Internet in a Box

This is a fantastic project, and we need more of those. Let&#x27;s keep in mind that 50% of the world&#x27;s population did not connect to the internet in the last three months (last un UN starts).<p>On my end, I worked on an Android version since getting &amp; maintaining a Raspberry Pi or a Linux machine is difficult in remote communities - where finding reliable access to a network or electricity can be tricky. Still, you will see those inexpensive Android phones everywhere. If you are curious: grey-box.ca&#x2F;uni Early stuff, but we managed to deploy and test in 12 countries, and we are looking for volunteers for some of our digital divide open-source projects.

This is great. Thank You for the link!<p>I have spent a little time each year over decades planning a library. The first draft planned a shipping container full of rack-mounted equipment, and several more shipping containers full of the equipment to power the library. That version never got built.<p>My current iteration uses a bunch of 18 TB HDDs in a HP Z-series workstation.<p>If I had the money to actually deploy prototypes outside my home, I would switch to much more power efficient SATA SSDs, a Raspberry Pi, some kind of hat that connects many SATA drives, and a low-power Wi-Fi router that connects many users at once.<p>Over the years I learned that: * The US Library of Congress (LOC) cataloging system is the best way to index information, but... * Databases are temporary. Files on disk are much more permanent. You will change databases several times while leaving the same files on disk.<p>LLMs will change my design, as will StarLink and other satellite-based Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

Or the IT Crowd version <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iDbyYGrswtg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iDbyYGrswtg</a>

Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27568332" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27568332</a> <i>(620 points | June 20, 2021 | 139 comments)</i>

Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box.<p>I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the renaissance.

It would be great if it had some &quot;snail mail&quot; like features: collect &quot;sent&quot; emails and &quot;posted&quot; posts, and synchronize them with real internet on regular intervals, probably on monthly basis.

I thought about creating one of these in the past, but it didn’t fit my needs. I decided to start my own project, called WROLPi. It also uses a Raspbery pi as its base, but also has a Debian installer. I have RPi images available at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wrolpi.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wrolpi.org</a> as well as a link to a demo (the demo needs an update, lots of new features since it’s creation).<p>The basic premise of WROLPi is creating your own off grid digital library: videos, web archives, PDFs, ebooks, etc. I have full text search for all of these. Offline maps as well via Open Street Map. Wi-Fi hotspot. Automatic downloads of videos (entire channels), RSS feeds, etc.

It&#x27;s a really great project and I hope there will be more like that in the future!<p>I wonder, do you have any plans do enable https support? With browsers increasing becoming hostile to http and disabling modern features, it might be a good idea to enable access via https.<p>I think a streamlined way how a teacher could quickly generate a custom root CA and install it on student laptops could be useful here.<p>(And yes, I still think it sucks that this is the only option for using https without internet)

This seems very cool. I’m trying to figure out if anyone would take a donation to build say 1000 of these and give them away, but I can’t find any kind of contact info for IIAB. They link to Wikimedia Medicine which I also can’t find any contact info for, apparently communication should happen over “meta” which must be some wiki thing?<p>Anyway, if you have or know about a 501c3 that can build and give away these devices, please share contact info here.

We&#x27;ve gone full circle. I remember the day this little box came in the mail and my world changed:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerhistory.org&#x2F;revolution&#x2F;the-web&#x2F;20&#x2F;408&#x2F;2089" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerhistory.org&#x2F;revolution&#x2F;the-web&#x2F;20&#x2F;408&#x2F;20...</a><p>Hopefully this project does something similar for others.

There is a mention of &quot;Internet-in-a-Box searchability&quot; but I am unable to figure out how it works now. Wikipedia and Stackoverflow are way better if they can be searched.

Related; Othernet (previously named outernet) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;othernet.is&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;othernet.is&#x2F;</a> is also worth looking at

The few instances I travelled in remote areas with little to no Internet, and moreover no over the air TV reception, I always mulled how a simple 1K-2k setup with a mini PC running plex and a 10-20TB of disk space could provide an plex TV media library (movies, tv, audio) for a small neighborhood. Throw in Ubooquity for books and audiobooks, you can provide a massive library of media entertainment and education to the area. (of course, copyrights be damned) also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg</a>

Is there something like this, for &quot;guerrilla&quot; situations? An open source DIY project, a Raspberry PI image, and some kind of WiMAX antenna&#x2F;WiFi AP combo to give internet access to a wide area in emergency situations.<p>I have no experience with that field but I think that would be really neat, for people in unstable countries where internet is blocked, or inaccessible. A plug and play, ghetto way of restoring internet access on the go, when all you have is a crappy, flaky and possibly filtered internet connection.

Cool! I&#x27;m really happy Iquitos got a fiber cable now. Just measured 23Mbps on 4G and I&#x27;m a few kilometers down the river. A few years ago I got about 5-10Kbps so it&#x27;s a huge difference.

I find the name to be misleading. By the same logic, could you describe &#x27;90s encyclopedia CD-ROMs as &quot;the internet in a box&quot;?<p>It&#x27;s content that was hosted on the internet. The actual internet is infrastructural, not content.<p>Is a DVD box set thus &quot;Netflix in a box&quot;?

Is this a consumption-only thing or does it allows some kind of interractions with the outside world, like emails sent to the box ultimately get delivered (when someone brings the box to a true internet connection to update it), edits to wikipedia get merged, ect. ?

Technically this is a cool experiment because it&#x27;s a bit like a cordless BBS from the &#x27;80s. However, I think it&#x27;s doomed to failure. People aren&#x27;t morons and they don&#x27;t need an occidental savior to bring the knowledge to them on a newfangled toy computer. If really it was useful and needed, it would already exists because a local somewhere would have found a way to build it by himself and start a business around it. Then the idea would have propagated to other places and soon, there would be unconnected hotspots everywhere. No need for a website to promote the idea with a link asking for money.

This is how people consume content in Cuba<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E</a><p>If you like this story, I recommend this documentary:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt2442080&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt2442080&#x2F;</a> (Chuck Norris vs Communism)

Honestly this is something I would love to setup for my future family some day, even when full internet is an option.

Nice to see the OLPC xo laptop again &quot;in the wild&quot; (the green laptop in the bottom picture) Hopefully it&#x27;s still useful for someone out there:-)

Eventually, when local compute gets good enough, running LLMs on this kind of system will be far more useful than most internet resources could be directly.

I was wondering, if there was enough cpu power and no hallucinations, a gpt kind of llm would compress better?<p>Will knowledge be stored in an llm in the future?

How long has this project been an Ansible script?<p>Iirc the Internet-in-a-Box project pre-dates Ansible, which was started sometime in 2012.

Why are half the comments about chatbots

i checked their GitHub repo and looks like the project is dead, any update from anyone working on it?

Nice educational project. In terms of entertainment... I wonder how cool would be a ChatGPT in a box. I think... how interesting would it be for isolated people...

This is stupid for schools as always, but does seem to be working in medical settings - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JHlfs__nBkE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JHlfs__nBkE</a><p>This seems to be the content - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;med.iiab.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;med.iiab.me&#x2F;</a><p>The &quot;The Global Emergency Medicine Wiki&quot; is pretty cool, external link where they get it from - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikem.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikem.org&#x2F;</a><p>Preppers seem interested too which is cool - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiktok.com&#x2F;@deweylikedonuts&#x2F;video&#x2F;7123650894398328107" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiktok.com&#x2F;@deweylikedonuts&#x2F;video&#x2F;71236508943983...</a>

The box should also contain ChatGPT, so the internet-in-a-box can keep growing and you could have conversations on forums like HN.

I wonder if something like a locally run LLM would be a 10X better (and viable) solution? You could frankly use a chatGPT like UI to have even the illiterate part of the community converse and learn about any topic with tts and stt.

You arrive at the village. You&#x27;ve been separated from your family and you are desperate to get some kind of Internet access so that you can try to get in touch with them. Your phone still has 20% battery but no reception. You finally find a Wi-Fi hotspot! You connect... and it turns out to be one of these things instead of the real deal.

I really don&#x27;t get it. Many of these countries don&#x27;t even have the resources for clean water, sewage, and reliable agriculture. The idea that they&#x27;re going to just think their way out of poverty is a very western idea that comes from quite a privileged background. You&#x27;re not going to be able to do any of that luxurious learning when your stomach is empty and you&#x27;re having to sleep each night in some war-torn slum. These countries need a lot of basic things before getting them online will have any real impact... Some of the poorest countries don&#x27;t even have stable governments.<p>I think most idealist people here would be utterly crushed by how bad the situation is in some countries. Going in with ideas of how tech will be used to raise everyone up... Then having to live in camps with armed guards outside because there&#x27;s frequent raids... No way to even get supplies in because corrupt beaurocrats keep asking for bribes. The same beaurocrats who are supposed to be on the side of their country are also massively part of the problem. Then you end up realizing that there&#x27;s so many problems and inter-dependencies that it&#x27;s not clear if any single person can do anything positive.<p>All aboard the FEEL TRAIN. Yeah, its hard, I wish I knew the answer.