To clarify, the "box" is any UNIX computer (very well suited for Raspberry PI devices, since the wifi can act as a hotspot), and the "internet" consists of all the best FOSS apps and open content that get served from localhost, see full list here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/IIAB/FAQ#What_services_.28IIAB_app...
The use case is to make apps/content/tools normally requiring internet accessed work offline (either on localhost or local area network). In practice, using IIAB goes a little something like this:
1. find device (the more storage the better)
2. install free software on device using IIAB scripts
3. download free content (various content packs)
4. deploy device anywhere in the world to enjoy
all the FOSS and free content on local network
The IIAB scripts make installation and download setup fully automatable (battle-tested Ansible scripts https://github.com/iiab/iiab/tree/master/roles ), which is exciting because you can provision "learning server" devices very easily.
It could also be made with ultra cheap repurposed routers such as the old TP-Link TL-MR3020 or similar ones, whose hardware is really limited for doing anything serious but still can run older OpenWRT versions. All it needs is to activate a file sharing service and stick an USB drive to be shared with the usual protocols.
I mention it because I've found some at flea markets for 5 to 10 Euros.
Actually a possibly better solution would be to use a ESP32-like board (therefore no Linux or any other OS) to keep power consumption as low as possible, in order to supply it through solar power, de facto turning it into a self sustaining device in which passers by could download files or even upload their ones, including messages, photos etc. that would stay online say for some time before being deleted.
I have no idea though if the ESP32 network stack implementation and resources would allow that.
You want a real CPU and storage to serve media files at a good performance, ESP is far too limited, it couldn't even fit a photograph in RAM and its network stack is very slow. Its probably possible, but not worthwhile
ESP32 (and even ESP8266) can run a webserver and serve files from flash. It’s not obvious to me that they’d be so much better than a Raspberry Pi, which is < 10W and likely averages ~5W, which is on the order of magnitude of a single hard drive, and obviously much easier to port Linux apps to.
Yeah, I don't know how useful it would be for this specific application just due to the architecture differences. Just for a off-the-grid file share, a ESP32 with a SD card wired up to it is still a lot less power hungry than the Raspberry Pi.
Even under full load with the radios powered up, you're looking at like 0.75W, and when you're not actively transferring anything you can go into any of the various sleep modes and hit 0.05W (modem sleep), 0.0025W (light sleep) or 0.00003W (deep sleep). That's an order of magnitude difference versus a Raspberry Pi. You can easily power that esp32 pretty much indefinitely with like... a 4x6in PV panel.
It's a fun thought experiment on where you could toss a little 4x6 inch panel that has wifi and a 32GB microsd card you can access via wifi or something. But yeah, doesn't really make much sense to me in this use case.
I would love to have one myself. I may have to put one together.
Just thinking if I had the device and if even only Wikipedia were on it — would save perhaps a small amount of internet traffic? Maybe negligible, but I think if I knew I had a "local cache" of all of Wikipedia I might rely on it more.
Then I wonder if there was a way to integrate it with my browsing of the actual internet — perhaps keeping a running feed of Wikipedia article links somewhere in my UI as I type words or as some script scans the contents of the pages I am browsing so that detail on any topic is literally a click away. With the local Wikipedia cache of course I have no privacy concerns.
"With the local Wikipedia cache of course I have no privacy concerns."
This is one reason why bulk data downloads are (IMO) extraordinarily useful. Speed and reliability are some others.
There is no reason to limit this approach to Wikipedia. It can be applied to any data that we consume regularly. I use this approach for DNS data and some websites (= frontends to databases) I use frequently, though none of those sources facilitate bulk dowloads the way Wikimedia does.
I think you're misunderstanding the point of this. It's not meant to be a device that people directly interact with. It's meant to be a local server that anyone nearby with a wi-fi connection can tap into regardless of broader internet availability. In that way it's likely to last much longer since it can be placed somewhere safe and not run the risk of being stolen/fought over/dropped/smashed/etc. and the end point used by the local population doesn't matter - a chromebook, second-hand android phone, whatever.
Ignoring the other comments point that this is meant as a server rather than a direct kiosk, lets smash each of these points.
> 1. Has screen - (strong, tested, replaceable).
Broken/scratched/hard to read in sunlight/draining power.
> 2. All the Android apps.
All the android apps for that old version of android, presuming they work without a wifi connection.
> 3. Wifi hotspot functionality + FTP + server hotspot.
Very dependant on the phone make/model, and server/hotspot wouldn't be that performant.
> 4. MicroSD slot for massive and switchable data store.
Again, very dependant on the make/model.
> 5. Solar powerable, with removable and replaceable battery.
Solar power I will give you, but you'll be hard pressed to find a phone suitable as server/hotspot with a removable battery.
> 6. Touch friendly, kid friendly, low IQ requirement UI/UX.
That's very dependant on the app developers if we go with point 2, I know plenty of apps with terrible UI/UX.
> 7. Easy to code to extend functionality any way you like.
Not on phone, you can maybe automate stuff with the likes of Tasker (see counterpoint 6 about UI/UX though)
To really extend it you'd need a PC at which point... just use the PC? Or a pi.
Not sure that a few of your points are relevant for a large part of the intended operation but I do like the idea of using old Android hardware though!
The idea is to have a low power server for anyone to interact with over the wifi.
If you could grab an old android phone, install IIAB app, configure as desired then put where you want - this would allow so many more non-technically savvy people to be able to build/deploy it.
Depending on the phone it also could be easy to ruggedise with a case or maybe the phone itself might have waterproof ratings too.
Data hoarder that I am I would like it to scrape more of the site than I actually visit ... in case I missed something when I'm browsing offline later.
Yeah, a "spider this page with depth X" would be a neat addition.
Edit: Though the way it works as a sort of proxy, it seems like you could combine it with something like this, and it would just work: https://github.com/naoak/chrome-site-spider
Would something like this work for single-page applications? Given that most applications today are built entirely through the DOM, would regex matching on embedded scripts be that useful?
I've actually started thinking about how to build a spidering/scraping tool that extracts links/JS, etc from an SPA but would rather not reinvent the wheel if possible.
This is awesome. A friend of mine and I once did something for the local kids of our hometown way back (I guess, 2005-2007) where there was no proper Internet in that part of the country. A local LAN setup with few Desktop computers, where we load up videos for education. While kids takes turn to use the computers, they can watch videos in groups -- Videos which are readily available for free on the Internet. It didn't really "succeed" due to many reasons and I gave up.
I worked for the division of CompuServe responsible for that. I even have "Internet In a Box For Kids" still in the shrink-wrap on a shelf behind me. I keep it in case I ever need to bootstrap the Internet after a disaster.
That division had some .. uh .. interesting sales ideas. One of the ones I remember painfully was an attempt to cross-promote our sign-up disks with a heavy metal band. Disks were given out for free at concerts. The net result, to be expected, I suppose, was an impressive number of confused fans calling up support and asking when the next concert was.
I don't think it was ridiculous, except perhaps for the name, but non-tech people back then didn't even really know what the Internet was. It probably didn't seem far-fetched, since most (all?) products were basically tangible things that could fit into a box, and it probably bridged the gap.
In that box was a browser and list of dial-up POPs and designed to compete with AOL, which offered AOL's version of the Internet and was peppering the country with free floppies (and later CD-ROM's).
Other than AOL, most people in the country could only do dial-up to gain access to the World Wide Web (it sounds so quaint when you write it out now!).
A lucky few within a certain distance from their CLEC's CO could get DSL or would spring $800/mo (or a lot more!) for a 1.5Megabit/s T1.
I think it was around the late 90's that Time Warner and a few other cable companies started testing out high-speed cable.
So, to me, the Internet-In-A-Box product was a cool thing that didn't last that long because most people migrated from dial-up to broadband as quickly as they were able. I wonder, though, why it died so quickly while Juno is still around 20-something years later! Freemium is a better business model?
Who first coined "Internet in a box?" When I saw the title, I thought back fondly to 1994 when my dad came home with a package of software called "Internet in a box" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox.
Same here. I remember thinking it promised so much, but there were always problems with getting it to work. I managed to have someone walk me through how to get Trumpet Winsock to work with a university dialup a few months later and the rest was history.
Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better. The majority of the world either has an Android phone (possibly a decade old), or a family member with one.
Have the android app available in the app store and the data downloadable for those who occasionally have internet connectivity (for example visiting a big city), but don't have money for an sd card.
I have seen a IIAB device used in a school in a remote area (one IIAB for several clients on the WLAN, old PCs with wired network, phones, and tablets).
The IIAB scripts, https://github.com/iiab/iiab/tree/master/roles , make setting up such servers very easy (including best FOSS apps, wifi hot spot, networking, and web admin interface). You just need to bring one beefy hard disk and you suddenly have access to all of Khan Academy, wikipedia in dozens of languages, and all kinds of other collections of educational and reference materials.
Of course nothing prevents you for copying content over to individual mobile phones and tablets (like takeout), but centralized setup of a "learning resources hotspot" that people can connect to is very efficient first start.
Related: see related info about installing Kolibri and Kiwix in this comment (these are two of the apps that are available via the IIAB install scripts) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137100
If you think a smart phone lasts 10 years in the hands of poor people, you are extremely optimistic.
From what I can tell, even here in South Africa's townships they are using fairly new Samsung, Huawei etc smart phones (always with a broken screen - this happens without exception), albeit cheap ones.
Even my gardener has a Samsung 10 something. Not entirely sure how he can afford it, but I suspect he borrowed a lot of money to afford it. Having next to nothing, the smart phones becomes your communication channel and your media center, news and.. hopefully learning.
You'd be surprised how many poor smart phone users exists in all of Africa. And 3G or better is almost everywhere now.
The pricing has come down and that is truly bridging the digital divide.
> Not entirely sure how he can afford it, but I suspect he borrowed a lot of money to afford it
There's a gray/black market for second hand phones whose provenance is...questionable. As someone who involuntarily contributed a phone to this surprisingly international parallel supply chain, the sellers are probably not selling at Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.
There’s a lot of African countries where that isn’t the case. I recently did some work for a mobile based game targeting a number of African countries and we had to support WAP and SMS.
India is another country where poorer regions wouldn’t have good cell coverage with most people without phones (let alone smart phones).
If you live in a region that can have luxuries like a gardener, then you’re likely already more affluent than those who this project is targeting.
My point was that this project isn't even targetting my gardener or his neighbors. They all have smart phones with Internet access. One more physical asset is a liability to them. Something else that can be stolen.
> always with a broken screen - this happens without exception
Are the devices super-low end? Users underestimate how sensitive they are to breakage? Regularly thrown? Broken units that are usable end up there for export or?
In such places, everything has a tough life. Possessions are not taken care of very well, due to a number of reasons. Phones are regularly dropped. If you are lucky enough to own a car, it will be full of dents within 3 months.
Get on a plane and then a bus and then a microbus or some kind of informal rural transit, go as far as you can into the mountains or the desert or the jungle and take with you one of these and a mikrotik router and a source of solar power. You won't be able to get much of a cell signal - or it's slow or expensive - and community access to Wikipedia and health-care information could be the most useful treasure you bring with you, without needing to worry about the kind of devices they run.
It's unclear what product you're asking that about. The post is from "Internet in a Box" who don't sell anything. Just volunteers that put the software together. They do mention a few things being sold by others that use the work created by "Internet in a Box".
>Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better.
There's a couple of versions of this mentioned. The one used by clinics would fit on that, but it only has medical info. The hardware for the more general purpose one is using a 1TB drive. I assume that's for the Wikipedia + Maps + Literature + Khan Academy content mentioned.
At this point there are still an number of people who for any reason can’t or don’t want to use a smartphone.
Pushing a 60 year old to understand a completely new paradigm is fine if you are putting the time and energy to assist them until they are proficient, but otherwise they might be better with an old computer and check pages through local wi-fi.
There also enough remote locations where phone connectivity is just bad, and they keep 2G rugged phones around for their main use. In these situation I’d imagine a laptop being easier to use than a second phone just for that.
A large omnidirectional antenna could be a decent addition?
The RPi inbuilt module doesn't have the much range, assume the other options are the same, antennas are cheap and even better can be homemade quite easily with instructions and raw materials.
You don't need to use the pi's built-in wireless, but it's a cheap way to get started and covers most use-cases where the users are very near the device. I've got an old Ubiquiti Bullet M2HP mated to a broomstick omni acting as the AP for my IIAB network, and you can hit it from halfway down the block. Further if I get some more height under the 'tenna.
I wish 802.11ah was more common; a low speed long range option would be perfect for lightweight content like this. But until phones have the radios, the use-case just isn't there.
With IIAB running on platform like raspberry pi you can carry a slice of internet content in your pocket in a safe way. No need for any external network connectivity as it acts as local hotspot using Wi-Fi. With open source educational content like full Wikipedia, TED videos, text books, medical reference material you have you own portable reference library which can be shared with a group of people for self learning. IIAB opens up access to free knowledge which can provide huge opportunities for remote communities for a very small set up cost.
When I read the headline, I had an alternate vision of this.
A super hardened computer, drop proof, waterproof, weatherproof, sandproof, rated for at least 20 years of
use.
No moveable parts and everything stored on PROM.
It would come with a kit to use any power source
possible
That should be able to survive in remote village with
no supervision required for a long time.
I did not imagine a PI with a plastic case and a standard harddrive.
Clearly the rugged one would cost magnitudes more and
things like WordPress and other programs like it would
not be possible on rugged version either.
I would think that as a plus not a minus.
If a village fills up a blog or some other such software with large amounts of data and the harddrive crashes its gone.
Does not come with a backup as far asI can see
I think that's a little unfair. The focus here is on the software. Yes, the examples show it running on a pi, but they don't limit it to that. It should also be able to run on your hypothetical rugged box.
There's absolutely nothing preventing you from building your IIAB into precisely such an enclosure with such a power supply. IIAB is a set of scripts to load the software onto such a box, and they also have a cheap hardware recipe that'll get you going for the 99.9994% of situations where being sandproof is not important.
But you can use those very same scripts to install the content on your sandproof ultramachine. What's the gripe?
I like the idea as part of our power outage prep kit - running on a single Raspberry Pi means it can run off one of those ubiquitous power banks that can be safely charged from our small generator.
I like the idea. It would be cool if multiple devices could create a mesh network where students and teachers could communicate with each other without a connection to the global internet
Most IIAB installations are single server, but some have indeed implemented a mesh network including long distance links using wifi extenders. Of course this is no longer a low cost project.
This was my thought exactly. Excuse my naivety, but shouldn't a wifi-enabled pi be able to broadcast and automatically connect to others around it? And as long as they all have unique names shouldn't <piname>:port_number be possible for a simple web sever on them?
That's the use-case I set mine up for, just for fun. Unplug my cable modem and see how long I can still be productive.
With a local copy of most StackOverflow sites and Wikipedia, I'm pretty well equipped for a certain set of problems.
Next up, I need to figure out how to wield the various github-mirror-an-entire-org scripts I've found, to keep a local copy of Adafruit's github, since their code and libraries power a lot of the hardware I have sitting around. And then maybe a mirror of Seeed Studio's wiki and whatever else I can find.
The Lokole email benefit to the offline communities;
When a community has no Internet availability or its population cannot individually afford existing Internet data, it will be very difficult for this community to use traditional email sustainably, but condemned to use SMS. As you know, SMS has a limited capacity.
The Lokole is the solution to this problem. The Lokole brings the online email full power to offline use for the unconnected communities in a shareable, affordable and sustainable way. Using the Lokole reduces the cost of data to more than 95%. For instance in the Congo DRC, 100 people can share US$ 0.50 a day to send a hundreds of emails with attachments.
The Lokole creates a shareable local email network in the office, school, or clinics and church facilities without Internet. The Lokole email can also be accessed online such as Internet café.
The Lokole email benefit to the offline communities:
When a community has no Internet availability or its population cannot individually afford existing Internet data, it will be very difficult for this community to use traditional email sustainably, but condemned to use SMS. As you know, SMS has a limited capacity.
The Lokole is the solution to this problem. The Lokole brings the online email full power to offline use for the unconnected communities in a shareable, affordable and sustainable way. Using the Lokole reduces the cost of data to more than 95%. For instance in the Congo DRC, 100 people can share US$ 0.50 a day to send a hundreds of emails with attachments.
The Lokole creates a shareable local email network in the office, school, or clinics and church facilities without Internet. The Lokole email can also be accessed online such as Internet café.
Very cool device. The dean and doctor discussing the document they've been writing in Creole (context tells us it's probably a local dialect) could be uploaded to the device for everyone else that has them to use is a great reflection of how far this device can reach.
Agree with the other comment, not what I thought the device was going to be initially. Not everything needs a buzzword marketing name so it doesn't need to be like Doctr or something like that, but maybe Medic-in-a-Box or something that conveys this is a medical device.
I tried doing something like this with all of the books hosted on archive.org that are out of copyright. You can see the collection I put together at locserendipity.com.
Nice idea, but as other commenters has pointed out, maybe not the best name. Back in the 90’s when I first connected to the internet, my ISP provided a package called Internet in a Box made by a company called Spry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox
Never heard of the company but I think it's much better than what we see otherwise. Like names of food or things that sound like something which has absolutely no relation to the product.
This was my first thought as well! Our first computer came with Spry Internet in a Box in 1996. Mosaic was already aging pretty badly at that point, the early web changed fast.
I love things like this, and I have a number of open wifi networks which could use this, but it seems people have gotten in to the habit of thinking that one service should run on one device, and that's all. It'd be nice if people would say what the software requirements are, regardless of the complexity of setup.
We can learn a lot from this about distributed, decentralized systems and their resilience. Caching as much and as local as possible, while accepting that the processes might have no network connectivity is key. This way each node, and whoever can reach this one node, can work independently for long stretches of time.
You're definitely not the videos on an sdcard, and even the text-only (nopic) ZIM file is 43G, see the line "Wikipedia (English) en 2021-01 all nopic" on this page https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages So you'll need at least a 64G card.
If you want 23+ languages + videos simultaneously you'll need to setup an external drive with larger capacity.
IIAB is just scripts for automating installing other software, so it doesn't include content — you download the content separately based on the app you need.
For StackOverflow content, the best way to get it offline is through the Kiwix ZIM files (compressed archive suitable for web content).
What? There's a button to include those sites. I configured mine to include raspberrypi.stackoverflow and a few others.
All the StackOverflow sites are available as Kiwix ZIM files, so if you select the ZIM server to be installed, you can check boxes for whatever content packs you want.
maybe there is already an internal search engine app that does the indexing of the local contents of the drive, to provide a quick search interface on the topic - with links to the actual material?
Also, based on trends, would'nt most of the populated world (even 3rd world) be covered by internet in the next decade? The prices may not come down enough to serve the needs of the population?
The headline is extremely misleading, which is a shame, since the product seems very useful. I had expected to see a remote Internet router of some kind, yet this is literally NOT the Internet.
Amusing name, but if it's not networked in any way, it's not really 'internet', it's just an extract of various sources that's pretty much static in time.
I think a hot swap system would work best. The central office of an aid organisation could just send new drives along with workers delivering food and other supplies.
I imagine you could keep it relatively up-to-date that way.
Web free
As free as the web blows
As free as the web grows
Web free to follow your heart
Web free
The wiki surrounds you
The porn still astounds you
Each time you look up a star
The complaints about the name for a free product, created by a charity, that aims to help the deeply poor and remote because it "conflicts" with an inside joke from a cult BBC comedy that wrapped up 8 years ago are, at best, a bit silly.
There were several name complaints and several jokes and they formed the bulk of the initial comments. The complaint that triggered me to write this comment has been deleted since I made my comment and it looks like a couple of others have been deleted as well.
I hope the advent of machine learning will afford us a way to filter out 50-95% of the laugh tracks in The IT Crowd. I'd love to be able to watch it for more than 5 minutes at a time again.
We have 20 years on this. I get in the 90's it would have seemed like a quick win. But it didn't work. This inability to move on is frustrating.
If you care , which most people don't. But if you do, what you want on them is porn and copyright TV. If you don't understand why I can't really help you, it's a pretty simple idea.
You can't do that obviously, so how do you do it by proxy?
That is the solution to find.
One simple idea, find places without internet, find a cafe and sell them Starlink. You charity sets it up for free, they pay something per month. Report what happens. I'd bet it'd be very cost effective. Unfortunately it is boring and people don't get to feel good about themselves, so it won't get funded, so perhaps it's just as dumb.
If this is what it is, then I'm totally wrong. This is a really good idea. A wireless hotspot, anyone can setup to distribute terabytes of material to others, preferably with a charge/login option.
Years ago we did this with a wireless access point 'Login for free movies" in our apartment. But couldn't (at the time) work out an easy way to distribute the AVI's once randoms connected.
To do this, what's vital is cafe owners and teachers and students can buy this product and easily dump stuff on. A movies section, comics section, a books section they can make pretty, they need ownership in their collations.
Their FAQ is on OLPC's site which had a horrific attitude of not allowing others to use their products and locking them down.
Once you pay someone to set IIAB up, giving them Starlink would be around the same price. IIAB has to be open and easy to buy.
> They cite examples of it working
Where? The Dominican Republic video was 4 years ago. Is it up and running? These things are easy to send in a team for and have running for a few months. I would be surprised if one was running for more than a year without an expat there.
Yes, what very, very poor rural schools and hospitals in the heart of Africa really want is porn and not access to teaching aids and medical databases.
They have a lot of flat garbage that if you really want you can just put on your phone, I can see those.
A database (For Africa as you mention) is a big deal, it's queryable store of info. It's rare to see these open source (or CC) Does it use MySql? MSAccess? How hard is it to set up?
I don't think they will have any. Databases need to be updated, it's easier to add 4G if they are needed.
Chemwatch did a pretty good setup with CD that did the 3 month updates. In the developed world is still ran into problems with being up to date enough, I think most would be online now. And it cost money because it's a hard thing to do.
You can't just say, they will 'run datavbases on the IIAB' That's an ongoing commitment that needs to be supported. Else it becomes another bricked device in the NGO graveyard.
This is why I want to know the name so I understand what you think IIAB does.
You seem to think these communities can skip the internet development of the Developed West which was - Academia -> Porn -> Shopping -> Illegal Movies -> Legal streaming movies-> Getting close to formal education
But I'm not getting this leap you think it can do.
The use case is to make apps/content/tools normally requiring internet accessed work offline (either on localhost or local area network). In practice, using IIAB goes a little something like this:
The IIAB scripts make installation and download setup fully automatable (battle-tested Ansible scripts https://github.com/iiab/iiab/tree/master/roles ), which is exciting because you can provision "learning server" devices very easily.