I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.
I had him as a CS teacher at SDSU for a class. I had no idea he was a sci-fi author when I started the class. Bought his books and was hooked.
He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not.
Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.
I emailed him out of the blue and asked him to write more stories about Pham Nuwen. He replied and was really nice and we corresponded over a couple of emails.
Thanks for situating this in history! It's easy for people to look at the project and be like "why no RPi?" without understanding that when LibraryBox started, Raspberry Pi's didn't have onboard wifi, and the travel routers we chose to support were SIGNIFICANTLY less expensive as well. We're in a very different hardware world now.
FWIW: one of the other main issues with the project as it neared its end was the move to mandatory SSL connections. By its nature, LibraryBox has to be able to work entirely offline, and trying to sort out how to manage SSL connections in that situation without also causing potential security issues in sensitive use situations...well, we tried and couldn't come up with a reasonable, usable solution to those overlapping issues.
100%. This is something we are trying to solve with Butter Box (https://likebutter.app/box/) but there aren't great answers.
I've considered shipping a unique-to-device certificate for e.g. box123.comolamantequilla.com with each box. It doesn't solve the evil maid scenario of someone copying it, but it at least provides TLS. Realistically, our users are offline and mostly not going to verify that comolamantequilla is owned by the organization they're intending to trust.
At one point there was a sort of "starter" content set that was made up of CC or public domain works that was distributed by the community as a torrent. But the project itself was always about the hardware/infrastructure aspect, not the content itself.
Hello all! I'm the creator and director of the LibraryBox project. Sadly, the project is mostly ceased for a handful of reasons. As noted here, Matthias stopped production of Piratebox code, which was the underlying basis for LibraryBox.
When the FCC passed the rule a few years back that 5Ghz chipsets had to be firmware locked, the hardware that we mostly relied on dried up. Rather than producing 2.4-only devices or leaving the 2.4 unlocked, manufacturers like TP-Link just firmware locked everything. This killed the MR3040 and MR3020, and without those as primary hardware targets, development stalled.
LibraryBox never pivoted to the RPi, for a few reasons...the biggest being that for most of our development, the RPi didn't have onboard wifi, and driver support for USB wifi dongles was a horrorshow. The other big driver was that LibraryBox always focused on the lowest possible price point devices, and the RPi was never the cheapest, so it was never our focus.
The project is "dead", in that there's no ongoing development (unless someone out there wants to jump into the GitHub). But I'm keeping it up because there are still pockets of the hardware out there in the world that people might want to convert.
That's a shame, and although I never set up a LibraryBox, got some very good ideas from the concept. Thanks for the opportunity and inspiration though!
I also ran a PirateBox for a while and recently set up a "sharebox" based on an Onion Omega 2P which worked well. The biggest obstacles I found were that people were generally unwilling to connect to an unsecure wireless access point, even when the SSID was more "benign" than "PirateBox". Also, the struggle to deal with the increasing de-popularisation of HTTP in favour of HTTPS. Android phones also tended to not want to stay connected to devices that "weren't connected to the Internet".
The irony is that with the way the online world's going, the need for LibraryBox and similar devices is going to be greater than ever.
