LibraryBox
jasongriffey.net
jasongriffey.net
I'm just wondering, why hasn't a SBC-based alternative popped up yet? I think the project is/was awesome, I actually did maintain 2 public PirateBoxen for a while. Is it a simple lack of interest? The fact LibraryBox tried to pick up after PirateBox kind of suggests otherwise. I feel like it's actually easier now than ever to build a Libary/PirateBox-like project (although I do imagine an on-board network card probably has way worse performance than even those old portable routers).
I've even tried to put together an image like that in the past but I couldn't find a reproducible solution for creating raspi images so that put me off, maybe it's time to give it another try...
And who ... "should" want to with all the security considerations and etc?
Still it would be a very cool hobby project none the less.
So when you connect to a Box via Wi-Fi your phone demands to connect to Internet hosts even though this is unnecessary for this use case. This behavior is confusing to the user. Some early solutions involved trying to spoof Apple servers for example, but the names and IPs of these servers kept changing and this kluge became ineffective.
The only solution I am aware of is to pre-inform users of a local IP address to browse to once their Wi-Fi is connected to the Box. But depending on the occasion and venue, getting such instructions to the audience and having them follow it, can be its own problem.
I actually have a "MonsterOTG" portable WAP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THnT-rWFnE8 ...their pitch was "put your kids movies on an SD card and they can navigate to them from their iPad (on a road-trip)"... or have all the media on one SD-card and not have to have them on all your phones (like a proto-NAS, kindof).
I used it actually while on a trip to "fake" being a web-server. eg: `scp index.html 10.1.10.1:/media/files/public` (or whatever) and then I could have my phone navigate to it. Chromebook => "OTG-Wifi" && Phone => "OTG-Wifi". Chrombook.push(); Phone.fetch(...);
I couldn't connect directly from phone to chromebook, but if they were both on the same (captive) wifi, I could actually have the phone navigate to the server running on the chromebook via that little device as a "wifi mediator" (even while in the middle of nowhere with no internet for 50 miles around). I had some episodes of Twilight Zone that I'd ripped and could connect to it while on a flight. You could take the SD-Card out of your camera and fetch pictures over to the macbook-without-sd-card situation, then clear the card and take more pics (or keep them on and just be guaranteed that you have a backup).
There's really some non-pirate use cases of things like that, and the overall concept is pretty cool! Got me thinking of something like a neighborhood "Captive SSID", like a LAN that you opt in to vs the WAN that's always connected. It's really instructive to think through for yourself personally: if you were on the moon, and all you had was a wifi access point that held SD-Cards
Captive portals sound nice until you find out how limited they are -- a lot of styling, JS and browser features are simply unavailable. So, you need to tell users "Close this, then go open this site in your real browser"...
Of course, you can't and probably don't want to redirect HTTPS traffic since you don't have the matching cert for e.g. https://google.com
I don't follow: When my phone connects to a wlan, it will try to connect to the Internet, and if the phone can't do that then the phone won't function on the wlan?
> The only solution I am aware of is to pre-inform users of a local IP address to browse to once their Wi-Fi is connected to the Box.
What is the response from this local IP address that solves the problem above?
Putting together the images isn't terribly difficult. For Butter Box, we just run a script to install all the things we want, then make an .iso of that, which we distribute on our site and in hardware form.
Those onboard network cards are indeed a problem. You can get single-digit # of simultaneous users. But other than that, they tend to be very fast for large files since you're not going out over the Internet and can saturate the WiFi connection.
I actually did that as a part of Google Summer of Code: https://github.com/LibraryBox-Dev/alexandria
The goal was to make LibraryBox, but with just a little more frontend and a little more flexibility. It had a lot of the earliest things: Simple wifi support, and was built to enable you to add services like Gopher, maybe Gemini, IRC, etc.
In the end, there was not quite enough interest. Jason moved up in the ranks of the then Berkman Kline center, 2018 became a very touchy time for things.
You can easily run Alexandria, which at its core is a very basic directory browser, the admin panel can be turned off. I wanted to add the ability to upload & expand archives of files, but couldn't find a good way to do that at the time.
I've been worried for the last few years that this kind of lockdown is going to be the end of open source OSs for the masses.
Right now we have secure boot, and it's feasible but a pain to work around it to, say, install Ubuntu on a Dell XPS. But the next step after that is, "no, you can't disable secure boot. That would be insecure."
Arduinos, Raspberry Pi ?
Maybe not ideal for this situation, but still available, with lots of handy extra hardware rather than relying on repurposing some other hardware not at all meant to be used in this way.
LibraryBox was hardly anything that Joe Schmoe was capable / willing to do either.
https://likebutter.app/box/ https://gitlab.com/likebutter/butterbox-rpi/-/blob/main/docs...
I would love more people to use it! Check it out: https://wrolpi.org
It's based on this same principles and in fact, one of the creators is friends with Jason :-)
Ours is tailored for scenarios where Internet is unavailable due to disaster, government shutdown or simply cost. It has an app store, an encrypted (matrix) chat server with a simple web UI, and maps (since you probably didn't download google maps for you area before the Internet went out).
We localize the boxes (mostly for central and south america) and have sent a few dozen around the world to communities with various use cases.
I've considered shipping a unique-to-device certificate for e.g. box123.comolamantequilla.com with each box. It doesn't solve the evil maid scenario of someone copying it, but it at least provides TLS. Realistically, our users are offline and mostly not going to verify that comolamantequilla is owned by the organization they're intending to trust.
https://jasongriffey.net/librarybox/notactive.php
I do wonder how readily people would just connect to such a thing, or how readily they should just trust such a thing...
If memory serves me, there was a web server available through a standalone open wifi network.
Plus, it can be easily "hidden" and remain available without its owner babysitting the hardware.
How is LibraryBox better? You would be connecting to a random wifi SSID?
> Aside from that, I believe they were indeed intended to serve multiple people at once... encampments, communities, short term installations, etc.
Almost any computing device on a network can share files this way, with a bit of configuration.
> Almost any computing device on a network can share files this way, with a bit of configuration.
LibraryBox is designed to be a deployable appliance that works where no network exists that's configurable by non-technical people. Nobody even intimated it was a novel technical approach to physically transferring data. You could pick any method of transferring data and say, "well why didn't they just use [method]?" I suspect you're just hunting for opportunities to make critical comments.
> LibraryBox is designed to be a deployable appliance that works where no network exists that's configurable by non-technical people.
Yes, that is valuable.
Although showing Night of the Living Dead in a coffeehouse does have some kind of amusement value.
Still, only works if you own it and have local control.
The catch is that you have users without either the sophistication to size up how trustworthy this model is or to do out-of-band verification (remember: no internet). I think a RAG model serving answers from Wikipedia could be suitably safe, but we'd have to do some user research to know more.