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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

356 pointsdoodlesdev119 comments

This is a fantastic project, and we need more of those. Let's keep in mind that 50% of the world's population did not connect to the internet in the last three months (last un UN starts).

On my end, I worked on an Android version since getting & 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/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.

I know this will get absolutely smashed but is this such a bad thing anymore ? If you can’t connect to the internet you’re immediately protected from a lot of garbage information, attention hijacking, scams and hacking, child grooming, IP theft, you’re job is probably a lot more secure etc.

I know there is access to information which is beneficial but at some stage I’m not convinced having internet access will necessarily be considered a luxury in the best future.

I know it’s an outrageous sounds claim but I still feel it could go either way.

Access to high-quality internet resources is absolutely a luxury. You can pick and choose what resources you want, it's not TV.

It's like saying that access to a well-stocked university library is not a privilege because most pop books that get published are crap. It's not even the same category of "book".

Negatives of the internet do exist but you're overstating your case. This is about getting basic resources to people who couldn't otherwise access them, I don't see how it can possibly be net negative.

This is an outrageous claim lol.

I don’t post to make friends.

Edit: Follow up thought, I’m not sure who the internet benefits anymore. It used to be about users. Now I don’t feel the same way.

I mean, you basically out of hand disregard the infinite potential network connectivity grants you to learn nearly anything to a good level.

Languages? State department language courses are available online, as are many other resources, language classes, language learning communities, etc.

Math? Physics? Chemistry? Again, infinite repository of info.

And so on...

The internet may be full of scams and IP theft, but it also allows people to fulfill their impulse to post, so who is to say that it’s bad?

The privilege is in being able to not have Internet access for an extended period and just enjoy life from a tropical beach, sipping on a mai tai, with no work to check-in on to make sure nothing's blown up. From the first world, only the middle class and higher can afford such a luxury. But the Internet is just so damned useful that, sure, it enables doomscrolling, but it enables so much more as a communication medium (the MVP for many businesses is a email address or a whatsapp number) that the assertion is just ignorant of life before the Internet.

Well, some content available through the internet is useful. That content was available on CD-ROMs in the '90s as encyclopedias.

The function provided with this project is some content available offline just like those CD-ROMs. You aren't going to be communicating with folks on the other side of the world via it. Ergo, it is not "the internet in a box".

> From the first world, only the middle class and higher can afford such a luxury.

That is a HN perspective.

Blue collar shift workers often leave the work at work, and don't 'hop on a call' outside work. I took a 4x10 shift job and it has good benefits and pays enough for vacations. For the extravagant luxuries, TGFBtc.

Also starting to believe that the real status symbol will be the ability to not have an internet connection or only connect at your own discretion.

I also see a lot of temptation especially in the IoT space to use the internet to control the devices against the users wishes and spy on the user.

You also see tge first attempts of devicemakers to actively ensure an internet connection themselves, independently of what the user set up. (I.e. Apple's Find My network, Amazon's Sidewalk, etc).

I don't think this will become less in the future.

Thanks, I think we need to discuss this too. I don't believe we can wish the internet away, but we're still in internet infancy, the "wild west" of plugged in, always online, life. Regulators need to catch up, but at the moment they seem to miss the point, mainly trying to cash in and serve their own narrow interests.

We likely need a movement that promotes a healthier use of the tech, which could include things like making it socially unacceptable to be constantly hooked up to your phone, and hefty fines for the manufacturers whenever their hardware/software made clandestine surveillance possible.

If things like these are not technically or socially possible, then I'm guessing we'll see an "anti-internet" movement eventually, too.

Actually, such local "internet in the box" as per the linked article might prove to be a basis for one such "anti-internet" solution: detach from the internet as a whole and enable local communication, resources and traffic only.

Every prepper should really have one!

What's old is new again: if everyone has their own isolated network, then if you need message exchange, you can light up FIDO or UUCP!

Look how few projects containing valuable knowledge are available offline. There's less and less stuff that can work offline.

I have a similar feeling. I think there is a definite lifecycle to consumer technology (on the internet you have things like wikipedia, youtube, social media, google search, but this also applies to things like smart phones, operating systems, tvs even).

These things all seem to follow a curve. They are released, adopted and improved, they become amazing, and then at some point they start to decline for whatever reason (even as they may be improving in some aspects - like smart tvs continue to get a better picture but only if you can stomach the extra ads, surveillance, and otherwise creepy anti features).

I wish I could just have windows 7 with security updates, a dumb tv with an awesome screen, almost no subscriptions or cloud based doodads.

Id love a frozen version of the internet that nobody can come along and ruin for whatever reason. Internet in a box seems like a good idea to me.

Oh boi. Don't ever go outside your home because you may get robbed, stabbed, spat on, laughed at, run over, kidnapped, etc. And even worse things await unsupervised children! No fun can be had outside and all knowledge must be carefully curated.

Ugh.

This does not connect to the internet.

Very cool idea!

How this project funded? Do you plan to make enough money selling boxes to support development or rely on donations?

Kinda wondering if you'd consider the org a social enterprise.

Btw your site doesn't redirect to https, not sure if that's intentional.

Years ago I worked with a project that used eGranary and FabFi mesh networking:

https://widernet-egranary.org/?page_id=5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi

We were trying to bring Wifi and digital content to some struggling communities.

Yeah a Pi is a completely terrible solution for something like this because it doesn't really play to any of its strengths. Android phones are cheaper, more reliable, have a built in battery, touchscreen, GPS and compass (so you can navigate with one too), and have you know... actual power management so you don't run out of said battery. Sometimes they're even dust and waterproof which is probably good in a tropical rainforest or a sandy desert.

Where do you get Android phones for cheaper than a Raspberry Pi (e.g. $35 for a Pi 4)?

> $35 for a Pi 4

Lol, if you have them at that price I'll take 5. More like $80-120 at current market rates, and then you still need to buy everything else that's already included in a phone.

I’m so tired of people citing $35 for a Pi. Maybe for a Pi Zero (non W). But $120 is standard at this point.

Second hand market? Samsung, OnePlus, HTC, LG, Nexus, Nokia, Pixels, with quad core CPUs and RAM >2GB can be had dirt cheap depending where you live.

Choose a popular, old flagship that's well supported by the community, and can be flashed with a de-Googled ROM and you're gold.

Old OnePlus devices are still supported today by the community.

Thanks for what you're doing. Couldn't that be achieved with kiwix as well ? It can serve content over WiFi as well

The project seems to be using Kiwix, but not only that. For example, you can't serve OpenStreetMaps cards using Kiwix (at least to my knowledge).

It seems to be Kiwix+OSM+Archive.org downloads which is really nice. I wonder how the interface works

Ooh ooh ooh!

I've been trying to get Termux/Alpine going on my old Android so I can install IIAB in it, for precisely all these reasons. But I'm linux-clueless and haven't had the best of luck.

UNI doesn't look like it's actually IIAB-on-Android, more like another similar project, yes?

This is great. Thank You for the link!

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.

My current iteration uses a bunch of 18 TB HDDs in a HP Z-series workstation.

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.

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.

LLMs will change my design, as will StarLink and other satellite-based Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

Are you comfortable sharing the current version of your draft?

I've built http://arquiva.me exactly with that concern in mind.

Databases are temporary and difficult to move around when getting too big. On the other hand, files are easy to transport in portions and to continue working if a part has gone missing for some reason.

The backend on that platform was written from scratch and is file-based. Reduces duplication of images to permit archiving parts of the digital history for my country (Portugal).

Works fully offline for benefit of archivers in future generations.

Or the IT Crowd version https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg

Thought the exact same thing when I saw the title :)

First thing I looked is if someone would mention it in the comments ;-)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332 (620 points | June 20, 2021 | 139 comments)

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.

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.

In my experience LLM's hallucinate a lot.

Often giving "plausible but entirely wrong" output that is hard to discern from factual, real output.

Yes.

At the moment they are great for entertainment.

But for factual information, you are better off just grabbing a copy of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's information often isn't collated how you want. Eg List the states where the biggest city is larger in population than the state capital? There isn't specifically an article for that. Sure you could take the List of United States cities by population article and assemble the list yourself, or you could just have ChatGPT do it for you.

Yes, language models are already great for collating information, but they are still too unreliable to rely on.

LLMs are not magic.

If wikipedia takes up 100GB of space and your model trained on it is only 5GB big, there is NO WAY it will hold all the original information.

Furthermore, LLMs are good at condensing information, but terrible at knowing which information will actually be important or true. This is an obvious problem in a life or death medical situations.

…which is also unsolved by any other system or by humans. It’s a fundamental constraint of reality.

I'm not sure this is true.

Lossless compression algorithms exist, and HTML compresses almost absurdly well. A 20x compression rate would be quite impressive, but I don't think it's impossible, since 10x compression is fairly common in this domain, and there are reasons to expect wikipedia to compress even better given the significant amount of markup on each page.

I've worked with cleaning up rendered wikipedia texts, and if you strip the mediawiki class names and cruft, the uncompressed HTML shrinks a lot, often from hundreds of kilobytes to tens of kilobytes. You can then probably compress that quite a lot as well since plain text compresses very well on its own.

Basically, mediawiki uses this much markup to say <li><a href="#Assessment">Assessment</a></li>:

  <li id="toc-Assessment"
  class="vector-toc-list-item vector-toc-level-1 vector-toc-list-item-expanded">
  <a class="vector-toc-link" href="#Assessment">
   <div class="vector-toc-text">
   <span class="vector-toc-numb">6</span>Assessment</div>
  </a>

  <ul id="toc-Assessment-sublist" class="vector-toc-list">
  </ul>
 </li>

So yeah. 20x isn't too far fetched.

That is not the point.

There is a physical limit of how much you can compress stuff. If your LLM is significantly smaller than even the most optimized compression we can achieve, then it simply doesn't actually preserve all the information

Be that as it may, 5Gb just isn't realistically significantly smaller than you could squeeze the text of wikipedia.

Indeed, if the theoretical limit to compress wikipedia is n GB, then you will need n GB at least to create the exact same copy of wikipedia. However you may create a jpg of it. (And you can then remove the artifacts, and even enhance it with AI, and you will get something better than the original wikipedia, to keep the image analogy.)

NNCP, a state-of-the-art lossless text compressor based on a transformer neural network (i.e. containing similar structures to a LLM), can reach a compression ratio of 10.8% (0.867 bits per byte) on Wikipedia text: https://bellard.org/nncp/

Compared to NNCP, a hypothetical LLM that "knows" every fact in the English Wikipedia, would not need to keep a lossless record of the entire text of Wikipedia, since many Wikipedia pages repeat facts that also occur on other pages, and instead of reproducing every word it would be enough to paraphrase the ideas. Thus the size of such a LLM could be much smaller than 10% of the size of Wikipedia. How much, it's hard to say...

Yeah neural nets are amazing compression algorithms since the best way to get the gist of something is to actually understand it, then algorithmically generating the data. Like a calculator having a near infinite compression ratio because it can do math instead of keeping a table of all possible inputs and outputs.

Same goes for human brains I suppose, we can only remember as much as we do because of the effective compression our understanding allows for.

As of 21 September 2022, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 21.23 GB without media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

By the way, note that is the Wikipedia in English which AFAIK is the largest one. For instance, Wikipedia in Portuguese weighs about 13gb with a few pictures in my Kiwix install.

Has Kiwix gotten any better? I tried to use it a few years ago, but the user experience was super rough. Fantastic idea, but there were lots of UI stalls and glitches that soured my trial.

Honestly? The UX is dogshit lol, at least on the Android app, when you go and download something to find out if it has downloaded or not is a chore and there is no progress notification or indication it's doing anything at all.

I'm considering sending some contributions whenever I have time again for OSS contributions.

However, I find it usable enough that I've been using it quite a lot recently when I don't have internet access to read Wikipedia, StackOverflow and a few other things I downloaded.

It doesn't need to be lossless to be useful. A lossy LLM can just throw all the redundant stuff away and focus on the actual information in the text, instead of the text word by word. It wouldn't need to keep dozens of languages around for if it could translate on the fly. And it wouldn't need to keep a full text when it can just have the raw facts and generate the text on the fly.

Not sure what the state of the art is with LLM text compression, but with StableDiffusion compression ratios of up to 155:1 have been achieved[1] compared to 10:1 for JPEG.

[1] https://pub.towardsai.net/stable-diffusion-based-image-compr...

Let's be honest disk space is cheap enough for people use actual data instead of LLM-generated.

What people in poor countries need the least is learn from source that have tons of random facts of knowledge censored out since some western corporation decided they're unetical or disturbing.

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

Lol, you've just rediscovered "uucp" and the other related protocols!

This comment is bang on.

It does, it has https://github.com/ascoderu/lokole

So basically a BBS that you access over wifi instead of dial up? :). Long live FIDO net!

aka "Sneakernet"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

I wonder if the internet will be handled in a similar mater once humanity spreads to other plants.

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 https://wrolpi.org as well as a link to a demo (the demo needs an update, lots of new features since it’s creation).

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's a really great project and I hope there will be more like that in the future!

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.

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.

(And yes, I still think it sucks that this is the only option for using https without internet)

> install root CA

Lol. Yeah, we didn't spend all this effort to centralize the Internet just to let you have such a powerful and dangerous tool as a private key, buddy.

one day someone is going to die, and the root cause will be found to be some nonsense like an expired certificate, invalid [old] ciphers, ocpp, lack of publicly signed cert, or some other ridiculous security feature that you should be able to turn off or ignore in an emergency

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?

Anyway, if you have or know about a 501c3 that can build and give away these devices, please share contact info here.

We've gone full circle. I remember the day this little box came in the mail and my world changed:

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20...

Hopefully this project does something similar for others.

There is a mention of "Internet-in-a-Box searchability" 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) https://othernet.is/ is also worth looking at

Natural allies, it's weird that they're not already grafted together somehow.

IMHO, the ultimate feature-set would be:

* IIAB content library support, especially the new map features which rock

* wrolpi-like tagging and automatic updating when connected to the internet

* Othernet updating of content when satellite signal is available

* Toosheh extractor for unpacking files saved in an mpeg-ts on a USB stick

* Local Fdroid app repo

* Piratebox-like file drop area

* BBS or local forum message-board

* Mesh with other nodes, perhaps using NNCP or Scuttlebutt protocols to exchange messages over spotty connectivity or traveling relay nodes

If I had any software clue whatsoever, I'd be actively trying to graft all these things together.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

Is there something like this, for "guerrilla" situations? An open source DIY project, a Raspberry PI image, and some kind of WiMAX antenna/WiFi AP combo to give internet access to a wide area in emergency situations.

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

I find the name to be misleading. By the same logic, could you describe '90s encyclopedia CD-ROMs as "the internet in a box"?

It's content that was hosted on the internet. The actual internet is infrastructural, not content.

Is a DVD box set thus "Netflix in a box"?

There was a product in the 90s called "Internet in a Box". I remember seeing it at a store. It appears to be a way of selling Compuserve. https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20...

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's a bit like a cordless BBS from the '80s. However, I think it's doomed to failure. People aren't morons and they don'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.

Yeah, I think this is a solved issue. People just share physical media with the content they need. Which is more useful than this proposed solution, because they usually don't misguidedly respect copyright monopolies.

This is how people consume content in Cuba

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E

If you like this story, I recommend this documentary:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/ (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 "in the wild" (the green laptop in the bottom picture) Hopefully it'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?

Will knowledge be stored in an llm in the future?

The current size of the full text of Wikipedia is about 21GB. Text compression is not a field which needs disrupting

You might find this interesting.

Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002312

How long has this project been an Ansible script?

Iirc the Internet-in-a-Box project pre-dates Ansible, which was started sometime in 2012.

Why are half the comments about chatbots

Half of all comments are now about chatbots.

I'm a little afraid of the implications.

half of the internet is now just chatbots taking to chatbots. it's why the internet has been slow lately

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

Which repo did you look at? The one at [0] seems pretty active, specially for an application that probably doesn't need updates all that often anyways.

[0]: https://github.com/iiab/iiab

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 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlfs__nBkE

This seems to be the content - http://med.iiab.me/

The "The Global Emergency Medicine Wiki" is pretty cool, external link where they get it from - https://wikem.org/

Preppers seem interested too which is cool - https://www.tiktok.com/@deweylikedonuts/video/71236508943983...

You were flagged, I imagine because of the tone of your comment, but I wonder why you think this is stupid for schools?

Living in a third world country I can tell you this has huge potential to improve schooling in areas with limited or no internet accessibility.

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

It would need to be a significantly larger box for that. And require a field of solar to run. It would also cost a few orders of magnitude more than just a starlink terminal would.

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.

LLMs get a lot of facts wrong. Computer literate people can double check. But completely illiterate people can't even look it up in a book. That sounds like a way to fabricate myths and straight up lies that are believed by the most vulnerable in the population.

Using llms can be useful, but it's very advanced tech that should be done by people who understand what it is and what its limitations are. And even then it has its dangers. Letting it loose among uneducated people has the potential to be disastrous

No, a locally-run LLM would not be a 10x better solution than having a copy of Wikipedia - plus StackOverflow, the other StackExchange websites, and a lot of other wikis - thanks to Kiwix, a copy of Khan Academy's educational content, of the relevant OpenStreetMap data, of Project Gutenberg, and of dozens more GB in textbooks, reference material, and entertainment.

The illiterate part of the community would be better served by interacting with the community - by fostering connections between people, improving literacy, and giving them tools - rather than with any sort of LLM, let alone one that has been cut down enough to run on cheap, under- (and often intermittently-)powered commodity hardware.

You arrive at the village. You'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.

Either use gsm or ask the locals to relay a message via radio?

Just wondering aloud: once a region has a number of villages with these services going well, perhaps a low bandwidth mesh network between them would allow a slow messaging service like email to exist?

Low bandwidth mesh for email ought to be viable, I'm sure that used telecoms equipment could enable a 'good enough' network, although perhaps using QRP APRS equipment would reduce the cost when starting from an energy demands point of view, and better account for the fact that packets will occasionally have to wait a few hours until the batteries in other nodes are charged.

Text does not consume meaningful bandwidth, so a mesh network should allow IM. (You’d need to limit torrenting, video, and hi-res audio)

Email and ssb can be supported by having a bicycle and a thumb drive.

The solution between villages could be LoRa since it is cheap, less than 50 euro per device albeit too high-tech.

A lower tech option is plain old radio, for example: https://frn.dc4fs.de/

I really don't get it. Many of these countries don't even have the resources for clean water, sewage, and reliable agriculture. The idea that they're going to just think their way out of poverty is a very western idea that comes from quite a privileged background. You're not going to be able to do any of that luxurious learning when your stomach is empty and you'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't even have stable governments.

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'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's so many problems and inter-dependencies that it's not clear if any single person can do anything positive.

All aboard the FEEL TRAIN. Yeah, its hard, I wish I knew the answer.

Is it really so binary that either they’re rich westerners or they’re so destitute they can’t benefit from this project?

Also, this project ends up being a compact way to deliver educational material. Imagine sending them the equivalent in physical books and manuals

it's a very privileged western view that all "third world" countries are destitute and starving

> You're not going to be able to do any of that luxurious learning when your stomach is empty and you're having to sleep each night in some war-torn slum.

Not sure why your calling out this poster when the OP said the above.

I feel that's exactly what the op was saying in response to gp?

There's a spectrum, and while we should have increased empathy and awareness of a LOT of places in the world where life is spectacularly rough and wildly different than ours (2 years of my childhood were in a civil war and my Canadian wife just cannot fathom any of those experiences), there are indeed a lot of places in the world where knowledge and access and technology are helpful.

I was rephrasing the comment I'm replying to in agreement

For their businesses owners and upper class, I'm pretty sure that sending money abroad to Facebook for advertising or Uber for taxi service doesn't help the situation. Local apps like FoodPanda or Grab at least let the money stay in-country or in-region, instead of off to California.

But the level of poverty is unreal. I had multiple hotels charge me a deposit for key card so I'd return it, and breaking large bills (the equivalent to US $20) wasn't something that most shops actually had change for.

Did you see what this project actually is? It's not a live internet connection. It's a content pack of extremely useful reference materials and such for solving exactly a lot of those problems, with solar power and local wifi.

It's a end run around those corrupt bureaucrats.

Is it perfect or going to solve everything? Obviously not, but it's cheap, simple, and robust.

Very true. It reminds me of the time I visited a remote Ethiopian village. Very poor area, but they seemed fairly self-sufficient. There was a large solar oven given to the village by some NGO. Looks like:

https://www.voanews.com/a/south-african-firm-aims-to-supply-...

You can see it was never used. I asked the guide, do they even use this thing? He laughed and said no. It was basically a decoration piece.

What did they use to cook? The wood they go out to collect.

You're just being contrarian, not more realistic. Which is also a very privileged position. I also suspect that you haven't actually visited many poor countries.

Even for extremely poor people, free and easy access to information and communication can have very substantial, practical benefits.

A layman's medical encyclopedia that lists smyptoms and treatments for common illnesses may not be an adequate replacement for a trained doctor, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing.

One of the most important factors to enable the "reliable agriculture" you mentioned is access to a good weather forecast. Even one that's only good for the next two days can be a game-changer when it allows you to harvest a crop that might otherwise get spoiled.

Another example I've read: access to cell phones massively improved the lives of fishermen in Northern Africa by allowing them to find out in which nearby port the demand for fish is highest. Previously, they'd have to guess and often there would be an oversupply (and thus low prices and fish that goes to waste) in one town, while another twon 20km away had people go hungry because there was too little fish and the prices too high.

It's such a privileged position to be even able to underestimate the importance of knowledge.

There are billions of people living in situations between the poorest parts of the EU (yet still in better circumstances than the majority of the world) and war-torn starvation in Sudan, and things like this are for them. Plenty of people who can’t afford satellite internet can read just fine.

And I, a well-off tech worker in urban Germany, use the project as part of my own emergency communications prep. Internet outages are possible even for rich Europeans and Americans, and we’re awfully dependent on being able to look stuff up.

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