$7 USB Stick Aims To Bring Thousands of Poor People Online 201
dryriver sends this BBC report:
"The USB flash drive is one of the most simple, everyday pieces of technology that many people take for granted. Now it's being eyed as a possible solution to bridging the digital divide, by two colourful entrepreneurs behind the start-up Keepod. Nissan Bahar and Franky Imbesi aim to combat the lack of access to computers by providing what amounts to an operating-system-on-a-stick. In six weeks, their idea managed to raise more than $40,000 (£23,750) on fundraising site Indiegogo, providing the cash to begin a campaign to offer low-cost computing to the two-thirds of the globe's population that currently has little or no access. The test bed for the project is the slums of Nairobi in Kenya. The typical income for the half a million people in the city's Mathare district is about $2 (£1.20) a day. Very few people here use a computer or have access to the net. But Mr Bahar and Mr Imbesi want to change that with their Keepod USB stick. It will allow old, discarded and potentially non-functional PCs to be revived, while allowing each user to have ownership of their own 'personal computer' experience — with their chosen desktop layout, programs and data — at a fraction of the cost of providing a unique laptop, tablet or other machine to each person.'"
How is Burying Africa Under PCs Going to Help? (Score:5, Insightful)
In Africa I see waves of ethnic turmoil coupled with basic infrastructure problems, all played by the governments to keep a few powerful folks in power.
Are we trying to turn Africa into our next call center and need to get the kids up to speed with computers? I don't think that is going to happen until something resembling stability (i.e. taking care of food, clothing and shelter for entire years without fear of a machete attack) takes hold.
Re:How is Burying Africa Under PCs Going to Help? (Score:4, Insightful)
something is better than nothing
And that something should be access to reliable electricity,clean water, and most importantly physical safety(seeing as how even teh 3rd richest state in Africa-Nigeria-can't even guarantee safety for its citizens as roughly 300 kidnapped girls can tell you) before it is access to a personal computer. Africa needs infrastructure, not internet.
Ssshhhhh (Score:3, Insightful)
You're going to ruin the liberal feel good circle jerk. Yeah someones discarded PII-266 box will boot Linux and get Africa online. Now they just have to fix the other issues like drought, drug trade, poaching, blood diamonds, genocide....
Re:Cloud vs stick (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not clear to me how a bootable thumb drive is going to resurrect a non-functional computer. Neither is it clear what this will accomplish for all those people too poor to own one at all - although in the article it says these guys did provide five old laptops to a school where they were testing this.
OS on a stick is not novel (Score:5, Insightful)
We have other OS distributions that that live just fine on SD cards or sticks, already. If you want to bring computing to slums as a useful resource, the big problems are probably really:
1) actual hardware, shared or not, to run whatever open source OS you pick;
2) electricity to run the hardware and shelter for the hardware;
3) people to train those who have never used computers before, may have other literacy issues besides, and quite possibly speak dialects you will have difficulty getting localization for; and
4) affordable/free network access if these people want to use the internet.
I'll bet these are not the only issues, but if you don't address these, I suspect your money and time will be mostly wasted.
pointless? (Score:5, Insightful)
any computer??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some older systems can't boot usb and other need bios updates to do it.
also what about drivers for all of there hardware?
Re:How is Burying Africa Under PCs Going to Help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cloud vs stick (Score:4, Insightful)
No? What causes a computer to be written off as 'non-functional?'
The first thing that comes to mind is a failed hard drive. Plug in a system on a stick and it's functional again.
Very often there is actually *nothing* physically wrong with the hard drive, it's just a corrupted/infected filesystem, but the typical computer user doesnt know the difference and junks it anyway. And system on a stick fixes that too.
"Neither is it clear what this will accomplish for all those people too poor to own one at all"
It will allow them either a) pick up a 'dead' computer either free or a a very low (scrap metal value) price and use it or b) borrow/rent computer time but still be able to boot their own system on the temporary hardware, maintaining some semblance at least of their privacy.
They only raised shit money (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously.
LIVE USB stick.
What a great new idea!
Free OS! What a great new idea.
Promises of being able to use an old PC. What a great new idea!
Fact is running OS from USB stick is slow as fuck and if you already have a PC why not install it on the HDD in said PC? Now they said personal and fine. Are there a requirement for that? Maybe they could store their files on the USB stick instead? both is ok.
How do they get actual Internet connection?
What about electricity?
If they have limited electricity then something more modern would likely be better.
Also how do they take care of old electronic goods in Africa? Environmental safe recycling? ..
If we really want to help Africa... (Score:4, Insightful)
If we in the west really want to help Africa, there are a few things we can do right here that will make a difference. Eliminate agricultural subsidies, stop buying African diamonds, and stop using cheap African-sourced conflict minerals. Right now food prices are so artificially low that African farmers can't afford to grow food for their own countries. It's quite literally cheaper to buy food from abroad than to grow it locally. And the US is happy to give Africa food. In exchange for favors. Food quite literally has become a weapon and it's certainly part of what keeps Africa in a cycle of poverty and abuse. Meanwhile China has been buying up farm land in China to raise food that will be exported from Africa without really benefiting Africans themselves, except for a few that directly benefit.
Conflict minerals, including diamonds, also concentrate a tremendous amount of African wealth in the hands of just a very few who are quite happy to use this wealth to buy whole governments. Most times they *are* the governments. But hey, as long as we can get cheap goods made in China with cheap African resources, life is good, right?
But I guess my idea to not buy diamonds and kill the farm bill has about as much merit as handing out usb sticks after all. I doubt western policies that hurt Africa are going to change any time soon. Good luck to these folk. I'm personally quite skeptical.
Re:Ssshhhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah that old Linux box really filters water or prints money. How the hell do you even power it when you have no electricity? Whatever you send there will be seized by whoever is running the country this month and sold for profit.
Re:What security reasons? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't in the interest of an internet cafe, which charges for time logged in, to allow you to bypass their log-in environment (typically some form of cafe management software).
Additionally, using any USB stick that successfully bypassed the management software in China would get the user arrested.
The security reasons gp mentioned aren't related to the user, they are related to 'the man'.
Re:Dead hard drive or EOL Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the answer is even simpler. A personal usb stick lets you use shared computers, without internet, without having to learn which apps reside on each pc. Linux distros already do that, so I'd customize one with some applications that are useful for sneakernet and backups.
Unfortunately we don't have the equivalent of read only floppies, which coupled with a write protection on the BIOS and on peripherals' firmware would make the PC very difficult to pwn.
Because even write protected sd cards can be written to, as you easily discover running some card readers under linux.