BlackoutOS is a desktop library of practical guides for emergencies. Each guide is written for it, every claim is checked against the source it came from, and all of it works with no internet at all.
You create an account first, so your key and devices are kept in one place. No payment is taken.
What BlackoutOS is for: getting through an emergency, and keeping what people know if the internet disappears. These are the rules it keeps.
After you activate and download, nothing needs a network: no account, no check-ins, no server. Reading, and later searching, happen on your computer.
Every guide names who said it, where, when it was retrieved and under what licence. Numbers and doses are quoted exactly, never reworded.
What you buy never expires and never phones home. When your update period ends you keep everything you have; you only stop getting new versions.
One key works on a primary computer and an emergency one. A dead laptop's slot can be released here on the website.
The app sends no usage data. Your searches and bookmarks stay on your computer.
Our own guides are protected. Open content such as Wikipedia stays open: you may copy it, as its licence intends.
Many offline libraries are mostly copied websites: hundreds of gigabytes, a frozen date, and an AI that asks you to check the sources yourself. BlackoutOS starts from the questions people actually ask in the first 72 hours and answers them.
| A typical offline library | BlackoutOS | |
|---|---|---|
| Content | Third-party dumps, sold by size | Short guides written for the situation, built on official sources, plus open knowledge as a reference |
| Trust | No way to see who said what | Source, date, version and licence beside every guide |
| AI answers | "Always check sources manually" | Answers only from installed guides, with citations, and "not found" when they say nothing (planned) |
| Updates | A dataset frozen on one date | Each module has versions; updates are downloads, and old versions keep working |
| Delivery | A box that has to be built and shipped | An app and downloadable modules; delivery on an SSD later |
| Languages | English | English first, then Spanish and Ukrainian |
This is the one page in the proof of concept: Survival › Water › Making water safe › Boiling. In the app it is encrypted on disk and opens only on an activated computer. Here it is public, so you can see what a guide looks like.
Create an account and get a key. In this PoC it is free.
For macOS and Windows; Linux later.
Online, or with a small file carried on a phone or USB stick if the computer has no internet.
Each collection is a module, checked against our signature before it installs.
For good. Nothing to renew, nothing to sync.
More on how it works, and what copy protection can and cannot do →