We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports IE 11!
You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of (https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user) to create "selections" which let you have your own custom version of Wikipedia, using categories that you define, WikiProjects, or even custom SPARQL queries.
In my case, a friend/colleague Freeman Murray,[1] had that idea and I told him I will try in my hometown (one of the most remote corner of India). We did and I got a few young kids to be the maintainer, have a few desktop (not Laptop) that they carry around and watch videos to learn to program. It was good while it lasted. Now, those isolated places that I was scared to go alone when I was a kid have fiber Internet connections.
On a fun note, I do have a picture of an "Internet in a Box". This was Detroit in the mid 2000s. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...
It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right... I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote management possible. And even then it was tough to manage considering all other constraints.
I can only imagine how hard it is to deliver this kind of service reliably when Internet is rarely if ever available.
Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.
If no one produces such a device I may need to make one myself by the time my toddler gets old enough to go online.
The Commotion "Internet in a Suitcase" project (~2012) was much more up my alley. Is much more the sort of thing I wish that, for example the State Department would still fund.
> Commotion relies on several open source projects: OLSR, OpenWrt, OpenBTS, and Serval project.
So, mesh, wifi, cellular, and voice technologies, packaged onto semi affordable hardware... That's the real stuff! That's what democratic values should look like, that'a what we could build that would embody our (USA's) founding principles, would fight tyrant info-control.
Right now, Kiwix’s search function is quite basic and doesn’t work well with large amounts of content. It might be worth exploring the use of a generative language model or embedding model to improve its accuracy and usefulness.
I wonder if allowing it to have instant messaging (including offline asynchronous messaging) would change how people in a small community communicate each other. I wonder if, for one, it would induce Internet trolling.
What exact solar products (panels, battery, converter?) would I need to buy, near Chicago, to run one of these 24/7, year round, and let's say it's gotta be up and running most of the time - say, 99% of the time. (That means it can be down over 3 days a year, and still be acceptable to me.)
2023 (356 points, 120 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750165
2021 (620 points, 142 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Contains Internet links, channels, etc. Work in progress. You can find various domains, channels etc.
Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet in a box without proper attribution?
When I was about 7-8 years old I used to get the "Tell me why" books, which were books that had 5-ish pages on all sorts of different topics.
https://archive.org/details/heresmoretellmew0000leok/page/n3...
These books sparked a lifelong curiosity in learning, I would sit for hours and hours and read them in my room. I hope that internet in a box inspires another generation of me's out there, who, like me, wouldn't otherwise have had access to this info.
( However having worked as a technical software tester in similar systems for over 20 years , its probably to complex to implement reliably, being able to handle all the edge cases. Is my GUESS )
> But these user figures also suggest that 652 million people in India did not use the internet at the beginning of 2025, suggesting that 44.7 percent of the population remained “offline” at the start of the year.[1]
I guess I'm mentally comparing this to SE Asia, where smart phone usage (and cell coverage) is ubiquitous; Vietnam at 80%, Philippines at 75%, Thailand at literally everyone. Fewer in Indonesia, but geography there is especially challenging
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155552/countries-highes...
It would have been more "Internet in a box" if it would have helped people set up their own services and pages; and if it were extensible using other radio-capable devices.
Yes ! And at very low cost! It doesn't require a network, a power connection or high technology! It prepares its users for adult life!
How can people read this article and not think, "Wait ... don't we already have books?"
isn't a headphone just a high impedance speaker? you just grab the same output that goes to the speakers and reroute it through a big resistor to the headphones.
did a little searching, here you go (the extra resistance isn't that great)
https://samtechpro.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-use-speaker-o...
put your efforts into stereo, speaker and headphones, why wouldn't stereo set the stage for more complex brain development?
If anyone has a better idea of a protocol for this than NNCP, please suggest at: https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/dn/issues/221
Like an offline whitelist of sources you trust not to distract you while you're reading that 1000+ page book.
They also have Datapost (https://datapost.site/map) which uses android phones as data carriers between the remote location and the Internet, for email, stats and updates.
And those people then have a better chance at a much better education?
Why not in developed countries schools as well?
I actually recently learned about Internet-in-a-Box myself and started contributing. Its cool to see that for the most part people seem to think this is a positive idea! Internet-in-a-Box has been around for a while (at least 10 years) and it's a great project with a lot of very passionate people working on it.
In addition to Wikipedia, I’d love to see a mirror of all the health (NIH) and similar data
- key imagery, for example the human body
- (wishful) chatGPT 4o
Fun facts, about one third or 2.6 Billions of the world's population has no or very limited Internet connectivity [2]. The main root cause is most probably power not the infrastructure.
Most of the people in authority probably don't realize that this rural connectivity does not need a fast high speed network as long as it has connectivity. It can be slow as kbps bandwidth, a kind of "sipping" Bittorent based download, but a download nonetheless.
The main problem of the Internet connectivity it's not really the infrastructure itself but the overall power budget requirements for the connectivity infrastructure.
We need to bring back the very efficient wireles modulation for the remote and rural Internet as exemplify by the DMR with its very efficient 4-FSK [3],[4]. This type of wireless modulation employed constant envelope modulation that is far more efficient (8 to 15 times more efficient) than the alternative TETRA with comparable bandwith [5]. It's reported that DMR operates on 1 kWh per day while TETRA is on 15 kWh per day thus the former can be sustained by only solar panels but not the latter.
Please note that TETRA itself is not a very efficient modulation with π⁄4 differential quadrature phase-shift keying (π⁄4-DPSK) since it requires linear amplifiers due to its non-constant envelope wireles modulation. It's even worst for typical OFDM based system (e.g Wi-Fi HaLoW, LTE, 5G, etc) [6]. This is because a similar power budget setup to DMR would have required probably around 100 times more power or more than 100 kWh per day including the air-conditioning systems for the linear power amplifier systems [7].
Thus these remote and rural base stations can be potentially powered by merely solar panels and the infrastructure does not need to be expensive since the base station structure can be made from bamboo [8].
[1] Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
[2] About one-third of the global population, or 2.6 billion people, remain offline.
https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2023-09-12-unive...
[3] Digital mobile radio (DMR):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_mobile_radio
[4] DMR networks for health emergency management: A case study:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220761899_DMR_netwo...
[5] TETRA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TETRA
[6] Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_...
[7] Base Station ON-OFF Switching in 5G Wireless Networks: Approaches and Challenges:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315696556_Base_Stat...
[8] IEEE Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) 2022 Challenge Winners:
I don't know how many more times this needs to be proven.
You do not understand data, you do not understand the reality around you, you do not understand 80:20 style engineering rules, you can't look at previous implementations of the Internet in a Box and see it didn't work.
Worse, you now live in a Starlink era where you can give them a real "Internet in a Box" and there is no solution people can just roll out. Talking a proper Linux setup, real hacker and nerd stuff, but because it's not Data Hording 101 no one will tackle it.
Internet in a Box is a great example of why Western foreign aid is failing and China is moving in. The West no longer builds infrastructure for the poor (like a Linux build) and feeds them wishy washy stuff. Facebook does more for the poor in this area.