PirateBox

» see piratebox.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

PirateBox was a wireless network with nothing behind it. You flashed OpenWrt onto a TP-Link travel router and plugged in a USB stick, and the box started broadcasting an open access point. Anyone who joined it and opened a browser got a page where they could upload files, download whatever other people had left, and type into a message board. There was no password and no account to make. There was also no internet: the box was not connected to anything, which was the entire design.

David Darts built the first one in 2011 while teaching at NYU's Steinhardt School, and put the design out under the Free Art License so anyone could copy it. The hardware list grew as cheap computers did, moving from the TP-Link MR3020 onto the Raspberry Pi and eventually onto a WiFi SD card reader small enough to lose. Matthias Strubel took over as lead developer in January 2012 and carried the project for the rest of its life.

People used it for the reasons you would expect and a few you might not. Teachers loaded one with course material and handed a class a network that could not wander off to anything else. CryptoParties used them. So did people in places where the regular internet was watched, since a box with no uplink produces no traffic for anyone to inspect. The last release, version 1.1.4, shipped on 27 February 2018 as a collection of small fixes gathered over the preceding year.

~ the dossier ~

~ what killed it ~

Two things went wrong at once, and neither had anything to do with the project. Router manufacturers started shipping firmware you could not replace, which removed the cheap hardware the whole thing depended on. At the same time browsers decided that plain HTTP was a problem to be warned about and that anything typed into the address bar was probably a search query. A device whose entire interface was an unencrypted page at a made-up local hostname was on the wrong side of both decisions.

There was no way to fix it from inside the project. A certificate for a hostname that only exists inside one unconnected router is not something a certificate authority will issue, and getting users past a browser's security warning to reach a file-sharing page is a losing argument. The closing announcement on 17 November 2019 put it simply, pointing at locked firmware and at browsers forcing HTTPS. The forum went read-only the same day and conversation moved to a subreddit.

I knew what this was and never built one. By 2011 I was a working engineer with a fast connection at home and no particular need to create a wifi network that went nowhere. PirateBox belonged to art schools and hacker camps and festival fields, and those are rooms I was not in. If anything I have more use for one now than I did then.

~ the site that never switched off ~

The announcement included a schedule. "The website, downloads and everything else will continue running in 2020, but will be shut off at the end of 2020." Matthias signed it.

That did not happen. The DokuWiki at piratebox.cc is still answering in October 2026, six years past the date in its own goodbye note. The installation guides are still there, and the November 2019 announcement still sits at the top of the front page where it was posted. Somebody is still paying for the hosting. The skull with the wifi signal coming off it is still the first thing on the page.

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