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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.
It's the easiest way to get 1.3TB from here to there.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This article is lying. I know several people in Nigeria that have Internet access, they send me messages every day. They also seem to have a lot of money to send me, so Nigeria is not really developing country.
Now that they have the granary, they won't loose all of their food every time the city goes up a level.
Either that, or I've been playing too much civ.
I think I need a new sig here.
You could mount them in removable hard drive slides...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Jim Gray (Microsoft researcher, grand Poo Bah of transactions, etc) cowrote an interesting paper 2 years ago entitled TeraScale SneakerNet: Using Inexpensive Disks for Backup, Archiving, and Data Exchange. (Word .DOC file) which analyzes the economics of transferring huge amounts of data by shipping hardware.
(Insert obligatory "never understimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 9-track tapes" reference here.)
or thats what it seems, what about other developing countries that dont have access at all, surely they would be better served with project like this ?, dont get me wrong im all for charity (if you can call 120$ for a 120gig hard drive and $112 p&p charity) but Nigeria already has quite good network access, (judging by the amount of internet cafes and budding enterprise) perhaps we should let them develop with what they already have and concentrate on bringing computing and networks to those who are even less fortunate
120$ for a 120gig hard drive seems rather steep (and 75$ for a demo USB box) as this is more than a complete computer in the local classifieds, (not to mention a shitload of cash in developing countries) is this a charity or a commercial profit making venture ?
i always am suspicious when i see the face of a charity/good cause but then they charge for the service at above-cost especially when other companies are supplying their services for free)
cough*scam*cough ?
Give them info, and teach them to USE it. Having one without the other will just lead to a duplication of the situation we have here. Wired 100% of the time, unprecedented access to so much information... but still lead down a path of war by a bible bashing president and allowing our own government to turn over and beg for the RIAA, MPAA, ignoring our own rights at home AND those of prisoners of war overseas.
Information is one thing. Using it is something else entirely.
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.
I hate that phrase. We are ALL in "developing countries", I hope - or we are screwed. The phrase sounds like the West has "finished developing" - which may be not be inaccurate as it drowns itself in a sea of intellectual "property" litigation, but I know I would like to see a guarantee of MY free access to information, as my fellow countrymen are doing their best to lock down that access and turn the country into a fascist police state that would have given Stalin wet dreams of joy.
Everytime something comes up about technology in developing countries someone or other posts something like this.
Guess what ? The Western world and lots of Asian countries didn't get those necessities by some nice person donating them a 100 gallon container of fresh water, some cheap pills and some old school books. They got there by educating their people to a point where they become able to take their fate into their own hands. To do this, you need more than just basic schooling, you need something a project like this might provide.
Useful links:
hmm.. . every time a post about the developing world comes up somebody asks "don't they need food and clean water first"? In some places yes (and basic schooling is still needed in some parts of USA and other developed countries as well by all accounts, what's the average reading age in your local low-income area?) but for many places basic needs are addressed and its higher level issues that have to be resolved.
Or even Firewire or USB or something...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
It seems like they could spread the wealth a lot more widely if they just burned a bunch of CDs and sent them out. They could even send updates more quickly and easily than sending more disks.
Before the obvious comment comes back saying "but CD-ROM drives don't exist everywhere" please remember that CD-ROM drives became the standard way of distributing bulk data a few years before ATA controllers that can grok disks larger than 32G appeared. So I'm guessing that a computer in some remote area is at least as likely to have a CD drive as a controller that can take a huge disk.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Do we really want to sponsor more competition to our jobs?
Some other people see affairs in wider context as "Do we really want to sponsor american lifestyle?"
There you are, staring at me again.
I am getting real tired of hearing about 'bringing technology to the underpriv's of the world' - guess what : Nigeria's problems are not going to be solved via the Internet.
Countries do not evolve, grow, or progress because an extra 2% of them get dial up access to the Internet. Countries evolve, grow, and progress because every single person in the country gets involved and does some work. Look at the conditions of America circa 1650 or 1800. Those poor fuckers worked 16 hours a day to build farms, homes, roads, schools, infrastructure and the best technology they had access to was the sailboat, the wheel, and the beast of burden. If they wanted a second copy of a text file they had to write it out by hand using a bird's feather dipped in a little glass of ink, scratching it on a piece of paper. If they planned on eating they got out in the field with wooden tools and dug up the ground and planted seeds, chased off birds and rodents from their crops, and watered them by pumping water out of the ground with a hand pump. They spun wool and cotton into threads, wove those threads into cloth, cut the cloth into patterns and using a sewing needle and thread made clothes, and they washed their clothes in the river. They mixed mud and rock to make bricks, fired them in an oven, and build their homes one brick at a time. They took straw and bundled it together and if the floor in their homes got dirty, they swept it outside. They took pride in who they were, they worked their asses off, and they became who America became. Without the Internet.
Yea it's hard. Anything worth while is hard. You can't give a country 'civilization'. They have to EARN it.
BTW pangian - I wasn't reacting harshly at you directly, your post simply gave me a good anchor point.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Surfen auf Trümmern (in German).
If they want to booby trap it, they could pack one of the "drives" with C4. That would be a REAL Trojan Horse.