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Comment by flaburgan | Hacker News Reader

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 me. And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly? I remember 10 years ago, in Ubutu, Empathy was allowing me to chat with people connected to the same network than me. No account, no registration. That would be very useful. Does the Pirate box do all of that? How extensible is it?

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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 corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.

So archiving is good anyways.

To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).

Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.

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

Yeah who knows whats the real cause. Maybe some fire, maybe a cyberattack or could even be someone messed up greatly in their pc because government security is disastrous so who knows

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....

AREDN can give you a mesh running standard internet protocols on fairly cheap hardware - they have firmware that can be flashed on small USB-powered GL-iNet devices such as Beryl:

https://www.arednmesh.org/content/supported-devices-0

It's self-configuring, too - as soon as the node spins up, it will automatically find and connect to nearby nodes and start routing.

What would be lovely, is a giant repo of "every tool, firmware file, and documentation you might need, to reflash any random consumer router you might come across", completely offline and packaged up.

Because inevitably, you find a bunch of them after you've lost access.

> 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 have right now.

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.

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.

To serve multiple users, probably not.

But--if you don't think of asking Hacker News every single thing you need to know beforehand, I think you still want the LLM to answer questions and help you bootstrap it.

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?

Learning things from scratch is really hard too, just a copy of wikipedia gets one absolutely nowhere if you don't know what to search for.

Having something that you can plainly ask how to start that will point you in the right direction and explain the base concepts is worth a lot more, it turns raw data into genuine information. Yes it can be wrong sometimes, but so can human teachers and you can always verify, which is a good skill to practice in general.

See the Wired article on the rewright of German history. And The George Galloway article. The enshitification has not only begun, it's in rising force.

Too little bandwidth and too few nodes to do this in the sense I think you mean.

You can build a hotspot and try setting up meshes with any of the available hardware or software packages out there, but you're going to end up being the gatekeeper to the service. HAM radio ends up working out the same way, as I understand. It's just too technical for people to have this spring up collectively without a single person or team doing everything.

Lack of tech experience to even know how to build a mesh let alone prioritize its limited bandwidth is why the general public isn't going to assist.

>And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly?

Yes, pretty much. The problem is poor definition of the problem, though.

What are we trying to solve? A way to send trickles of comms out, like "Mom and Dad, we're alive?" or "We have life-threatening casualties at x',y'?" Emergency kiosk to send emails one at a time? Doable if you have an Internet source like a Starlink, or any other uplink that's still up somehow.

Or is to restore the "Internet" as generally known, which might as well be synonymous with YouTube and Netflix and web browsing for people. You and your system would be overwhelmed as soon as your mesh comes up.

You might be able to define this particular problem using negatives instead of positives. Everything except stuff like YouTube, Netflix, etc. If you cut out images, audio, video, and other intensive data streams text based communication in natural language is extremely lightweight. Particularly if the protocol is carefully designed with the intended deployment conditions in mind.

I guess a requirement for that is a sufficiently generalized protocol with a matching hardware stack.

I was thinking he could just mirror hacker news discussions. Those are totally worth it.

I've gone a step further, I have built a 50 TB NAS and I'm loading up as much as I possibly can.

I’d love some detail on your setup. Which NAS, which drives? Key data sets? (Would love to build one myself)

I have 4 Seagate Exos X18 14TB drives crammed into a JONSBO N2 Black NAS ITX Case. 2 TBs of SSDs, and 64 GB of RAM. (Going to double the ram soon)

Why is it useful to have as much as 64GB of RAM in a NAS?

What if you want to load all of Wikipedia and images on the RAM for even faster access of every page?

No, and not even close. The bottle neck is the network, so unless he is running a database in the background, it is not going to improve speed in the least. 14TB drives are not that fast. Video 4gb, or 8gb, and as little ram as possible. Not much processing is needed either. That is why NASs are built in celerons. In 6 years, when he knows something, he will see the extreme error of his ways.

My NAS has 2x2Tn striped and a video 1Tb. It streams 4k to multiple sources. If I needed faster, I'd throw it on the install server. 4x1TB striped, and 8Gb of ram. 2xGbit net. Did it tell you this cost all of $60?

I started in the ISP business and did Wisp stuff for a while so doing this wouldn't be too difficult for me. Hardest thing would be scaling it with the average equipment and user would have.

I wonder if it is possible to have some kind of P2P protocol similar to BitTorrent where one can seed incremental snapshots of subsets of the internet.

Something like the internet archive, but fully decentralized.

Sounds like something r/datahoarders would be / may already be into.

IMO: this type of prepper offline Internet apps should support Android/Windows and have .apk/.zip download links on front pages so that it can reproduce itself. It should run on something like a random cracked phone charging from USB port on a Wi-Fi router.

> 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.

More like 54TB

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage

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?

Theoretically yes. But no person ever is going to look at all the tiles (on the highest zoom levels) in the sea, so they are not rendered by default, and only on demand.

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