from the wait-until-they-find-out-some-search-results-are-advertisements dept.
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
Related Stories
Facebook has announced the Internet.org Platform, "an open program for developers to easily create services that integrate with Internet.org." The partnership is designed to deliver affordable Internet access to the developing world. However the initiative has been criticized for violating net neutrality:
Facebook says it will allow more websites and other online services to join its "free mobile data" Internet.org scheme.
The announcement follows a backlash against the initiative. Opponents suggest it compromises the principles of net neutrality, because it favours access to some sites and apps over others.
But Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg said it was "not sustainable to offer the whole internet for free". "It costs tens of billions of dollars every year to run the internet, and no operator could afford this if everything were free," he said in an online video posted to Internet.org's website.
Also discussed at TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, and Quartz.
Previously:
Internet Access in Developing World With Drones
Facebook's Internet.org - "Internet-For-Everyone" - Launches in Zambia
India Debates Net Neutrality
(Score: 2, Touché) by WizardFusion on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:06AM
So to distract them from their starving, diseased ridden lives, they want to give them the internet and cat pictures.
The money would be better spent on getting food and aid to them instead.
Yes, I know education is important too, and Wikipedia may help with this, but Wikipedia has offline DVDs that can be used instead - much cheaper.
(Score: 3, Touché) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:06PM
And pr0n. The Internet is for pr0n.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:24PM
And since in so many parts of the developing world pr0n is illegal, even punishable by flogging or worse, it has ironically made people in those places more conversant with proxies and other security/anonymity measures than in the developed world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:45PM
Won't they need some sort of internet enabled device first?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:22PM
I've been following this blog [whiteafrican.com] for years, which covers the tech scene in Africa. There it's all about mobile Internet, because people can't afford computers but a great many people have cell phones. Originally it was about getting news and crop prices and the like via SMS; now as smartphones are spreading it's more robust. But even just the crop prices by SMS has made a big difference in the lives of the farmers in that region because now they can check what prices are before loading everything up in the truck and riding 6 hours on rutted roads to get to market and maybe make a profit.
But it's my knowledge through that blog of what does exist in places like Africa now vs. my skepticism about the company in TFA's business model that make me question if they know what they're doing. It would make more sense to work through the mobile devices that people there already have.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:46PM
That's great for the developing world "upwardly mobile" class, but there are also a LOT of rural people, especially in Asia and Africa, that don't have access to cellular networks, simply because it's not cost effective to build the infrastructure in the middle of nowhere, when population density * population wealth is so incredibly low. It is spreading rapidly as the cost comes down, but it will probably take many decades before the most remote places become even vaguely appealing to traditional cellular infrastructure.
That's where Satellite-based services start getting appealing though - line-of-sight can easily extend 20-40x the distance as for a cellular tower (400-1500x times the coverage area), with much slower signal falloff. And for a one-way broadcast-to-buffer service such as Outernet that coverage doesn't have to be continuous, so even a single satellite can bring access to what is effectively a modern globe-spanning library. Sure, you've got to make a local "Lighthouse" Library branch to get access, but I suspect those could be mass-produced in extremely cheap, durable, and self-contained forms, as well as being cobbled together from fourth-hand components.
It actually seems to me to be a strategy with great gracefully scaling upgrade potential as well: Being wifi, all those "mobile internet" smart-phones will make dandy interface devices - even the ultra-low-end ones discarded by the developing-world middle class. And I would fully expect the Lighthouse to also double as a local message board, especially as the local link technology incorporates old cellular antennas as the rebroadcast technology instead of WiFi (no new hardware needed for all the people who have already invested in an old smartphone for wifi access). And as densities increase with such antennas, mesh networks become more viable to provide regional intranets*, and eventually tie in to the internet itself.
*I'm assuming that if you've got an old cellular network repeater antenna it's at most a software upgrade away from being able to form a mesh network
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:48PM
If all you can think to do with the vast repository of information that is the internet is look at cat pictures, well then, I feel sorry for you.
If I was starving and disease ridden then information about farming and disease prevention might be useful.
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:14PM
So to distract them from their starving, diseased ridden lives, they want to give them the internet and cat pictures.
The money would be better spent on getting food and aid to them instead.
Yes, I know education is important too, and Wikipedia may help with this, but Wikipedia has offline DVDs that can be used instead - much cheaper.
You're wrong on several counts.
1) Direct material aid is more complicated than you might think at first glance.
2) Very few phones can read DVDs
3) News (especially crop prices) isn't the sort of thing you want on old DVDs.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:47AM
you are ignorant.
we already provide them with plenty of aide. the problem is the local governments are corrupt and are taking all the resources. we've even tried dropping food directly to the people but you end up with soldiers coming in and gunning down anyone who touches it. the food is taken and used for their military. the sad fact is we cannot help them with physical goods if their government doesn't want us to.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AnonTechie on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:58AM
I have submitted this story twice before. I do hope that this company finally does something other than Press Releases.
Outernet - Information from Outer Space
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/02/25/173217 [soylentnews.org]
Startup Beams the Web’s Most Important Content from Space, Free
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/05/16/2137238 [soylentnews.org]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:22PM
I will ask the Editor to write out 100 times ' I must check for dupes' - but, to be honest, the automatic checker is not up to much at the moment and with over 7000 stories published so far the task is not an easy one.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:10PM
I don't consider it a dupe... maybe a non-update update.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:00PM
I will ask the Editor to write out 100 times ' I must check for dupes'
Only reason you didn't see it is because of the error
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:17PM
I assume takyon made the comment about the spending power. in any case, I wanted to point out that if their computers literally cannot upload anything, it means they can't order anything off the internet. at most, you could force them to watch commercials for something, but I doubt anyone would be interested in advertising anything to them anyway.
for instance, I assume that if the various car companies knew I do not have a driver's license, they would not pay anyone to show me their silly commercials (be it hulu or tv or whatever).
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:25PM
And you would be wrong - that comment is attributable to the original submitter. You can always look at the 'Original Submission' link to check.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:16PM
The spending power comment was mine.
Oh, but there are. Tobacco companies for one spend a lot of money advertising cigarettes [care2.com] in the 3rd World. Smoking rates are dropping in industrialized countries and they want to replace that lost revenue. Liquor and beer are another common advertisement you see in poor places; even in the most impoverished village in Vietnam you can see billboards for cognac.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:15PM
If we assume advertising is incorporated, then the question would still essentially become: does the benefit of having a local branch of the globe-spanning super-library outweigh the cost of letting the sponsors put up billboards? Having worn out several library cards in youth, I would tend to believe it does - they're fertile ground for avid minds, giving fresh opportunities to a population that had no option of expanding their intellectual horizons other than leaving.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:39PM
WTF? The link is busted.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:27PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:40PM
All 3 seem to work nicely for me atm.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:41PM
If the link is only one-way, what the hell good is it? How do you select what page you want to see?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:39PM
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:39PM
Think of it like like radio except for wikipedia.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:21PM
There's never really anything new in technology, I can think of teletext on TVs in the 80s/90s and at least one place was distributing a one way usenet feed over satellite in the early 90s and the public high school around 1990 had a literal news feed over satellite service in the library that you could search, and last but not least coast guard bulletins distributed via radioteletype and radiofax.
At a system level there was once a service a long time ago that broadcast news to text pagers, which is conceptually similar. I had to carry a pager for some years with that service, but I don't remember it terribly well.
In the 80s using 80s home computers I used to listen to the coast guard radiofax station NMC somewhere in New Jersey, perhaps, that broadcast fax'd weather pix on 8080 KHz worldwide 24x7. Radiofax was a simple analog protocol, something like 1000 hz pip for sync, then 1200 hz for black and 2400 hz for white (or vice versa) and something like 1 horizontal pixel line per second (or maybe 2, aka 120 lines per minute). Anyway a 80s home computer was well up to the task. I could also print out the charts I got on my dot matrix printer and the satellite shots looked pretty good. AFAIK the coast guard still broadcasts weather and safety bulletins for ships at sea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:27AM
Outernet beams a set of files throughout the day (think wikipedia, PDFs, news, weather, etc). Satellite dish/receiver stations cache this data and make it available locally via WiFi for free.
Why would anyone want this? When you're too far from the grid (or your grid is down), a solar powered Raspberry Pi connected to a USB satellite receiver/dish that is sharing its content cache via WiFi is next best thing. Runs on sunlight, is inexpensive, reliable, informative, and timely. Bonus: weakens state censorship/snooping.
It's not an alternative for people with 1gbps internet connections. It's for those with no access at all. And geeks, of course.
https://outernet.is/en/ [outernet.is]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:23AM
Bonus: weakens state censorship/snooping.
Ah, no: it makes it stronger. This is basically a form of digital broadcasting, which means that whoever is controlling it controls what goes into the stream, being censored at the head end. This is tailor-made for censorship, as is ALL broadcasting. If not, why would we need to go online to find out what's really going on with TPP, Snowden, etc?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:19PM
Think of it like a shortwave radio broadcaster. Yes, the broadcaster's mother could be censoring his content. But whatever he does broadcast travels the world. Anyone can listen to the broadcast, even if it contains content that their local regime (or mother) does not approve of.
One of Outernet's stated goals (from wikipedia) is "to provide information without censorship for educational and emergency purposes".
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:21AM
The device costs $99.99. Here are the specifications:
You apply to have content "published"/cached by asking for it on a wiki. I wonder if you can snail mail your requests if you can't send data?
The design seems to have a number of shortcomings. It's a nice idea but appears (to me at least) that the hardware has been slapped together and the finished product lacks polish.
I wish them all the best. Hopefully these kind of hacks won't be needed for too much longer. I believe Internet access for everybody closely follows clean drinking water in terms of importance to humanity. It's all very well to "teach a man to fish", but the man has to find a teacher first. Give him an Internet connection and he can find as many teachers as he might want.
(Score: 2) by nyder on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:00AM
I wish them all the best. Hopefully these kind of hacks won't be needed for too much longer. I believe Internet access for everybody closely follows clean drinking water in terms of importance to humanity. It's all very well to "teach a man to fish", but the man has to find a teacher first. Give him an Internet connection and he can find as many teachers as he might want.
What if these people, who have no internet because they are very fucking poor, also have no education so they can't even read? Explain to me how this "Internet" is going to help them? Remember, this is a one way internet, not the nice internet you and I enjoy.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:14AM
What if these people, who have no internet because they are very fucking poor, also have no education so they can't even read? Explain to me how this "Internet" is going to help them?
Bootstrapping.
Humans; even completely uneducated ones; are just as smart as you or me. Somebody will be able to read everywhere these things are deployed - even if that somebody happens to be a tourist. Once the locals work out that these squiggles impart magic knowledge, somebody will be inspired to learn to read. Even the single Bible left after the last missionary got eaten would be enough. Humans' thirst for knowledge is boundless.
I'm not naive enough to think that delivering a library to an illiterate society is going to change things overnight. Most people will ignore it - but there will be those one-in-a-thousand motivated individuals that takes the opportunity and runs with it. Those individuals will use the knowledge to solve local problems which in turn will encourage other people to learn how to access knowledge. The process will take a generation or two.
All it takes is one person to solve a real problem; adapted to local requirements; using this newly-available knowledge for its value to become apparent. Immediate change is both impossible and highly destabilising. Effective change happens from within.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:43PM
Keep in mind that buying a pre-built receiver is for those who desire that convenience. They have instructions and source code available for those who wish to build their own.
example: https://wiki.outernet.is/wiki/Outernet_receiver_DIY_kit [outernet.is]
The 24watt power draw does seem substantial, I will agree. While it might be a high estimate, when you add up the devices (Raspberry Pi, satellite receiver, WiFi, storage), it doesn't sound too far off. The solution? Size the photovoltaic panel and battery proportionally to the needs of the device.
I would hope the 5 device WiFi limit will be overcome in the near future. Theoretically, you could attach your own WiFi router to the RPi's ethernet port instead, nullifying that limit.
Bi-directional internet access is superior, no doubt. But for people that are isolated (middle of a desert/jungle/ocean/etc) or have no money for an ISP, this is something much greater than their previous nothing.