Live data from Hacker News

Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

241–250 of 263 posts

Re: Internet in a Box

#241

Volunteer for Kiwix here ( https://kiwix.org ), we do a lot of offline Wikipedia stuff. I've personally worked on MWOffliner ( https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner ) which scrapes MediaWikis, primarily Wikipedia. We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports IE 11! You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of ( https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user ) to create "selections" whic…

If I'm reading this right, the last full zim archive of all of english wikipedia is wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim which is now about 16 months old. Is that right, or is are another more recent sources? The current US administration is actively trying to interfere with Wikipedia and censor public speech or information that is detrimental to their disinformation campaign. [1] Do you know if there is an effort to pu…

[flagged]

Re: Internet in a Box

#242
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap Isn't OSM like 2TB to host if you include all tile scales? I guess you could skip the last few where most of the size explosion lies but that doesn't give you much precision.

But about 70% of all images are something like https://tile.openstreetmap.org/10/399/390.png , e.g. water...

> 7.8 TB, too much water.

That could be easily compressed by having all of these link to one water image though, no?

Re: Internet in a Box

#243
post #174
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running a Raspberry Pi based GNSS receiver from a 26 Ah SLA battery and an 80W panel. Just passed 2 weeks of uptime in a cloudy period of southern hemisphere autumn. A monte carlo simulation using historical conditions said it had a ~95% chance of no downtime over 3 winter months. A slightly larger battery would bring that up to 99%. The Pi (3b+), GNSS reciever (u-blox ZED F9P), and Waveshare 7600G 4G modem avera…

Is it an RTK base station? If so I'd love to know more about why you set one up.

It's functionally equivalent to an RTK base station (the configuration script I'm using is even called "RTKbase"[0]), but it's being used for researching GPS-based soil moisture retrieval[1]. Basically the GPS signal bounces off the ground and causes an interference pattern that changes based on the wetness of the soil.

There is actually a permanent survey grade GNSS reciever about 200 m away from the u-blox receiver. But the geography around it (too hilly) means it doesn't work for soil moisture retrieval.

[0] https://github.com/Stefal/rtkbase/ [1] https://gnssrefl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pages/understand.h...

Re: Internet in a Box

#244
post #49

Vaguely interesting, but I am far more interested in actual connective technology. The Commotion "Internet in a Suitcase" project (~2012) was much more up my alley. Is much more the sort of thing I wish that, for example the State Department would still fund. > Commotion relies on several open source projects: OLSR, OpenWrt, OpenBTS, and Serval project. So, mesh, wifi, cellular, and voice technologies, packaged onto…

I think that giving the poor(er) people access to just the information that’s accessible on the internet, like Wikipedia, like Khan academy to learn programming. Is so much more helpful than handing them access to “the internet” as in what the internet is for people in the rich parts of the western world. Sure, we can hand them access to all of the internet and have them scrolling social media till they’re hollow peo…

The most useful part of the internet is Anna's @®©hi3.

Social media is exactly working as Zuc planned, it's a survalience state where you are the product. I do like the brasserie ads.

Re: Internet in a Box

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you give them just the useful parts of the internet. Implying you (or anyone) knows better what is most useful to someone else isn’t fair to them. What if the sites that are most useful aren’t included in the backup because of blind spots or license/copyright issues? Saving a single page to view offline is simple enough for me, but many non-technical folks would struggle. A whole site? That is a bit harder. Most…

It may not be fair, but honestly, neither is the fact that the web has been completely ruined by moneyed interests.

We were winning for a while with ad-blockers but it seems like we're on the short end of the stick - the briefing on firmware - 4 Sequential ads. And I am sure there are worse.

Re: Internet in a Box

#246
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the internet would go offline "for real" even for days, all hell would break lose. It would not be as bad as electricity going offline, but it's in the same category now. No credit card payments payments (food, gas), no logistics. Prepper stuff. The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporat…

And a couple of hours later, major blackout in Spain.

And Protigal, as well as Peurto rico. I wonder how Canada would react by being treated like that... But the anywhere with oil... Which puts Greenland as a false flag....

Re: Internet in a Box

#247

With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…

> would my neighbors understand it? I think this identifies a real problem in western society; there's a crisis situation of sorts, but instead of people talking to each other, this comment worries about whether people can figure it out on their own. I believe that if there were to be a crisis situation like that, long-term power outage or whatever, people would find each other again instead of the individualism we h…

Yes. Was at a bus stop with someone telling me to pay your front, and not your back and move forward, while a guy brrings a worldmap to the library lays it on the table in front of him..."Where you from?"

"Congo."

I personally have not known shame for decades. I was ashamed.

Then someone tried to burn down the library.

Re: Internet in a Box

#248
post #84
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add an LLM like QwQ-32B to the mix--that has a ton of compressed knowledge embedded in it. I would also store it in a steel Oscar the Grouch style trash can for a cheap faraday cage, which gets you protection from solar flares, and EMP blasts.

LLMs are a bad deal when you look at how much power you need to run that inference. A device that could barely run one instance of QwQ-32B at glacial speeds will be able to serve multiple concurrent users of Kiwix.

Quick question: which car companies are working on self driving cars? All of them, and two other companies ( Apple and Google ).

Which militaries are working on battle field AI. All of them.

Could a 64Gb dual xeon run say 50 to 100 users of kiwix?

Re: Internet in a Box

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access. > https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-…

I asked Kiwix and Marc replied and said they are indeed affiliated. Marc also stated they offered help and are pretty cool guys.

Thanks! That makes me feel better

Re: Internet in a Box

#250
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same. It must take much less space in database form than all the html pages.

Its also kind of bad form to scrape a huge website when there's a downloadable dump available. Save yourself, and more importantly wikimedia, a whole lot of bandwidth & CPU cycles.

And torrenting the dumps helps distribute them to others as well.
Post reply on HN