Internet in a Box
internet-in-a-box.org
internet-in-a-box.org
The use case is to make apps/content/tools normally requiring internet accessed work offline (either on localhost or local area network). In practice, using IIAB goes a little something like this:
1. find device (the more storage the better)
2. install free software on device using IIAB scripts
3. download free content (various content packs)
4. deploy device anywhere in the world to enjoy
all the FOSS and free content on local network
Just thinking if I had the device and if even only Wikipedia were on it — would save perhaps a small amount of internet traffic? Maybe negligible, but I think if I knew I had a "local cache" of all of Wikipedia I might rely on it more.
Then I wonder if there was a way to integrate it with my browsing of the actual internet — perhaps keeping a running feed of Wikipedia article links somewhere in my UI as I type words or as some script scans the contents of the pages I am browsing so that detail on any topic is literally a click away. With the local Wikipedia cache of course I have no privacy concerns.
Just the text is smaller at 11gb.
This is one reason why bulk data downloads are (IMO) extraordinarily useful. Speed and reliability are some others.
There is no reason to limit this approach to Wikipedia. It can be applied to any data that we consume regularly. I use this approach for DNS data and some websites (= frontends to databases) I use frequently, though none of those sources facilitate bulk dowloads the way Wikimedia does.
Old Android phone:
1. Has screen - (strong, tested, replaceable).
2. All the Android apps.
3. Wifi hotspot functionality + FTP + server hotspot.
4. MicroSD slot for massive and switchable data store.
5. Solar powerable, with removable and replaceable battery.
6. Touch friendly, kid friendly, low IQ requirement UI/UX.
7. Easy to code to extend functionality any way you like.
Any old Samsung would be great, S4 was good and less than $50 a shot used with an OLED 1080p screen.
> 1. Has screen - (strong, tested, replaceable).
Broken/scratched/hard to read in sunlight/draining power.
> 2. All the Android apps.
All the android apps for that old version of android, presuming they work without a wifi connection.
> 3. Wifi hotspot functionality + FTP + server hotspot.
Very dependant on the phone make/model, and server/hotspot wouldn't be that performant.
> 4. MicroSD slot for massive and switchable data store.
Again, very dependant on the make/model.
> 5. Solar powerable, with removable and replaceable battery.
Solar power I will give you, but you'll be hard pressed to find a phone suitable as server/hotspot with a removable battery.
> 6. Touch friendly, kid friendly, low IQ requirement UI/UX.
That's very dependant on the app developers if we go with point 2, I know plenty of apps with terrible UI/UX.
> 7. Easy to code to extend functionality any way you like.
Not on phone, you can maybe automate stuff with the likes of Tasker (see counterpoint 6 about UI/UX though) To really extend it you'd need a PC at which point... just use the PC? Or a pi.
The idea is to have a low power server for anyone to interact with over the wifi.
If you could grab an old android phone, install IIAB app, configure as desired then put where you want - this would allow so many more non-technically savvy people to be able to build/deploy it.
Depending on the phone it also could be easy to ruggedise with a case or maybe the phone itself might have waterproof ratings too.
Actually a possibly better solution would be to use a ESP32-like board (therefore no Linux or any other OS) to keep power consumption as low as possible, in order to supply it through solar power, de facto turning it into a self sustaining device in which passers by could download files or even upload their ones, including messages, photos etc. that would stay online say for some time before being deleted. I have no idea though if the ESP32 network stack implementation and resources would allow that.
Even under full load with the radios powered up, you're looking at like 0.75W, and when you're not actively transferring anything you can go into any of the various sleep modes and hit 0.05W (modem sleep), 0.0025W (light sleep) or 0.00003W (deep sleep). That's an order of magnitude difference versus a Raspberry Pi. You can easily power that esp32 pretty much indefinitely with like... a 4x6in PV panel.
It's a fun thought experiment on where you could toss a little 4x6 inch panel that has wifi and a 32GB microsd card you can access via wifi or something. But yeah, doesn't really make much sense to me in this use case.
It brought to mind El Paquete Semanal, Cuba's sneakernet culture drop: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/
Https://github.com/i5ik/22120
Ah, wow, that's a very cool way to build up the content.
Edit: Though the way it works as a sort of proxy, it seems like you could combine it with something like this, and it would just work: https://github.com/naoak/chrome-site-spider
I've actually started thinking about how to build a spidering/scraping tool that extracts links/JS, etc from an SPA but would rather not reinvent the wheel if possible.
On a lighter note; here is an "Internet in a Box" https://www.dropbox.com/s/52f9ceusbm9kd4j/internet-in-a-box....
In that box was a browser and list of dial-up POPs and designed to compete with AOL, which offered AOL's version of the Internet and was peppering the country with free floppies (and later CD-ROM's).
Other than AOL, most people in the country could only do dial-up to gain access to the World Wide Web (it sounds so quaint when you write it out now!).
Juno did this even better -- for free, with ads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_Online_Services
Shockingly, they're still doing it today! I had no idea there was a market for free dial-up internet in 2021! That is so cool.
A lucky few within a certain distance from their CLEC's CO could get DSL or would spring $800/mo (or a lot more!) for a 1.5Megabit/s T1.
I think it was around the late 90's that Time Warner and a few other cable companies started testing out high-speed cable.
So, to me, the Internet-In-A-Box product was a cool thing that didn't last that long because most people migrated from dial-up to broadband as quickly as they were able. I wonder, though, why it died so quickly while Juno is still around 20-something years later! Freemium is a better business model?
That division had some .. uh .. interesting sales ideas. One of the ones I remember painfully was an attempt to cross-promote our sign-up disks with a heavy metal band. Disks were given out for free at concerts. The net result, to be expected, I suppose, was an impressive number of confused fans calling up support and asking when the next concert was.
I remember the name as it was so ludicrous to think the internet fit in a box. Meanwhile a decade of usenet is only 10gb.
Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better. The majority of the world either has an Android phone (possibly a decade old), or a family member with one.
Have the android app available in the app store and the data downloadable for those who occasionally have internet connectivity (for example visiting a big city), but don't have money for an sd card.
It's unclear what product you're asking that about. The post is from "Internet in a Box" who don't sell anything. Just volunteers that put the software together. They do mention a few things being sold by others that use the work created by "Internet in a Box".
>Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better.
There's a couple of versions of this mentioned. The one used by clinics would fit on that, but it only has medical info. The hardware for the more general purpose one is using a 1TB drive. I assume that's for the Wikipedia + Maps + Literature + Khan Academy content mentioned.
Pushing a 60 year old to understand a completely new paradigm is fine if you are putting the time and energy to assist them until they are proficient, but otherwise they might be better with an old computer and check pages through local wi-fi.
There also enough remote locations where phone connectivity is just bad, and they keep 2G rugged phones around for their main use. In these situation I’d imagine a laptop being easier to use than a second phone just for that.
From what I can tell, even here in South Africa's townships they are using fairly new Samsung, Huawei etc smart phones (always with a broken screen - this happens without exception), albeit cheap ones.
Even my gardener has a Samsung 10 something. Not entirely sure how he can afford it, but I suspect he borrowed a lot of money to afford it. Having next to nothing, the smart phones becomes your communication channel and your media center, news and.. hopefully learning.
You'd be surprised how many poor smart phone users exists in all of Africa. And 3G or better is almost everywhere now.
The pricing has come down and that is truly bridging the digital divide.
India is another country where poorer regions wouldn’t have good cell coverage with most people without phones (let alone smart phones).
If you live in a region that can have luxuries like a gardener, then you’re likely already more affluent than those who this project is targeting.
There's a gray/black market for second hand phones whose provenance is...questionable. As someone who involuntarily contributed a phone to this surprisingly international parallel supply chain, the sellers are probably not selling at Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.
Are the devices super-low end? Users underestimate how sensitive they are to breakage? Regularly thrown? Broken units that are usable end up there for export or?
I have seen a IIAB device used in a school in a remote area (one IIAB for several clients on the WLAN, old PCs with wired network, phones, and tablets).
The IIAB scripts, https://github.com/iiab/iiab/tree/master/roles , make setting up such servers very easy (including best FOSS apps, wifi hot spot, networking, and web admin interface). You just need to bring one beefy hard disk and you suddenly have access to all of Khan Academy, wikipedia in dozens of languages, and all kinds of other collections of educational and reference materials.
Of course nothing prevents you for copying content over to individual mobile phones and tablets (like takeout), but centralized setup of a "learning resources hotspot" that people can connect to is very efficient first start.
Related: see related info about installing Kolibri and Kiwix in this comment (these are two of the apps that are available via the IIAB install scripts) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137100
The RPi inbuilt module doesn't have the much range, assume the other options are the same, antennas are cheap and even better can be homemade quite easily with instructions and raw materials.
You don't need to use the pi's built-in wireless, but it's a cheap way to get started and covers most use-cases where the users are very near the device. I've got an old Ubiquiti Bullet M2HP mated to a broomstick omni acting as the AP for my IIAB network, and you can hit it from halfway down the block. Further if I get some more height under the 'tenna.
I wish 802.11ah was more common; a low speed long range option would be perfect for lightweight content like this. But until phones have the radios, the use-case just isn't there.
This is much better at describing how this can be used in the real world. A mesh network in town lets people communicate/post videos/etc.
Anyways, amazing initiative!
It's basically wikipedia and other things on an access point, right?
A super hardened computer, drop proof, waterproof, weatherproof, sandproof, rated for at least 20 years of use.
No moveable parts and everything stored on PROM.
It would come with a kit to use any power source possible
That should be able to survive in remote village with no supervision required for a long time.
I did not imagine a PI with a plastic case and a standard harddrive.
Clearly the rugged one would cost magnitudes more and things like WordPress and other programs like it would not be possible on rugged version either.
I would think that as a plus not a minus.
If a village fills up a blog or some other such software with large amounts of data and the harddrive crashes its gone. Does not come with a backup as far asI can see
But you can use those very same scripts to install the content on your sandproof ultramachine. What's the gripe?
there's thinking along this line, just needs some muscle behind the implementation
With a local copy of most StackOverflow sites and Wikipedia, I'm pretty well equipped for a certain set of problems.
Next up, I need to figure out how to wield the various github-mirror-an-entire-org scripts I've found, to keep a local copy of Adafruit's github, since their code and libraries power a lot of the hardware I have sitting around. And then maybe a mirror of Seeed Studio's wiki and whatever else I can find.
then this: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-... but I'll need to add more disk space.
You can pick and choose categories to some degree (e.g. I’m downloading some to get the videos as well), but I think this leads to some redundancy.
134gb for stackoverflow, but it's from 2019. This guy does sql files, but viewing is another story: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-th...
There are torrent links here: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages but I think in iOS, you're stuck downloading over http.
Agree with the other comment, not what I thought the device was going to be initially. Not everything needs a buzzword marketing name so it doesn't need to be like Doctr or something like that, but maybe Medic-in-a-Box or something that conveys this is a medical device.
Sd cards suck.
Well forget it then, it might as well have been a billion years ago. Internet in a Box is an ideal name - describes exactly what it does.
I'll just put this here https://youtu.be/FBw-Z8ULwcc
"On your marks, get set...we're riding on the Internet"
If you want 23+ languages + videos simultaneously you'll need to setup an external drive with larger capacity.
For StackOverflow content, the best way to get it offline is through the Kiwix ZIM files (compressed archive suitable for web content).
IIAB will install kiwix-serve by default, then you need to download the relevant ZIM files from here: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages (search for the ones with stackexchange.com )
All the StackOverflow sites are available as Kiwix ZIM files, so if you select the ZIM server to be installed, you can check boxes for whatever content packs you want.
Also, based on trends, would'nt most of the populated world (even 3rd world) be covered by internet in the next decade? The prices may not come down enough to serve the needs of the population?
I imagine you could keep it relatively up-to-date that way.
The IT Crowd popularised "have you tried turning it off and on again"
We have 20 years on this. I get in the 90's it would have seemed like a quick win. But it didn't work. This inability to move on is frustrating.
If you care , which most people don't. But if you do, what you want on them is porn and copyright TV. If you don't understand why I can't really help you, it's a pretty simple idea.
You can't do that obviously, so how do you do it by proxy?
That is the solution to find.
One simple idea, find places without internet, find a cafe and sell them Starlink. You charity sets it up for free, they pay something per month. Report what happens. I'd bet it'd be very cost effective. Unfortunately it is boring and people don't get to feel good about themselves, so it won't get funded, so perhaps it's just as dumb.
Are you just saying that actual free internet access would be better? Sure, that's true, but not practical everywhere.
Official Sneakernet is terrabytes of TV (Government 'sanctioned' without porn or politics) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
If this is what it is, then I'm totally wrong. This is a really good idea. A wireless hotspot, anyone can setup to distribute terabytes of material to others, preferably with a charge/login option.
Years ago we did this with a wireless access point 'Login for free movies" in our apartment. But couldn't (at the time) work out an easy way to distribute the AVI's once randoms connected.
Wikipedia not clear IIAB is this and I didn't see it from the web site - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box
To do this, what's vital is cafe owners and teachers and students can buy this product and easily dump stuff on. A movies section, comics section, a books section they can make pretty, they need ownership in their collations.
Their FAQ is on OLPC's site which had a horrific attitude of not allowing others to use their products and locking them down.
Once you pay someone to set IIAB up, giving them Starlink would be around the same price. IIAB has to be open and easy to buy.
> They cite examples of it working
Where? The Dominican Republic video was 4 years ago. Is it up and running? These things are easy to send in a team for and have running for a few months. I would be surprised if one was running for more than a year without an expat there.
> See Mexico's live demo and these medical examples used by clinics in Asia and Africa especially, as hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia).
They have a lot of flat garbage that if you really want you can just put on your phone, I can see those.
A database (For Africa as you mention) is a big deal, it's queryable store of info. It's rare to see these open source (or CC) Does it use MySql? MSAccess? How hard is it to set up?
I don't think they will have any. Databases need to be updated, it's easier to add 4G if they are needed.
Chemwatch did a pretty good setup with CD that did the 3 month updates. In the developed world is still ran into problems with being up to date enough, I think most would be online now. And it cost money because it's a hard thing to do.
You can't just say, they will 'run datavbases on the IIAB' That's an ongoing commitment that needs to be supported. Else it becomes another bricked device in the NGO graveyard.
Have you read the article? It has links.
https://www.google.com/search?q=database+site%3Ainternet-in-...
This is why I want to know the name so I understand what you think IIAB does.
You seem to think these communities can skip the internet development of the Developed West which was - Academia -> Porn -> Shopping -> Illegal Movies -> Legal streaming movies-> Getting close to formal education
But I'm not getting this leap you think it can do.