PirateBox 1.0 Released

by
Anonymous Coward
in code on (#3SC)
story imagePirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. Think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box. PirateBox is designed to be private and secure. No logins are required and no user data is logged. Users remain anonymous - the system is purposely not connected to the Internet in order to subvert tracking and preserve user privacy. PirateBox is designed for openwrt. There are versions for android raspberry pi and linux.
Reply 3 comments

Useful (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-08-10 02:48 (#2SE)

This would be good for when travelling, camping, concerts. Kudos to the PirateBox crew!

Re: Useful (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-10 21:02 (#2SJ)

Looks like it would be good for low-latency home networking, too. Why not keep those hops local? Sneaker net rules.

Cheap and fun (Score: 3, Interesting)

by stove@pipedot.org on 2014-08-10 23:59 (#2SM)

After the 1.0 release I bought one of these: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n, as it looked like the cheapest way to get a working piratebox - under $30 delivered, plus a 32gb thumbdrive I had lying around to use as storage. I've had it running for probably about a month.

So a few observations:
  • Setup instructions are very simple and had me up and running in about 20 minutes.
  • Zero maintenance required. Once it's set up, it'll chug along until it runs out of storage space.
  • The one I chose runs off 5v microusb, so you can hook it up to any 5v source (including those external mobile phone battery packs)
  • The web interface is a bit clunky at times, most obviously when it comes to uploading and organising files. Apparently you can get webDAV working on them, but I haven't tried yet.
It's pretty good fun for the price, and since it's all open source you can mod it till your heart's content.