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loband - Killer App for Developing World?
An anonymous reader submits "With recent stories about hardware products for the developing world - namely the MIT Media lab's $100 laptop and the Simputer, its interesting to see a software solution to the problems of internet access. Aidworld, a Cambridge (UK) based organisation specialising in ICTs for the developing world have created a free internet service to speed up web browsing in low bandwidth environments: loband. Using server-side compression and by filtering images, scripts and plugins while retaining content and basic formatting, loband reduces bandwidth requirements by between 5 and 50 times. Its making waves in development circles but it also seems to make for a much leaner browsing experience in this world of heavyweight websites. Could this be a much needed stepping stone for users in developing countries? Do high bandwidth consumers find the sites they view could look much cleaner?"
It's a good idea to heavily use adblock as well. As an average page refers to several advertising services, knocking them out will usually reduce the number of DNS queries by 2/3 and bandwidth use by like half. The key is to not limit it to just images, but gratuiously give wildcard bans to entire domains that have something with "counter" or "ad" in name.
And as a side effect... yeah, you'll have no ads as well.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Finally, we give them money, and stop giving them manufacturing equipment. Then they are only dependent on us for money. That's where we are with a lot of countries currently. Now, we need to phase out the free money we give them.
Free money? What do you think Third World Debt is?
Nobody gives them free money. Even today, we see how the social cost of what money is offered often comes at a terribly high cost--the result of lending policies that absolutely nobody has enough experience to get right (yet). Even though you want to make the answers to third-world development sound simple, it repeatedly demonstrates itself as being beyond every program's and individual's expectations.
You sound interested, so Read up, buddy, and expand your mind at the expense of your confidence.
Cingular's wireless EDGE network recompresses all images. Quite a bit of savings depending on the web site. On my handheld I dont even notice the difference since the screen is small, although its pretty noticeable when hooked up to a bigger screen.
### Why don't they just have people use ELinks / Lynx?
Because thats client side, if you are really low on bandwidth you want to filter the junk out before you have downloaded it, not afterwards. Lynx of course already kills of the biggest junk by not downloading images, but there is still a whole bunch of useless information left in the html that you can filter out to reduce the size quite a bit.
>I wouldn't mind making that standard for cell phone and PDA browsing
Its not a standard, but proxies are old news. My Treo650 is on Sprint's proxy and the Blazer(the browser) requests compressed pages (gzip). Sprint's proxy compresses images too. It looks terrible if you use your treo as a wireless modem for your laptop, but looks good on the handheld.
The sidekick has a much more restrictive proxy system in which only certain elements are send to the client instead of the html of the page (text, basic tables, no css but supports colored text). It also compresses images like Sprint does, but I dont think it can handle animated gifs. Or at least it didnt when I still had one.
Netzero, AOL, Earthlink and others have this type of service for their dial-up users. They call it speed-up or somesuch.
There's also a lot you can do on the the client side. For instance, I run and ad blocking hosts file. Its just a blacklist of ad servers which get resolved to 127.0.0.1. Ta da, instant speed-boost and no more annoying ads. This kind of thing could easily be implemented on the server side too.
Also, Firefox has extentions that let you customize how plug-ins act. Like the "click here to run the flash embed" extension.
What I would like to see is some kind of bandwidth designator in the User Agent field. Something like narrow, low, medium, high, and very high. Then the site can generate the proper page, instead of the "click here for the html version of the site" half-fix.
Do we expect them to repay it? I don't think so...
Yes, and they are. Many of the third world countries spend more of their GDP paying back the interest, never mind the debt, than they do on healthcare and education and all the other things they should be spending money on.
Most browsers have support for compressed HTML via gzip/deflate. Maybe it compresses better or something.
Fuck that: don't give developing countries $100 computers, give them the $1000 ones that are being wasted on the so called developed countries - hey they're already developed, so they shouldn't need them, right?
/. post pretty amazing, and found them to be in sharp contrast with what is being done in my own country. :-)
Although I empathize with your troubles teaching spoiled kids, I have to say I found the technologies mentioned in this
I live in Brazil and just today I read in the morning newspaper about PC Conectado, which is supposed to be Brazil's answer to the problem of computer technology for the masses, and I found those technologies (the $100,00 laptop, the simputer, and the loband thing) to be quite an advance in terms empowering technology, concepts, and efforts to bring technology to the people.
The PC Conectado, in contrast, will sell for R$1,400 (that's US$ 535 at today's exchange rate). The high-fallutin' high-priests of Brazil's Free Software community are ecstatic because it'll come loaded with F/OSS software. That's good, but Brazil's minimum wage is R$ 260,00 ( = US$ 99 ), so PC Conectado is way expensive. In fact, it appears to be a stripped-down PC, and costing around what a stripped-down PC costs. It's not as cheap as it ought to be. Wal-Mart, the cheapo department store in USA, has 'puters for less (I've checked here today.)
So, in contrasting these 3 projects with the PC Conectado, I found nice food-for-thought. Here are my 2 cents futurology and thoughts:
1) While Free Software is nice, it may not be what people want, because it might not correspond to what people expect. It might just be that when people learn they can't play Windows warez games or office software in PC Conectado, they will uninstall GNU/Linux. Currently, for medium wage jobs in Brazil, the job market demmands some expertise in Windows software, and some might want to buy a PC to get that expertise and hone skills in Excel or whatever. If your hardware allows shifting to Windows, will they stick to GNU/Linux? I don't think so...
2) What is really needed is cheap hardware. You can't cheat like PC Conectado. You need $ 100 laptops. Cheap means cheap.
3) If you have custom hardware, there is no "turning back" to proprietary software.
4) Research groups must focus on new concepts. Old concepts will not only cost more, they might backfire. When you take low income populations, their whole model of what's "top" might be what is the dominant technology (and we know that's not the best choice).
5) Internet access is not a luxury. It's as much of a luxury as library access is a luxury. "The net is the computer." (TM Sun Microsystems)
6) Hand in hand with this custom new hardware an net technologies, we need to teach children what computer programming is.Developing countries do *not* need government-subsidized programs to teach people to use Microsoft software. In the long run, this will empower developing countries and create a virtuous circle.
So, IMHO, "the $1000 ones [computers] that are being wasted on the so called developed countries" isn't gonna cut it. I really think governments of developing world must foster research groups with innovative ideas.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I'm writing this, after browsing slashdot through loband.
It's a nice, clean look actually - nowhere near as much clutter as the standard slashdot.
It's a nice, sans-serif font (in black) on a white background and all links are in blue with an underline. There are no ads or other images, yet it keeps the layout pretty true to the original. Form submissions are a bit hit and miss - I could change, for instance, the threshold for viewing comments OK, however I had to return to regular slashdot to actually post this.
Plus, even though I'm on a 10 meg connection, this loband page loaded noticably faster than the regular page - less cruft to download, less HTTP connections to be made and broken, and a cleaner layout that's easier for my broswer to rend.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
For a slightly more informed view, consider:
http://www.uneca.org/
With a note on the importance placed on ICTs and similar infrastructure.