
Outernet: Humanity's Public Library - dsr12
https://www.outernet.is/en/
======
fpgaminer
Love the idea; don't like that they ultimately own the satellite.

I would like to see a satellite similar to this, storing and broadcasting a
queue of information, but that has a crypto-democractic method of submitting
data to broadcast. Requests for data to broadcast submitted to the satellite
must be accompanied by a Proof-of-Work. The required level of POW can be
dynamically adjusted by the satellite itself based on recent demand.

In other words, the satellite is fully autonomous, with no central control.
Anyone can submit data to be broadcast. They just have to "pay" for it.

This solves the problem of who owns the satellite (everyone does), but does
still mean money can buy broadcast power. Though people can build systems for
helping to "crowdsourcing" POW solutions for desired broadcasts.

NOTE: I haven't read up much on cubesat, and just satellite technology in
general, so I don't know how possible this is (in particular, how to manage
transmission to the satellite and whether cheap kickstarter sats/cubesats can
broadcast data on their own, or are linked to some other satellite).

EDIT: Also, this has the same problem similar systems suffer from: potential
to broadcast illegal data. No great solution to that problem other than
revising the laws.

~~~
a1a
Remember that much of wikipedia (and the internet in general) are considered
'illegal data' in some countries.

In this sense -- I believe that the idea here is to indeed broadcast illegal
data. I find this project very interesting because it exploits the fact that
we still have national laws in an increasingly international society. Because
let's face it, whatever data they might broadcast it will likely be illegal
_somewhere_.

~~~
Mutericator
It's effectively pirate radio for the internet age - broadcast outside the
domain of law and thus avoid censorship.

~~~
syedkarim
That's exactly how I pitched it to our investor.

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Briguy2k
philosophically and technically very exciting, however I'm worried about the
business model:

"Do you have content to share with the whole world? Skip the Queue, pay a
small premium, and flag your content as Priority."

[https://www.outernet.is/en/broadcast](https://www.outernet.is/en/broadcast)

They've "baked in" a corrupting factor to the content: money. IMHO this is
what soils services like Facebook, Twitter, Angies list, etc. Places like
archive.org and wikipedia are flat donations (I believe).

~~~
syedkarim
I'm open to other ideas for revenue. We have a hard stop on the amount of
capacity that we'll sell--no more than 25%. We have several pilots starting
next year where the sponsored content is educational material, courseware and
such.

~~~
Briguy2k
A couple of ideas. On revenue: I think dredmorbius really covered it well. And
I want to emphasize the infrastructure part. What about selling hardware that
focused on the receiving endpoint? The target demographics probably have
literacy/language issues with the content, so providing dedicated hardware to
read text (instead of broadcasting actual audio, saving bandwidth), translate
it, and do text-to-speech could be an example of some additional products to
sell. Sell an app version too for middle-wealth countries. Selling
infrastructure items doesn't create that conflict-of-interest in my mind that
paying for content does.

Jumping off of the classifieds idea. What if you charged a flat fee, the same
flat fee, for every submission regardless of what it was? If submitters truly
have altruistic intentions, then this small flat fee is a small hurdle for the
little guys, and probably a dead end for the very wealthy to try and
overpopulate the system with whatever they want. So that the pressure is not
on you to arbitrarily regulate the income sources. Decouple money from content
is my main theme here.

On content: I've never liked one-dimensional voting systems that are simply
popularity contests. It's not that hard for a organized group to up-vote their
propaganda (one group of many) while the altruistic content submitters are all
left by the wayside (many groups of one). What I'd like to see is voting be
not for submission, but for classification of content. It could be
instructional, news, public service, propaganda, entertainment, etc. Then let
your paid submitters be the ones to vote separately on ratios of these
categories of content that finally get broadcasted. And only content that has
been reviewed and voted for past a certain threshold gets proposed for
submission. Right now, looking at the stream, I am already biased AGAINST
stuff that is paid. Disclosure of that fact is great obviously, but what if a
private org really is producing great content? I'll probably never check it
out. A community filtering/classification of the content would put my mind at
ease as the same standards of review would apply for paid and free content.

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dreen
This article has some information about how it works:
[http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-g-
outernet-...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-g-outernet-
explained-20140808-htmlstory.html)

It answered some of my questions but doesn't say about how are they planning
to select the initial content, which needs to be a lot of data to get people
interested. It just says "you can send ideas to our facebook wall... or send
us a paper letter".

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wyager
It would be interesting if Outernet were to transmit the Bitcoin blockchain.
The maximum data transfer rate of the blockchain is artificially capped at
something like 13kbps right now (1x1MB block per 600 seconds), so it would
probably be feasible to transmit it. It might allow for some novel economic
activity in very poor areas without internet. It would obviously be receive-
only, but that could still be useful. It might provide an equivalent to pre-
internet banking in areas too poor to be served by banks. ("Pre-internet
banking" means you have to take a trip to the bank to send money, but you can
call up and ask your balance to make sure you got paid.)

~~~
icebraining
An SMS based service for checking the balance of a Bitcoin address seems much
more useful, since people in very poor places are much more likely to have
cheap cellphones than devices capable of processing the whole blockchain (and
an SDR or so to read the signal).

~~~
wyager
SMS services aren't secure. Lightweight SPV servers (well within the resource
constraints of ultra-low-end smartphones, which will see increased adoption in
very poor areas over the next few years) are. And the whole point of outernet
is to reach areas that might not even have SMS capability.

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alimoeeny
The general idea sounds cool. For the most part those people who are in the
dark and don't have internet access, don't have a wifi enabled device and the
luxury of having/maintaining a satellite receiver thingi to receive someones'
offline sub-internet + "sponsored" content. I hope google's balon project
takes off sooner.

~~~
syedkarim
I've worked in many places. There are plenty of off-brand dumbphones in India
with wifi and bluetooth. In many places I've been, the poorest people still
have two things: a cellphone and access to satellite tv. A satellite receiver
in Ghana costs $50. And that's also how much I paid for one in the rural
Morocco.

Google Loon is not going to be a free service; it's paid internet--which is
important, but $25 a month is still out of reach for many.

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nodefortytwo
I am really excited about this idea, especially the disaster information
aspect. I hope they build a decent system for prioritising what information
should be distributed. The connection between an sms request and receiving the
most relevant information is going to be tricky, perhaps something like
google's i'm feeling lucky might work.

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ChuckMcM
Interesting idea, presumably you could just download the broadcast as it came
across and then offer it up as a locally accessible store of data. Even better
if the outernet folks provide a means to auto-insert the download into a
structure that allows folks to search, index, and correlate it.

~~~
syedkarim
Your input would be invaluable. Feel free to start a thread at
[https://discuss.outernet.is](https://discuss.outernet.is). You can see a very
early alpha of the user experience here:
[http://librarian.outernet.is/en](http://librarian.outernet.is/en)

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saraid216
Can someone try to explain the metaphor of a public library in this case for
me? It seems more like a radio broadcast; I feel like I'm missing something.

~~~
Mithriil
What I understand of the project is that the Lanterns(the data receivers,
which you can make yourself apparently [http://outernet-project.github.io/orx-
install/](http://outernet-project.github.io/orx-install/)) store data received
from the satellites on a daily basis. The information, which is voted by
global citizens, is stored on it wherever you are on Earth, so you can access
to sites like Wikipedia even if you are lost in the wood, for instance. But
the goal of the project is not to make money but to give the opportunity to
population of countries like China and North Korea (and many others) to access
information otherwise censored in their country. So yeah, it's similar to a
global radio broadcast.

~~~
geographomics
> _But the goal of the project is not to make money but to give the
> opportunity to population of countries like China and North Korea (and many
> others) to access information otherwise censored in their country._

This is a laudable goal, but if this became a threat then wouldn't their
governments just jam the signal?

For example, China already does this with shortwave radio:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming_in_China](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming_in_China)

As this could completely undermine the project in large regions of the world,
it seems like a huge operational risk.

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zkhalique
So how would the requests for information be routed up to the satellite? It's
not like it can continuously beam down ALL the information all the time.

~~~
syedkarim
We could do 10 GB per hour, easily. And that's just one transponder. A twin
tuner for a set top box costs $8. To a slightly larger dish and a bit less
error correction, a receiver could pull down 1 TB a day.

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caffinatedmonk
Also see [https://projectmeshnet.org/](https://projectmeshnet.org/)

