Team: Bahareh Saboktakin, Khulood Alawadi, Qifan Zhao, Yi-fan Hsieh
The Internet is both a promise and a threat. How might we resist a government-imposed Internet shutdown?
Fallback is an alternative platform providing access to real-time news during times of Internet shutdown. With Fallback, users have the insurance of accessing daily news even if there is an Internet shutdown.
Fallback is triggered by powerful forecasting algorithms providing a backup right when it is needed. We constantly monitor the probability of Internet shutdowns worldwide. Upon a high-risk prediction, we scrape headlines and articles from news platforms, encrypt it, and send it over satellite to the Portal devices.
Portal receives data over satellite, decrypts it, formats it into news articles, and provides its own WiFi access point where no Internet is required. Users connect to the Portal device using any Wi-Fi enabled device via Fallback hotspot. Upon connection, our UI pops up and users can access the news maintaining the experience of browsing online news. The transmission will continue until the Internet shutdown is over or the risk levels decrease.
Fallback has been prototyped end-to-end. From prediction, scraping online news, transmission over radio to hosting a news platform and making it available via wifi hotspot.
Get in touch to talk about design and engineering behind it!
Follow Fallback Project on Instagram @thefallbackproject