If you were to create an operating system that never connects to the world wide web, which software applications would you have on it? I would make sure it came with Kiwix so the user would have access to encyclopedic knowledge through Wikipedia. I would also have some basic note-taking software and personal wiki software in order to manage one's own day to day archival and knowledge management work. What programming languages would you emphasize it use so that a user could reasonably develop their own software to suit assorted needs? Java might be versatile enough, but I simply do not know if I could write everything I needed myself. What do you think?
If anything, you can find this thread as a thought experiment. How would you exist without internet access? Or imagine if you lived in a post-apocalyptic world where internet infrastructure as we know it ceased to operate.
You should check out Outernet. othernet.is/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet It's basically a broadcast of their whole "internet" over the course of the day via 1 way satellite. Local receivers cache all the data and build up a library locally. If you want something added you have to email/snailmail in a request and they add it. Its goal is to help apefrica and they keep losing satellite time but I find the idea and technology interesting.
I could just toggle airplane mode on my windos for that
Oliver Morales
Seems like a wasted tech.
Lincoln Thompson
Ya it is a waste for what they are going to use it for. But the method is solid and easy to replicate in opensource with cheap off the shelf hardware. github.com/daniestevez/free-outernet
Air time on Ku satellite is actually cheap if you only need a few khz of bandwidth one way.
That's really interesting. Not what I was looking for, but still cool nevertheless.
The premise of the OP is that from first boot and install to end use of a computer, it never accesses any outside node. Not even receiving.
John Watson
I think gentoo has that covered?
Hudson Ortiz
Hmmm, could we start this up then maybe for ourselves?
Liam Powell
C (along with Ncurses) Go for memory management Perl for scripting Basic for tradition.
Asher Williams
Make an OS where in order to execute the next processor instruction you have to take a step on a treadmill. Force fat people to use it until they aren't fat anymore.
Eli Martinez
I'd rather not use GNU anything, but what services are there for Ku bandwidth? I can't seem to find any because I am not sure what to look for.
Charles Allen
A person couldn't take enough steps in their lifetime that the numbers the amount of instructions executed by the CPU during boot.
Jose Perez
Exactly.
Andrew Morris
I thought it used netinstall? Can you put t on a system without using the internet to fetch basic packages?
Kevin Bennett
Yes. Go to lyngsat and pick any random Ku bird. They are stuffed full of bible thumpers and imams broadcasting from their basements to no one. Lots of times between their shitty shows they just put up test patterns or repeating text scrolls.They can't be spending very much a month on this crap. lyngsat.com/Galaxy-19.html lyngsat.com/america.html AFAIK lyngsat only lists video/audio broadcasts. They don't bother trying to list all the rando data streams.
A digital broadcast video uses 6Mhz. Outernet is using a fraction of that and pushing 6gigs of data a month with what ever modulation scheme they are using. A few years ago a 128khz slot(used for audio only "radio" shows usually) cost 500-1K/month. From what i can tell Outernet is using 20k. That odd size means they are probability just subletting off someone's larger channel or got a deal on unused space between to larger channels for cheap.. The demand for unidirectional sat time has dropped like a rock because of the internet.
Ku could carry anything really. Most common use is for digital TV and audio. But its used for other stuff like paging, data, and industrial control. You lease bandwidth (Pricing is quoted in $/Mhz) on the satellite and can send what ever you want in that space. If you want to think of it like the OSI model they are just giving you the 1st physical layer. You can do what ever modulation you want. Hell you could send up Bell 202 AFSK and transmit your data like packet radio does or old style dialup modems did.
Owen Sanders
Am I understanding this correctly: Is this how it works?
James Lopez
I suggest you start at
Sebastian Bennett
in a disaster scenario, small, simple devices (like dumb phones) would become invaluable.
Lucas Thompson
I thought about what kind of computer I'd put in a go bag and what would be on it. Low powered with a large eink screen similar to that one laptop per child project.
Asides for maps/recent satellite imagery of the local area and some SDR tools for scanning frequencies I don't see what else would be that useful on it in a post apocalyptic world/SHTF scenario. A few databases taken from wikipedia on a variety of subjects is possible thanks to high density microsd cards. Could also be useful for reviewing pictures taken from motion activated IR trail cameras or as a monitor for an borescope camera.
Is there a cheap way to get data up to the satellite that doesn't rely on the internet? I like what I've read in this chat so far but the upload part is missing. With cheap upload capability, even if the upload rate is gruesome by modern standards, you could have the most comfiest image board ever.
Xavier Sanchez
If you are thinking about electronics for a SHTF scenario, consider cheap portable media players with porn on them, even simpler mp3 players with audio books and classical music and cheap tablets with casual games and children's media. Distractions become an invaluable trade good during bad times.
Well outernet receiving stations have a wifi hotspot you connect to with any device that you can then use any browser to surf like a mini internet. You could replicate the same thing with a raspi or similar singleboad computer.
No. You would have to do the upload via snail mail or maybe an email/SMS/twitter gateway. Then wait for the updates to broadcast out to everyone. NuFidoNet
OUTERNET is using a custom protocol with custom hardware. They are probably doing the uplink themselves. Their goal is to have standalone devices that could be dropped in to the 3rd world and start getting data with no skill necessary. The PublicAccess-tier shows on KuFTA are not doing their own uplink. They are streaming to an uplink center with software like shoutcast from a pc. The uplink center repackages it and does all the complicated stuff to get it on the satellite. You could actually do what OUTERNET is doing with nothing special and all open source software. The libraries to do the AFSK are probably already in the typical "ham radio" packages of most Linux disros. Packet radio is 1200 baud. You could easily get 9600baud or better with the clean audio on FTA.
Radio and sat would just be another hop in this sneakernet. OP would have to figure out how he wants to deal with updates to his distribution coming in out of order and what those updates would actually contain. Like I make an addition to my copy or local "Wikipedia" then pass it on to the next guy. The system recognizes this change then it slowly populates though all the different nodes via sat, radio, hand carried thumb drives, etc. Basically store-and-forward like echomail or a really slow speed torrent.
Nolan Gomez
This is pretty interesting. I remember reading somewhere in some chan (4/vr/, perhaps?) that one of the difficulties a person running an arcade in this day had was that mexicans would often gang up against whomever defeated them if they didn't like the fact that they lost. This really stifled customer influx to the point where the arcade just had to close down.
My idea was to have "arcade booths", basically. Each machine gets its own "room" (cardboard is sufficient for the walls of the "room" since you only wish to deny players access to awareness of whom their competitor is) and the machines are all set up in a network with one another. The player match-ups would be decided by randomness and win-loss ratios.
Jace Roberts
Someone should make an OS that, in place of networking, has an RNG oracle that gets information from God.
Brody Carter
Updates are botnet.
Charles Russell
Sounds like the arcade owner was spineless. He should've told them to knock it off or he'd ban them from the place. Instead he let them drive away all his customers to the point that he had to close down.
Thomas Torres
A WiFi meshnet? Ehh, I'd rather have hard copies that people peruse.
This is very true.
Henry Hill
Non-networked is more extreme than the internet dying. I can run a wireless mesh between friends who live nearby and still exchange files without internet
Charles Miller
But that is internet in pedantic vernacular.
Lucas Perry
All you need is a null modem cable and laplink.
John Barnes
Or be old enough to live through having no internet connection.
All you need to be offline is a couple of CDs for your OS and a few large external hard drives with your shit. Get in the habit of backing up your backups, because you can and do lose data to hard drive losses. They all die.
Leo Flores
Underrated post.
Brayden Collins
All you really need is an extremely stable OS that can recover itself from catastrophic damage. Basically, you need a system that can defend itself from both actively malicious and downright retarded users, so that there is no "lol bro delet system32". I thought about a microkernel system like Sculpt OS (Genode+seL4) but I realized that this system would still run off of a removable disk, internal hard drive, or some kind of flash storage that can be erased by the end user. If we're talking about a system that'll "just work" until the end of time itself, you'll want something that can be loaded completely from an onboard ROM chip into RAM, with no actual disks needed to get a fully booted system. You flip the switch on the side of your shitbox and the system comes up with all the basic utilities, as good as new.
The perfect OS for this is RiscOS. In addition to being loadable from ROM, you can also load user files and programs off of additional disks, though they aren't required. RiscOS does have networking but you could easily fix this by removing the networking components from the OS, removing the networking hardware from your computer, or by simply not connecting it. It has about the same functionality as Windows 3.1 or MacOS 7. It's small and will run on extremely low resources.
There's a lot you can do with RiscOS if you're looking for an extremely bare bones desktop OS. Version 5 runs on a Raspberry Pi as well, so it's not like you need expensive retro hardware to use it.
There are emulators as well, some for Linux. Not sure if any of them are well maintained aside from QEMU and RPCEMU. I use the latter on OS X for emulating RiscOS 5. Works well enough for hobbyist use.
Lincoln Stewart
Pretty interesting. What kind of computing technology would be available in a SHTF scenario? But I don't mean stuff like modern, really durable devices that would survive such scenario, I mean stuff that could be manufactured after civilization has collapsed and modern mining or industry is long gone. Could there be some kind of really low-level-tech computers that could be crafted without you needing to establish an entire civilization just to support the gathering of resources needed to build/maintain them? sage for non-OS, internet related post
Christian Nelson
I'd imagine something like an Altair 8800 or Imsai 8080 could be feasible in such a situation
Nathaniel Williams
there actually was a real one for a while called 'PostmanNet' in India for the Poos. don't know if it's still running now, this was basically started before the rise of smartphones. It relied on India's postal service to internetwork remote village schools with each other and the Internet. dsh.jeejio.com/
You could make a single transistor easily. But it would take decades just to build back up to the point of being able to make a simple IC. Much longer to make something as complex as a CPU. It took 30 years of massive spending and drive by large companies and projects like the Bell System and the "space race" to get to the point of making the 8080.
If civilization was collapsed a computer would be quite low on the priority list anyways.
Someone did manage to build a giant 6502 out of only transistors though. It be up to the size of a small mainframe for a fully working system, but it would be possible without high-tech manufacturing. It would have great utility for rebuilding however, so perhaps not so low on the list of priorities as you think.
6502 has 3500 transistors in it. 8080 has 4500. I don't know how you would get 3500 perfectly functioning transistors with out modern manufacturing. Then all the supporting logic and what about RAM? There is lots of steps between raw materials and a simple silicon transistor.
Logan Diaz
Vacuum tubes are always an option. You'd be able to find plenty of glass and metal in what's left of the cities, and vacuum tubes are something that can be created with late 1800s/early 1900s technology.
Lincoln Rogers
POTS is going to be gone in 10 years tops. Most people don't even have a real land line anymore. VOIP everywhere.
Robert Morris
Git is a good way of managing a lot of this stuff. Something IPFS style(I think IPFS itself) would work on lan. If you don't want to do networking with these people for whatever reason you could easily come up with some kind of requesting format for drives and give other people at these meetups file lists ahead of time. You would hand over your drive, with the request instructions already on it and then plug them in, have people plug drives into your box etc. Some way for a person to sign their file releases with keys would be good too and you could also track who has what files and where they came from etc. Something like this would be kind of easy to throw together in a week, month if I'm lazy.
Software wise I would make sure to have it setup for working with source files and probably use a source based distro with cross compiler toolchains on it already and as many types of architectures and drivers included. Another important thing would be a check summing file system and preferably ECC ram along with a raid card that has a battery, even if you are using software raid. So probably ZFS or btrfs if you trust it. Also even if you don't have room for all the source code for almost every open source project you should try to keep a library of the hash sums to tell if someone is giving you bad source code or something.
Justin Morris
POTS?
Hudson Hill
plain old telephone service
Lincoln Diaz
I think this hasn't been done yet as there isn't a point stable enough to hold an artificial sattellite in orbit without correction. There are retroreflectors on the moon and communication using them might be possible, but it isn't trivial.
Austin Lee
Your idea's fucking stupid, just use any OS ever and don't set up networking. BOOM, you're connected to "sneaker net". Redeeming this thread with something relevant but actually worth talking about: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(CD-ROM) Basically it's this professional warez group that used expensive equipment to distribute CDs all across Europe in secret before using the Internet for piracy was as convenient as it is now. In short, these guys lived every pirate's wet dream right up until that part where they got arrested.
If kikes were this adamant about stopping piracy, what changed with the internet? Kike controlled honeypot sites are now a thing compared to a private group you can trust?
William Brooks
I am currently living every pirate's wet dream.
Michael Stewart
Nothing changed. If you'd been keeping an eye on tracker news for the past few years you'd know.
