The New York Times offered up a classic piece of long-form Sunday reportage with an article on how people around the world are creating “Internet in a suitcase” projects, in part funded by the U.S. State Department to detour repressive regimes.
The lead pic is this one with a Mac at the center from Keith Berkoben, a Masters’ student at MIT who has he has led the development of the Fabfi Wireless project and spearheaded the deployment of a city-scale user-extensible wireless mesh in Jalalabad, Afghanistan since 2009.
The caption:
“Students at a school near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, helped point a FabFi wireless mesh radio at a distant radio. With FabFi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed Internet connectivity.”
Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco freelance writer who heads up Cult of Mac Magazine, our weekly publication available on iTunes. You can find her on Twitter and Google+. If you’re doing something new, cool and Apple-related, email her.
6 responses to “Spotted Using a Mac: Students Create Stealth Internet in Afghanistan”
Are you sure that’s what it is? That’s its not just “write text on screen with a big font and have somebody look at it through binoculars from a long distance away”?
that’s a linksys wrt54g in the background..pretty much the best router the planet has ever seen.
i’m in afghanistan right now and i can tell you thats what it looks like…run down buildings, bamboo ladders, high walls with big yellow doors and a afghan flag flying…yup looks like afghanistan to me