12 ms·

Internet in a Box

356 points by doodlesdev 3y ago

nynx 3y ago
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.
asicsp 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332 (620 points | June 20, 2021 | 139 comments)
mytheory 3y ago
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.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  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.
  - qsort 3y ago
    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.
  - nibbleshifter 3y ago
    This is an outrageous claim lol.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      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.
      - nibbleshifter 3y ago
        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...
  - cogitoergofutuo 3y ago
    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?
  - zamnos 3y ago
    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.
- raybb 3y ago
  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.
- zikduruqe 3y ago
  Years ago I worked with a project that used eGranary and FabFi mesh networking: https://widernet-egranary.org/?page_id=5 https://widernet-egranary.org/?page_id=5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi We were trying to bring Wifi and digital content to some struggling communities.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  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.
  - kangalioo 3y ago
    Where do you get Android phones for cheaper than a Raspberry Pi (e.g. $35 for a Pi 4)?
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      > $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.
      - asynchronous 3y ago
        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.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      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.
- rakoo 3y ago
  Thanks for what you're doing. Couldn't that be achieved with kiwix as well ? It can serve content over WiFi as well
  - lxgr 3y ago
    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).
    - asynchronous 3y ago
      It seems to be Kiwix+OSM+Archive.org downloads which is really nice. I wonder how the interface works
- myself248 3y ago
  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?
RecycledEle 3y ago
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)
- Infernal 3y ago
  Are you comfortable sharing the current version of your draft?
- nunobrito 3y ago
  I've built http://arquiva.me 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.
praveen9920 3y ago
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.
- nibbleshifter 3y ago
  In my experience LLM's hallucinate a lot. Often giving "plausible but entirely wrong" output that is hard to discern from factual, real output.
  - eru 3y ago
    Yes. At the moment they are great for entertainment. But for factual information, you are better off just grabbing a copy of Wikipedia.
    - zamnos 3y ago
      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.
      - eru 3y ago
        Yes, language models are already great for collating information, but they are still too unreliable to rely on.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  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.
rektide 3y ago
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.
owenpalmer 3y ago
Honestly this is something I would love to setup for my future family some day, even when full internet is an option.
fabiensanglard 3y ago
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.
throw2022110401 3y ago
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.
- chinaman425 3y ago
  [dead]
- freetanga 3y ago
  Either use gsm or ask the locals to relay a message via radio?
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  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?
  - thomasjb 3y ago
    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.
  - akho 3y ago
    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.
  - nunobrito 3y ago
    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/ https://frn.dc4fs.de/
asjfka 3y ago
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. ?
quechimba 3y ago
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.
xg15 3y ago
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)
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  > 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.
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    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
amelius 3y ago
The box should also contain ChatGPT, so the internet-in-a-box can keep growing and you could have conversations on forums like HN.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  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.
butz 3y ago
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.
- comprev 3y ago
  aka "Sneakernet" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
- dan_linder 3y ago
  Lol, you've just rediscovered "uucp" and the other related protocols!
  - drummojg 3y ago
    This comment is bang on.
- dimisdas 3y ago
  It does, it has https://github.com/ascoderu/lokole https://github.com/ascoderu/lokole
- troupe 3y ago
  So basically a BBS that you access over wifi instead of dial up? :). Long live FIDO net!
- kervantas 3y ago
  I wonder if the internet will be handled in a similar mater once humanity spreads to other plants.
Uptrenda 3y ago
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.
- brianvli 3y ago
  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
  - kevviiinn 3y ago
    it's a very privileged western view that all "third world" countries are destitute and starving
    - wil421 3y ago
      > 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.
    - 3y ago
shaburu 3y ago
i checked their GitHub repo and looks like the project is dead, any update from anyone working on it?
- doodlesdev 3y ago
  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 https://github.com/iiab/iiab
dynjo 3y ago
Or the IT Crowd version https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg
- jaxr 3y ago
  Thought the exact same thing when I saw the title :)
- prmoustache 3y ago
  First thing I looked is if someone would mention it in the comments ;-)
aaron695 3y ago
This is stupid for schools as always, but does seem to be working in medical settings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlfs__nBkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlfs__nBkE This seems to be the content - http://med.iiab.me/ http://med.iiab.me/ The "The Global Emergency Medicine Wiki" is pretty cool, external link where they get it from - https://wikem.org/ https://wikem.org/ Preppers seem interested too which is cool - https://www.tiktok.com/@deweylikedonuts/video/7123650894398328107 https://www.tiktok.com/@deweylikedonuts/video/71236508943983...
- doodlesdev 3y ago
  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.
krm01 3y ago
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.
- aflag 3y ago
  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
- mftrhu 3y ago
  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.
hoppla 3y ago
Related; Othernet (previously named outernet) https://othernet.is/ https://othernet.is/ is also worth looking at
- myself248 3y ago
  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.
antman 3y ago
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?
- rozab 3y ago
  The current size of the full text of Wikipedia is about 21GB. Text compression is not a field which needs disrupting
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  You might find this interesting. Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002312
marcodiego 3y ago
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...
shortrounddev 3y ago
Why are half the comments about chatbots
- RajT88 3y ago
  Half of all comments are now about chatbots. I'm a little afraid of the implications.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  half of the internet is now just chatbots taking to chatbots. it's why the internet has been slow lately
frickinadorable 3y ago
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.
rolobio 3y ago
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 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.
hammyhavoc 3y ago
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"?
- embedded_hiker 3y ago
  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/20/408/2089 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20...
29athrowaway 3y ago
This is how people consume content in Cuba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E If you like this story, I recommend this documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/ (Chuck Norris vs Communism)
enos_feedler 3y ago
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/20/408/2089 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20... Hopefully this project does something similar for others.
sph 3y ago
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.
Epa095 3y ago
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:-)
e808 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
asjfka 3y ago
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.
- chclt 3y ago
  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.

356 points by doodlesdev 3y ago

nynx 3y ago

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.

asicsp 3y ago

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

mytheory 3y ago

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.

ChatGTP 3y ago
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.
- qsort 3y ago
  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.
- nibbleshifter 3y ago
  This is an outrageous claim lol.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    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.
    - nibbleshifter 3y ago
      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...
- cogitoergofutuo 3y ago
  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?
- zamnos 3y ago
  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.
raybb 3y ago
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.
zikduruqe 3y ago
Years ago I worked with a project that used eGranary and FabFi mesh networking: https://widernet-egranary.org/?page_id=5 https://widernet-egranary.org/?page_id=5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi We were trying to bring Wifi and digital content to some struggling communities.
moffkalast 3y ago
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.
- kangalioo 3y ago
  Where do you get Android phones for cheaper than a Raspberry Pi (e.g. $35 for a Pi 4)?
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    > $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.
    - asynchronous 3y ago
      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.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    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.
rakoo 3y ago
Thanks for what you're doing. Couldn't that be achieved with kiwix as well ? It can serve content over WiFi as well
- lxgr 3y ago
  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).
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    It seems to be Kiwix+OSM+Archive.org downloads which is really nice. I wonder how the interface works
myself248 3y ago
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?

RecycledEle 3y ago

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)

Infernal 3y ago
Are you comfortable sharing the current version of your draft?
nunobrito 3y ago
I've built http://arquiva.me 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.

praveen9920 3y ago

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.

nibbleshifter 3y ago
In my experience LLM's hallucinate a lot. Often giving "plausible but entirely wrong" output that is hard to discern from factual, real output.
- eru 3y ago
  Yes. At the moment they are great for entertainment. But for factual information, you are better off just grabbing a copy of Wikipedia.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    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.
    - eru 3y ago
      Yes, language models are already great for collating information, but they are still too unreliable to rely on.
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
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.

rektide 3y ago

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.

owenpalmer 3y ago

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

fabiensanglard 3y ago

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.

throw2022110401 3y ago

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.

chinaman425 3y ago
[dead]
freetanga 3y ago
Either use gsm or ask the locals to relay a message via radio?
2b3a51 3y ago
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?
- thomasjb 3y ago
  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.
- akho 3y ago
  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.
- nunobrito 3y ago
  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/ https://frn.dc4fs.de/

asjfka 3y ago

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. ?

quechimba 3y ago

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.

xg15 3y ago

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)

otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> 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.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  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

amelius 3y ago

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

moffkalast 3y ago
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.

butz 3y ago

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.

comprev 3y ago
aka "Sneakernet" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
dan_linder 3y ago
Lol, you've just rediscovered "uucp" and the other related protocols!
- drummojg 3y ago
  This comment is bang on.
dimisdas 3y ago
It does, it has https://github.com/ascoderu/lokole https://github.com/ascoderu/lokole
troupe 3y ago
So basically a BBS that you access over wifi instead of dial up? :). Long live FIDO net!
kervantas 3y ago
I wonder if the internet will be handled in a similar mater once humanity spreads to other plants.

Uptrenda 3y ago

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.

brianvli 3y ago
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
- kevviiinn 3y ago
  it's a very privileged western view that all "third world" countries are destitute and starving
  - wil421 3y ago
    > 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.
  - 3y ago

shaburu 3y ago

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

doodlesdev 3y ago
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 https://github.com/iiab/iiab

dynjo 3y ago

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

jaxr 3y ago
Thought the exact same thing when I saw the title :)
prmoustache 3y ago
First thing I looked is if someone would mention it in the comments ;-)

aaron695 3y ago

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

doodlesdev 3y ago
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.

krm01 3y ago

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.

aflag 3y ago
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
mftrhu 3y ago
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.

hoppla 3y ago

Related; Othernet (previously named outernet) https://othernet.is/ https://othernet.is/ is also worth looking at

myself248 3y ago
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.

antman 3y ago

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?

rozab 3y ago
The current size of the full text of Wikipedia is about 21GB. Text compression is not a field which needs disrupting
bobsmooth 3y ago
You might find this interesting. Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002312

marcodiego 3y ago

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...

shortrounddev 3y ago

Why are half the comments about chatbots

RajT88 3y ago
Half of all comments are now about chatbots. I'm a little afraid of the implications.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
half of the internet is now just chatbots taking to chatbots. it's why the internet has been slow lately

frickinadorable 3y ago

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.

rolobio 3y ago

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 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.

hammyhavoc 3y ago

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"?

embedded_hiker 3y ago
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/20/408/2089 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20...

29athrowaway 3y ago

This is how people consume content in Cuba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E If you like this story, I recommend this documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/ (Chuck Norris vs Communism)

enos_feedler 3y ago

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/20/408/2089 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20... Hopefully this project does something similar for others.

sph 3y ago

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.

Epa095 3y ago

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:-)

e808 3y ago

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

asjfka 3y ago

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.

chclt 3y ago
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.