Someone has put everything they need in a survival flash drive.

The massive arrival of the Internet and connected devices have implemented a half-truth in our daily lives: that there will always be connectivity. And it doesn’t have to be. I discovered it the hard way on April 28, 2025, the day of the blackout: Without cash, something as common as eating out and paying with a card became an impossible mission and involuntary fasting.

With information, more of the same: the usual Wikipedia or Google Maps are of little use without the Internet (in fact, download the original is always a good idea). Someone has wondered what would be left on your computer when the Internet goes down and to address that uncomfortable but legitimate question, they have launched a “survival kit” that fits on a USB flash drive. You insert it into your PC, it boots directly from there and it comes with everything. Yes, also an AI assistant.

The project. shelters is an open source project created by Spanish Spanish dev Javier Prieto. What it essentially offers is a lightweight variant of Ubuntu preconfigured with a selection of tools designed to work completely offline. The heart of the project is an installation script: you prepare a USB with the base system, you connect it to the Internet once to run that script and you no longer need the Internet.

Why is it important. The refugiOS proposal solves a real problem that is often overlooked: the vulnerability of depending on the Internet and its infrastructure. In the event of a serious emergency, such as my blackout, but also natural disasters or conflicts, what the servers offer will be inaccessible. And it will be the time when you need them most. Having that data physically stored without the need for external and foreign infrastructure can make a difference.

Emergencies aside, the project evidently also satisfies from a privacy point of view. Everything you consult in refugiOS stays on your machine. There are no servers that record your activity, conversations or routes or share them with the AI. In a context where data and its analysis are increasingly the order of the day, having tools that work without filtering data to the outside provide value beyond being useful in the event of a possible apocalypse. And it offers one more extra: total portability.

What does shelter bring?. The available content is grouped into five blocks:

• Offline library and encyclopedias: Wikipedia, WikiMed and WikiHow thanks to Kiwix.
• Maps and GPS navigation with offline search and routes using Organic Maps.
• Artificial intelligence. An AI assistant run locally available in three power levels depending on the RAM of your computer: from the basic Phi-4-mini for any PC with 4 GB of RAM to Qwen3-14B that requires 16GB to Qwen3-8B, which requires 8GB.
• Encrypted file vault (LUKS standard) to protect sensitive files.
• General tools like LibreOffice, VLC or Syncthing.

There are three AI models depending on the hardware of your computer. GitHub

Context. There are a few digital resilience projects, including Kiwix, which has been distributing Wikipedia offline to areas without internet for years; but what refugiOS is about combining several of these options into an all-in-one, ready-to-use system, which is also accessible to someone who doesn’t have too much technical knowledge.

And it also comes at the best time. On the one hand, because there has been a real boom in small and efficient language models (something that a couple of years ago was unthinkable) and on the other, because of the current situation: conflicts, the flooding of AI to each and every one of the Internet sectors or the shift of the American technological monopoly of the West towards a more invasive policy. refugiOS takes advantage of that technological window and opportunity to add a layer of comprehensive utility.

In detail. The project has deliberately conservative design decisions in that it ensures that the system boots and runs smoothly on basic and/or veteran computers (with 4GB of RAM), being easy to maintain and distribute. In fact, the documentation explains how to copy it to pass it on to your people.

Of course, its status is still quite incipient: it is functional, but with room for improvement in the interface, documentation and language coverage. However, its roadmap is ambitious, with thousands of public domain books through Project Gutenberg or support for shortwave radio receivers.

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Cover | Immo Wegmann and Marcel Eberle