[yellowapple]

One thing those netbooks didn't/don't do that OLPC aimed to do was mesh networking. Internet connectivity is still... spotty, at best, in a lot of countries - even in some of the so-called "developed" ones.

I watched a video¹ today about the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, and while the video focuses on the rebels' use of 3D-printed firearms, there was a smaller point about how a lot of Rohingya villages ended up entirely caught off-guard during the most recent wave of genocidal purging because news would travel too slow from village to village; as the Junta forces would descend upon one village, there was no effective way for that village to warn its neighbors.

First thing that popped into my head: "ain't this something OLPC and other mesh network attempts would've been able to address?"

A lot of mesh networking experiments, including that of OLPC, seem to have failed - but some have shown some recent success. Maybe it's time to have another go at deploying mesh networks to the masses at scale, learning from those failures and successes?

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¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0oXupwf2D4

[nytesky]

Aren’t AirTags a mesh network of sorts? Or do the tags just piggy back on nearest device.

[yellowapple]

My understanding is that they just piggyback on the nearest Bluetooth-enabled Apple device, which then pings Apple's servers; non-Apple-specific equivalents like Tile work the same way (just with different host-device-level software and different centralized servers).

That said, Bluetooth mesh networks are absolutely a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_mesh_networking), and it'd be neat if low-power devices could capitalize on that.