FlashPatch: Spreading Software Updates over Flash Drives in Under-connected Regions

FlashPatch: Spreading Software Updates over Flash Drives in Under-connected Regions, Corrigan-Gibbs, H., & Chen, J. (2014, December). In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development, 1-10. ACM.

Computers in developing regions often lack the Internet connectivity and network bandwidth necessary to consistently download and apply software updates and security patches. This paper introduces FlashPatch, a system for distributing software updates to computers in such areas by having software updates “piggy-back” on the existing flow of flash drives in rural regions…We implemented a proof-of-concept FlashPatch prototype and evaluated it in a field trial in Ghana.

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