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Providing Access to Info in Developing Countries
matt writes "Widernet is a program run at the University of Iowa to provide developing countries access to information. Most of the universities they work with (mainly in Nigeria) have no internet access or have a very expensive, limited one. So Widernet ships hard drives with a data dump of about 100G to place on the local network. Students have access through the eGranery. Some the of the problems they are dealing with are how to provide updates to the already distributed libraries, how to provide the eGranery such that it can be setup with little or no IT knowledge, and how to stretch a limited budget and donations. I sadly had to turn down an internship with them, but would still like to contribute. Surely we can help with time, resources, and/or knowledge." And you thought sneakernet was dead.
You could mount them in removable hard drive slides...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I used to work for an ISP offering one way satalite internet. Needless to say, it was rather difficult to support, usually not because of problems with the reciever, but because of the dialup issues and TCP/IP stack problems courtesy of whatever spyware the users have downloaded.
As most of the issues that make one way satalite data delivery problematic for consumers don't exist for this type of application, it would seem like satalite technology is a good answer to the data delivery problem.
Time could be leased on commercial communications satalites, or maybe some sort of agreement to use idle capacity at reduced rates could be reached.
The reciever hardware for one way satalite systems is relatively inexpensive, in the $200-$500 range, so it would seem financially feasable as well...
Surely the best solution is to install a DVD drive and then simply post them a load of DVD-Rs. Perhaps it might even be cheaper to use a CD drive and a load of CD-Rs. As long as sufficient instructions are provided the installation of an optical drive should be fairly straight forward.
But also very sad, it seems Nigeria has the IP rights (SCO-style) on corruption (and is clearly not able to enforce them).
It is such a rich country in many aspects, diverse cultures, fertile nature and lots of oil and gas.
Yet as long as the western world does not act against these utterly corrupt leaders Nigeria will remain in its present state were even universities have difficulty to, for example, accessing the internet.
It is nice to see projects like this were the needed information still reaches the students.
But knowing Nigeria I wonder for how long these hard disks will remain at the university.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
It is difficult for some of us lucky people to comprehend life without the internet as we know it.
/.) won't function properly without real-time synchronisation.
Considering the difficulty of updating the dumped pages (eg: possibility of bad links, etc) and the high costs of hard-drives and shipping costs, I would have thought that it would be more practical to HAVE a satellite connection at the eGranery and have a LARGE proxy-cache (eg: 1TB?).
Because, by deploying internet to those unfortunate fews using data-dump methods would mean that services that we take for granted (such as email and
That's my 2-cents worth for the day.
Look at this info on nigeria, it's an opec member and has tremendous oil and natural gas reserves
According to this DOE fact sheet article, until recently they were flaring off almost all the natural gas, yet local villages had little electricity. I think I see the problem here. Looks like government payola, ripping off the people, various ill will, begats violence, more bad vibes, back and forth.
Just perhaps if they hadn't been ripped off for a long time maybe the people there wouldn't be so poor. Flaring off the gas for years instead of putting in generators to use the gas seems a scosh lame to me. I imagine this fact was not lost on the locals either. Who would be blamed then, the oil producers, the government doofus who gave them the contract? I have no idea, but right there you can see just one instance on how they got shafted.
I also just read a few pretty current news articles when I was looking for that reference link. Your typical back and forth warfare,massacres, people tapping into pipelines to get fuel, oil spills and fires and explosions then, etc. Chaos and anarchy mixed with huge international money and corruption and fascism. I have no idea how to help those people there, tribalism and warfare and serious government/oil industry corruption look like the major problems. I think perhaps if they just scrap the oil contracts and renotiate and require some actual infrastructure be put in instead of just arranging more cash to whatever local warlord du juor happens to be there with his hands out might work better. The actual hardware for electricity and normal communications, make the oil companies put it in. I would bet in one day some millionaire trader sitting in an office far away from nigeria, making a bundle off the nigerian oil, swapping oil futures commodites around could pay for this localised internet deal and then some, a lot of "then some". It's this whole system that causes the problems, so it's the whole system that needs to change. There's no excuse for a nation that wealthy to have such poor people and lack of the basics.