PirateBox 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.
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.