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?"

Comments

3rd World?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I wouldn't mind making that standard for cell phone and PDA browsing

Offer this for ALL customers?

[LiquidCoooled]

I don't care that I have fast broadband, I want the option of cleaning the html up and speeding my web experience.

Every second counts.

Ouch.

[gardyloo]

loband - Killer App for Developing World?

I knew that overpopulation is a concern, but this is ridiculous.

And pr0n?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, if pr0n is what makes internet happen, how is loband expected to actually have success?

Re:And pr0n?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, you underestimate geek resourcefulness. Pr0n always finds a way.

food....

[orufet]

Shouldn't we help them out with the things they need most in the developing world, rather than technology?

Re:food....

[Spodlink05]

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?

Re:food....

[Lemmy Caution]

The entire term "developing" world is problematic. It assumes a teleology: that societies like the US and Europe are at some ideal state that others need to aspire to, that levels of consumption and production are the indices of progress.

I'm not an anti-technologist who idealizes pre-modern ways of life, and I think it's a good thing if kids all around the world can get vaccines and medical care. But not every not-first-world society is just a mess of problems, and the problems aren't all the same everywhere. Most places actually have enough to eat most of the time; some areas are occassionally subject to famine due to reasons environmental, political, and economic. Many have sustainable economies where people aren't starving at all and things are generally OK--the biggest difference between their way of life and those in the "first world" is that they watch TV together in a public space, instead of having one at home, and that they take jitneys instead of driving; others are struggling with disease and sanitation issues, or war, or oppressive governments, or widespread crime. Maybe having internet connections in some of these areas will be helpful, maybe they won't. These things are entirely local issues: no single attitude or policy about "the developing world" is useful.

So maybe the first thing to do is to actually listen and learn from the people who you want to help, and not assume that you can characterize over half the world was one model.

Re:food....

[torinth]

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.

Mobile

[MHobbit]

This would be great if it was used for mobile phones as well: you keep the general layout, albeit lose the images.

Another unforseen benefit is that you can prevent your son from watching pr0n on their new cell phone.

Adblock

[KiloByte]

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.

Re:Smart but not needed

[Spodlink05]

Trying to design a $100 dollar laptop for starving users or kids who still go to schools where blackboards are mounted on trees is not a feasible idea.

Because they don't believe in stupid stereotypes.

ELinks / Lynx

[miratrix]

Why don't they just have people use ELinks / Lynx? ELinks with frame and table support works with most websites out there and it's very, very useable. It also runs on minimal hardware.

With mod_gzip / Content-Encoding headers, absolutely everything's taken care of. So you move this into servers and it all of sudden becomes a killer app that's gonna kill everything else that's out there?

Re:proxy == censorship?

[Monkeman]

What about a proxy that automatically corrects spelling! It would be brilliant!

Re:Smart but not needed

[Reaperducer]

Yes, those are sterotypes. But that doesn't make them untrue.

They are very real situations for thousands of children. The number of people in the world living in homes made of straw and mud with no electricity, running water, or even floors might surprise you.

$100 laptops is a good idea for developing regions.
But there are also regions where a $100 laptop is beyond the realm of possibility.

Re:Smart but not needed

[eyeye]

The number of people in the world living in homes made of straw and mud with no electricity, running water, or even floors

Why dont they just sell their levitation technology to the west, they'd be rich!

Actually, good government

[Colin Smith]

It's a misconception that the developing and third worlds are unable to grow their own food and feed themselves. They can, and they don't even need genetically modified crops to do it.

What they need is well run, stable governments. Take a look at Zimbabwe. Used to be fairly stable and able to feed itself. Not anymore, expect to see and hear of famine and death from that region in the near future.

It's a similar story throughout Africa. Corruption, poor government, poor planning all mean that any problems such as drought are massively exaggerated and kill millions.

Of course, import tariffs on food, created by developed countries in order to protect their domestic agriculture don't help even a little bit.

Re:Smart but not needed

[crazyphilman]

Well, there IS something useful about such a concept. You have to consider the social effects of such a development:

1. Networks optimized for the third world give them the equivalent of a telephone system, only better. Once everyone can communicate with everyone, cooperation becomes a lot easier.

2. The cheap laptops give them the ability to communicate not only with each other, but with the rest of the world. They get to see how everyone else lives, and compare it with how they live. And they get to see that things CAN be different, which makes them want to make things different.

3. Once they have the ability to communicate with everyone, and they have the desire to improve their surroundings, access to information from the rest of the world might give them ideas about how to actually change things. They might look for ways to improve irrigation, for example. Or ways to prevent their houses from having a leaky roof. Or even things as simple as learning how to bake bricks from clay, to make better houses.

4. The more they know, and the more they change, the more they will WANT to know and change. And things will accelerate significantly. I don't expect them to accept changes to their culture, rather, I expect them to want to learn operational things, skills and trades, engineering. That sort of thing. They'll pick and choose, and get what they want.

Access to knowledge is an extremely liberating, empowering thing. It's like the old saw, "dont give a man a fish, teach him how to fish".

The third world doesn't need to be taken care of by the first world; it needs to learn how to take care of itself, without the first world's help.

Then it doesn't NEED the first world. See?

Re:Hardware is only part of the solution

[crazyphilman]

I think a third world wiki would probably lean very heavily towards "how-to" subjects that would directly benefit people living in the various areas affected. For example, articles on how to use clay to bake bricks for use in building, articles on the use of adobe, articles on roof-building and plumbing methods, how to build water-delivery systems out of locally available materials... These are the subjects I would put in.

Everything from ancient Roman engineering concepts (the arch, the aqueduct, locating and exploiting water sources, etc) to modern home-building techniques could go in. Operational stuff, you know?

It would also serve as a "good-faith" thing; don't try to mess with their culture, respectfully avoid the subject entirely, just give them what they need to really improve their lives. That's what they want to know, you know; "How do I build a house whose roof doesn't leak in monsoon season?" "How do I build a better boat, with more capacity for fish and is easier to pilot?" Stuff like that.

I'd LOVE to see a resource like that made available. I think it'd help people a whole lot more than dropping bags of food from airplanes. :)

Re:Hardware is only part of the solution

[Reaperducer]

You're absolutely right -- it's all about content.
This is one of the areas that shortwave radio has addressed for years. The U.S. government beams regular programming into impoverished areas in their native languages teaching them how to improve crop yields, build safer sturdier homes from available materials, build new types of tools, and provide basic education to children.

Most /.ers have never heard of it because shortwave is so 20th Century, but it's an effective method for blanketing a region, even an entire continent, with useful content. Many developing regions don't have AM or FM stations -- they use shortwave because it goes farther on less power.

Many /.ers also haven't heard of it because the programs are transmitted in languages other than English.

Oh, and many /.ers haven't heard of it because we're supposed to go along with the dominant /. worldview that America is full of fat evil people who want to strip mine the Third World.

Almost the same thing

[MTO_B.]

Till recently I used almost the same thing, provided by an ISP in Spain.
The way it worked was like this:
- The ISP sends you html pages compressed.
- The ISP sends you *.jpg files compressed to your own choice of compression ratio.
- The ISP sends you *.gif files compressed without animations.

The html pages, are sent compressed, you localy have a program that acts as a proxy or something like that, then it decompresses it. The program also lets you set image compression ratio and all that.

It even compresses pictures inside flash files!

The result?
Much quicker browsing with less browsing.
If at any time you want to see the original picture you can just quickly change settings.

You can view a presentation of it here:
http://www.wanadoo.es/acelerador/micrositio .html
(in Spanish)

"Free" food floods their marketplace...

[WoTG]

More than making them dependent on "free" food, one of the biggest problems with sending food (or money that is earmarked specifically for food*) is that it distorts the market prices in those areas. In other words, the local farmers can not compete with "free" and they are forced to shut their farms and move on to other ways to make a living. Given the relatively underdeveloped economies, this is a real problem because there aren't that many other ways to earn a living. Over the long term, this hurts their economies greatly.

Note that disasters are a different situation entirely.

* it's a common practice in Canada, and probably most other developed countries, for national (government) level donations of cash to come with stipulations that the donation must be used to buy Canadian (or [insert donating country name here]) goods. It makes everyone feel good about helping other countries without "costing" quite as much.

Why not Lynx = wrong question

[eweaver]

Because, it's not about text-mode browsing. It's about low-bandwidth. Loband lets you see images if you have to (and recompresses them for you). The issue isn't having crappy hardware, it's having a flaky 12kbps satellite internet connection and having to use banking software full of javascript, imagemaps, and other accessibility-destroying oddities.

Re:Smart but not needed

[say]

I think you have a pretty naive image of the world. You seem to believe that if poor people only knew how good it is to be rich, they will start making changes to become rich? So, what do you suppose they are doing right now? Do you think the problem of starvation is due to lack of motivation for agriculture?

I'm sorry for bashing you this hard, but I often meet people in western countries who seem to think that the developing world could become rich if they only knew or only tried harder. I believe there are quite a few structural hurdles as well. Western companies' interest in keeping a low-pay workforce for coffee, shoes, cocoa etc. is one of those hurdles. Tax barriers in developed regions is another hurdle. And lacking economic strength makes it in itself hard to develop a stronger economy (ironically), because it makes it extremely hard to defend your currency, interest rate and your companies from hostile foreign takeovers.

Re:Smart but not needed

[synthespian]

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?

Although I empathize with your troubles teaching spoiled kids, I have to say I found the technologies mentioned in this /. post pretty amazing, and found them to be in sharp contrast with what is being done in my own country.
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.