Leading on from this thread talking about China as a target use case for Outernet (particularly because of their manafacturing ability to bring down the cost of lanterns)
It seems like the single most useful thing to broadcast might be TOR?
Obviously www.torproject.org & all mirrors will be blocked in repressive regimes.
The Orbot for Android is only 10.6Mb, so that should be doable once file chunking is sorted?
Another good one would be Signal a messaging app that encrypts all your messages. If it was accessible to people in repressive regimes it could be a game changer.
Again 10Mb.
And finally Serval 2.1Mb to create peer to peer messaging when the internet is off due to a disaster or government intervention.
The Outernet l-band system is 1-way. It can be used to push data, but there isn’t a satellite return channel unless a user has another satellite Internet service. While you could deliver applications for messaging, it will require some 2-way infrastructure for use.
Sure I’m thinking this would be useful for people living in China (1.3bn), Iran (77m), Egypt (82m), Saudi Arabia(28m) etc etc. Where the internet is available but heavily censored and monitored.
www.torproject.org is obviously blocked in those places, so they have few means to obtain the software.
Hello, I am a Outernet user in southern China.
I have set up my receiver kit last weekend and found there wasn’t any file received. The signal was strong enough and my receiver got 1000+ packets.
Is there anything wrong? Or I should put my receiver on my roof for more hours?
I’m not sure what the problem might be. It could be worth looking at We Moved! when connected to your device and post the version numbers shown. It may be you have an older version of the software?
Would the latest Tor browser be useful content for China? What content would you most like to see broadcast? Would this news be good for you? http://bowenpress.com/
I don’t think Tor browser is very useful for Chinese netizens since we can not connect to the onion directory servers directly. Instead we use P2P network such as Zeronet, Freenet to share informations and overcome the censorship.
The VPNs and Proxies still work well in China, but it won’t last very long. The Tor will be much useful when government lock the country again. If your guys broadcast the Tor Bridge lists periodically, it will help digging a hole on the wall.
Tor and Tails (https://tails.boum.org/) would be great for areas with censorship issues. The file size is quite large for Tails ISO… but perhaps could be sent at a lower priority if there is left over bandwidth.