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A satellite broadcasting company called Outernet wants to bring all this content many of us take for granted to the estimated 3 billion people without internet access. That catch is that, in order to get content to as many people as possible efficiently and cheaply, Outernet's connection goes only one way.
"We want to solve the information access problem as quickly as possible," Outernet co-founder and CEO Syed Karim says.
Outernet sells a simple gadget called the Lighthouse that can connect to a satellite dish and download—but not upload—information such as Wikipedia entries, public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, news, crop prices and more. The device doubles as a Wi-Fi hub, so that users can connect to it and download or browse text on their own devices. You can also build a Lighthouse-style receiver yourself, using the company's open source software and instructions. The service is free, and anyone with the proper equipment can pick up Outernet's broadcasts.
Yay, a new device to capture the spending power of the 3 billion humans who live on less than $2 per day.
Related: Facebook's Internet.org "Platform" Launches
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:59AM
I'd be somewhat interested to know how this system will get around the issue that most web downloads involve additional parameters in the request, and therefore provide a method by which a determined person could create a (possibly very slow) two-way communication system, something like the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol#InputDataGoesHere
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:10PM
I believe it's much more low level. Like you have a standard FM radio receiver. You just take what they give you. And even if you built a transmitter, they don't have a receiver...
On the other hand if there is a no upload, you can't spy people using this.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:50PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol#InputDataGoesHere
The part after "#" doesn't get sent to the web server, it's just meant for the client. I think you meant "?".
But yeah, you're right. HTTP doesn't have a clean separation between "download" and "upload", it requires two-way communication for every transaction. So if you try to build a read-only web, it means that things will break, or people will be able to get around your restrictions, or more likely both.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:22PM
I imagine this is more like the software the BBC would broadcast via the TV signal back in the day. Essentially the lighthouse receives a spidered version of Wikipedia or whatever on the radio, sends it to its local storage and then serves that to local clients. Sure you won't be able to edit the articles, but links between them should work fine provided all of them are present on the local storage device.