The Cyberpony Express

The Cyberpony Express started a project proposal that came out of the first meeting years ago where the Permaculture Mutual Aid Network was originally established. One of the communities asked if it would be possible to create our own off-grid alternative to the internet in order to enable the land projects to communicate via a separate off-grid network in order to send messages between the communities without relying on or using the public internet infrastructure. The Cyberpony Express was born.

cyberpony express

This project is essentially the hardware which hosts the Apocalypse Library as well as several other things. The basic premise is pretty simple. It enables local distribution of the library’s contents as well as facilitating multimodal connectivity to local and remote users and repositories without requiring any connection to the internet.

 

The Hardware:

The Software:

Internet-in-a-box is a simple software kit which enables you to create your own off-grid internet that basically shares everything on the hard drive as though it was the internet. Here are some examples of things that are included as complete, functional offline copies:

In addition to all of these resources, a community has already emerged of people who are collecting enormous hoards of documents, books, documentaries and more which are all enormously valuable for people living in off-grid communities.

What We’re Adding:

We are working to create and add our own original content to this universe of valuable data. All of the guest researchers are working to contribute new knowledge and information to the library.

We are also building a new communications layer of hardware and software to facilitate long-distance communication between off-grid communities using LoRa radio.

Another addition is software-defined radio. This is a simple cheap dongle that empowers the system to listen to anything happening on the radio, including weather reports, emergency reports, and even allowing the system to locate and identify radio sources such as the location of a pet or a stranger entering the mesh area. SDR can even locate and identify aircraft flying overhead and receive satellite imaging transmissions as the region is photographed daily by passing satellites.

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days, but what happens if the OpenAI website goes down, or the infrastructure to connect you to it? This is why we are including large language models in the Cyberpony Express. These models will run locally to enable simple off-grid chat interfaces and even help facilitate research within the local copy of the library.

How You Can Help

The best way to help is by donating what you can via the gofundme!

If you want to contribute original research or join us for a special project, please check out the guest researcher page to submit an application.

Other Examples

There are many examples of similar projects all over the world. Here is a list to get you started as you look around.

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