One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year.
You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy.
Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business - which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the officially priced $2 card.
But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.
I used to live on Tehran, Iran. All restaurants, stores and businesses must be closed after 12:00 AM in Tehran.
So one night me and a friend were driving around the town in midnight and we were quite hungry.
So we found a nice guy selling tea in the winter and there were other people around. We asked them if we can find food anywhere in town in this hour.
One of them gave us an address and told us we should just go there and wait in the car.
We didn't really believe, but we gave it a shot.
I kid you not. At 4:00 AM in the morning, in an alley, we stopped and a sketchy man came over and handed us a menu!
It was fast food. Pizza, burgers and chicken strips. It wasn't really good.
It was a few years ago. Nowadays there are always a few people hanging around and they sometimes open the doors and let people in.
Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer.
See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?"
The guy looked horrified and quickly blurted out "No, no, only beer! You can't get that stuff!" before moving along.
It just struck me as funny that they would dodgily sell you illegal beer but that they would be righteously indignant at weed. "That, sir, is where I draw the line of illegality!"
I've been to Barcelona as well, the beer sellers are terrible human beings. They will hover around you like flies, then one of them will put a beer down next to you in the sand. When you refuse it, he'll pick up the beer and say "Look, it has sand all over it, it's ruined now. Pay me for it." They are of South Asian like myself, and I'm sure many Indian travelers make the mistake of talking to them when the best thing to do is completely ignore them.
The next night I was ambushed by four of them in the subway, they wanted to put their number in my phone and started getting really aggressive. I smacked the shit out of two of them before a bystander intervened. If I had handed my phone to them I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten it back.
Haha! This happens at most places to tourists, some auto drivers, road side sellers in India try to rip off the tourists. It happened to me in Times Square when i first came to NYC. A guy was selling music CD's and when i was passing through him, he stopped me, handed over the CD, kinda forced me to buy which i didn't.
So across the world, it's very common the tourists get ripped off.
Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem, because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth.
Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in more touristy and "Americanized" places.
Smoking weed in Spain is legal since a couple of decades. Selling a small bag is illegal, but this isn't really enforced as it's hard to prove that the bag was for selling and not for self consuming.
Usually police will turn a blind eye both for selling pot and selling beer, unless anything goes wrong and somebody complains.
All those guys, but all are selling drugs. Not only weed, in BCN it is easy to get weed semi-legally thanks to those clubs. Beer guys are in other-class-of-drugs business and if they did not sell to you it is because they did not trust in you. even police knows that but it is a controlled business. The government can't prevent drugs, instead they just observe them and keep them under control.
When were you in Barcelona? It's easier to find weed than cigarettes and that's not even including the social smoking clubs popping up all over the city.
Are you sure it wasn't a scam to rip you off? I'm born and raised in Tehran and numerous times I had gone out for dinner passed mid-night, and I simply walked into a restaurant, ordered the food, and ate (assuming the kitchen was still open).
Specially because people in Tehran prefer to have late supper compared to North Americans, it was a lot easier to find food options late at night than say in Toronto where past mid-night the only option is fast-foods.
I doubt anything will happen to you as long as you keep things discreet.
When I was in Cuba, there were constantly people coming up to me wanting to sell cocaine/lobsters/girls/cigars. It was quite evident that you weren't going to get caught.
Some of them are quite desperate, and they're happy to do business. Interestingly, they told me they really wanted shirts. So basically be happy to swap a shirt for a box of cigars. Also branded clothes like sports jerseys seemed to be something they wanted to barter for.
I was in Cuba this January, and I didn't get the feel that this was illegal. We bought the cards on a busy street in Havanna with no problems at all. Also, we paid 2 CUC and were told the official price was 1 CUC.
I did the same last October. It's definitely illegal, only ETECSA kiosks are allowed to sell the cards. But resellers are ubiquitous and it seems that the authorities mostly turn a blind eye.
From what I saw a few times, it seemed to be pretty similar to a drug dealer standing on a street corner in a bad part of town in the US. Careful, but still kind of obvious. A couple times they made "pssst" noises to me as they showed me a card. I have no actual idea how much authorities targeted the dealings, besides seeing the level of inconspicuousness of the sales.
And in the wifi hotspots, there'll be a separate network and you pay a dude 1CUC to type in the password (access for 1hr). It's obviously not legit but it works and people get online this way.
Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind:
1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete"
2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old
3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata
Thus: what the fuck!? It'd take me weeks to assemble this kind of thing, especially given point #1 above. Sure, a lot of this stuff could be farmed out to scrapers/sickbeard/whatever, but this level of curation plus the quick turnaround plus the distribution (how many portable 1TB drives are circulating?!) plus the download speed requirements... Who is doing this, and how? There's clearly some really great high speed connections in Cuba. Are these guys backed (or at least tolerated) by the state or something?
Sounds like a warez share - there's a curation group, and a large ftp server (with lots of people having upload credentials)
You give people a credit for uploading something (anything recent, has to not exist currently on the share), in order to get access to download anything from the ftp.
People want to get free stuff, so they contribute some small thing - like an antivirus update that you can download for free from the vendor websites, in exchange you get that camm'ed version of The Martian or whatever you were looking for.
The drive folks make a copy once a week from the main repository, and duplicates it onto portable hard drives.
It doesn't mean one person or even one group of people are doing the uploading and curation, just that one group is copying it down and distributing it (even then it might be a lot of different people doing each individual step).
Old school warez clubs function pretty much like I described. The better clubs enforce some kind of ratio - like for every meg you download, you need to contribute 500k (for 1:2) or 1 meg (for 1:1 ratio) - that really gets good stuff onto the sharing sites and people compete for uploading the best videos/movies/music/warez/games, etc - for community recognition.
Granted, I've been out of the "warez scene" for going on 20 years but the "better clubs" didn't have ratios. For the "public" or your average person that was turned on to a site by their buddy or something, yeah. But once you were really "in", you didn't have to do anything. You just took what you wanted -- even better if you can turn around and upload it elsewhere.
I started out running BBS systems but, like everyone, eventually moved to the Internet where I ran several "semi-private" dedicated servers with lots of storage on "fast" (at the time) connections. Most of them were fully open to those in certain groups but there were a couple that were pretty easy to get an account on, albeit with a ratio requirement. A lot of those accounts tended to get banned pretty quickly, however, as the users would upload miscellaneous crap just so that they could download and nobody wanted to really "monitor" or "evaluate" the stuff in /incoming from the new users.
"... at 851GB ... 11Mbps 24 hours a day" I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB, those guy store all that information in a lot of common hard drives and distribute the package just coping from a portable hard drive to another one, that's the "cloud" for Cubans :(
this article should be named as 'The Cuban CDN and the Cuban cloud'
>I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB
Right, thanks! I made the erroneous assumption that the bulk of the data changed weekly (thanks to that "... 851GB ... at 11Mbps 24 hours a day" thing). Keeping the AV updates/some text-heavy-craigslist-alike current is an entirely different proposition.
Here I thought this was a revolutionary high-throughput sneakernet content accretion system possibly operating under the government/telcos collective nose, but as others point out it's probably more like the warez FTPs of the 90s. Here's hoping wider pipes, both technologically and ideologically, come to Cuba soon.
It talks about the mechanics, largely it looks like someone in Miami is consistently collecting stuff until they get close to 1TB or a week has passed, then that 1TB is flown out to Havana and it's copied and passed around after that.
Some guys in Miami with a T-1 and who then carry a drive into Cuba. There are almost as many flights between Miami and Havana as between Miami and New York. The only restriction was that you have to be Cuban to get on the plane in Miami--there are but few exceptions.
It's been so long since I even heard anyone mention T-1, I had to look up the speed, 1.54 mbps. I remember in the early days of dialup internet access with 14.4k when this was seen as a very highly coveted connection to have access to.
It's not like the whole 1TB is being refreshed weekly. File structure tree looks like a spanish language warez site. If I had to guess 85%+ of the disk space is taken up by video.
When you watch the YouTube video linked in the article it seems like lot of the content is gathered in the USA and then brought over on a drive / stick.
There are also many people involved in gathering the content.
One of the comments in the article explained it: there not actually 1TB of new stuff but only about 200G each week. They also have multiple people download it and then combine it before it gets distributed.
One of the major things we should watch for is a Miami to Cuba submarine cable. The Miami area (and the Terremark/Verizon "NAP of the Americas" IX point/datacenter) is already the landing station for a ton of submarine cables going to latin america.
At present there are challenges at OSI layer 1 getting data into/out of Cuba, not including any government regulation/interference, just due to the lack of pipes. There's a fiber cable to Venezuela, but VZ is not very well connected internationally and there's significant challenges with any US company trying to acquire a circuit on that path (do you want to build a POP in Caracas, with what's going on there right now?)
Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations.
Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?
It will speed Internet access for Cuban users (regular people, government, visitors, etc.). As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable), the international links will be contended -- Cuba isn't rich, and there isn't a huge amount of lit connectivity in place between Cuba and Miami yet.
Seems safe to assume that most Cuban users will be accessing US or EU websites. Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users. (The latency between Havana and Miami isn't much, true.)
At some point, assuming more liberalization, there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors, including expat Cubans.
It's at worst a no-op for Cubans, but probably provides some benefit, increasing over time. If a private company is going to pay for it, I don't see what's wrong with it.
(There's already a Miami POP; I'm not sure what Cuban routing is like but I suspect they have a lot of non-US terminating transit for political reasons, which will probably change with time...)
As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it. It's also a feel-good thing for employees and the world -- the Cuban situation has been sad, even if you agree with the embargo policy, and doing something to improve the lives of Cubans is awesome. Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, so it will make increasing commercial sense. But you'd have to ask eastdakota/jgrahamc why they want to do it.
Cloudflare being in Cuba or not will have zero impact on this... unless Cloudflare is getting into the last-mile business (doubtful, but possible).
> As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable)
Inevitable, probably, but in 1 year's time - unlikely.
> Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users
This could be the only tangible benefit - except Cloudfare isn't a "nation level" cache, they're a glorified CDN with only some content being "opted-in" to using Cloudflare. So the actual benefit will be minimal (unless Cloudlfare decides to cache all inbound content for the entire nation... which seems unlikely).
> there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors
Cloudflare doesn't need to be in Cuba for this to happen. Frankly, Cloudflare needs to _not_ be in Cuba for this to happen, otherwise it would be no different than a regular hosted server in Cuba (for in-country traffic that is).
> Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy,
Cuba never left the world economy -- only the American economy.
Cloudflare isn't an ISP, so Cloudflare putting a PoP in Cuba literally provides zero benefits to Cuba (and it's heavily questionable whether it would provide any benefits to Cloudflare either).
Sure, some money will be exchanged, but it's very likely the data center Cloudflare would colo at would be foreign owned and operated (since Cuba obviously lacks this infrastructure and expertise to build such an infrastructure, let alone maintain one).
> As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it
That seems to be the only logical conclusion.
Look, I'm a paying customer and love Cloudflare's service. It made a huge difference for my company's website. But it seems the comment that started this wasn't thoroughly thought through.
Why are you setting such a high bar for "benefit" from CloudFlare?
For web sites that Cloudflare does cache its assets, the latency of downloading those assets will certainly improve. Similarly, being able to establish an https connection on Cuban soil will be a win for customers given they are likely going to be hitting web servers thousands of miles away.
Cuba has 1/4 of the population of the Caribbean in one relatively small location.
Look at their network map [1] and you see they already cover major locations in South America, and has good coverage of the US, but Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean is a blan spot.
Looking at their worldwide location, my guess is that they pick their POPs largely based on whether they see a potential for cutting latency for their customers based on a mix of population size and the local transit situation.
In the US, it's relatively sparse. Probably because you don't gain much by increasing the number, as you can solve most latency issues within the US by buying more expensive transit from established backbone providers or peering directly with major ISPs at a relatively low number of peering points.
So lots of POPs == either high population or shitty latency over the regular network coupled with poor peering opportunities or other ways of cutting latency without putting actual servers in a rack. Or both.
Cuba is interesting - as someone has pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the plane traffic between the US and Cuba is quite substantial despite the travel limitations, because of the large Cuban exile community.
If Cuba liberalises network connections, chances are that despite the small current number of Cuban internet users, it would explode quickly, and that there would be a lot of US based businesses that might look to Cloudflare if Cloudflare could cut their latency.
Given the size of the Cuban population, it wouldn't take a large proportion of the population to make it the best contender for a first POP in the Caribbean.
My guess is that Cloudflare is looking to add a lot more POPs over the next few years anyway (EDIT: Supported by finding an announced from when they set up a POP in Kuala Lumpur: In September 2015 that was their 45th POP; today their map shows 83; if they add POPs at the same rate or faster until 2017, they'll be past running out of locations more suitable than a liberalised Cuba), and if you look at the empty spots on the map, and mark those areas with high population density and poor peering situation, I'd not at all be surprised if Cuba start looking quite good in the "if just they fix these couple of issues" (from the point of view of putting a POP in - I'm not trying to trivialise their problems) category.
Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba).
It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.
It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone.
In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.
> And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone
Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow.
From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc).
They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits.
So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none.
Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.
Most Cubans don't have internet access today because $2 for wifi access is a lot of money, and there are still restrictions, and you either buy it illegally or show your id at a government office and face the risk that someone has decided to pay attention to you.
But the success of things like in this article shows that there are a lot of desire for access, which means that once internet connectivity is liberalised and prices tumble, there is likely to be a large demand quite quickly. Yet from a population that is not likely to be able to pay for large upgrades to external links very quickly.
That's an ideal scenario for Cloudflare, in that you'll have demand from Spanish-language businesses outside Cuba to reach a market that once the floodgates opens is likely to grow very rapidly, especially due to the sheer amount of people in the US with connections to the island. If you can broker reduced latency, it will be a big competitive factor for Spanish language businesses that wants to target Cuba but doesn't want to put servers locally.
So don't worry. I doubt Cloudflare is hoping to burn your money to make a political statement (though who knows, it might very well pay for itself in PR), but rather is looking at it in terms of actual business potential.
Also, I don't know what the minimum size of a Cloudflare pop is. Unless they've said something (I haven't looked), for what we know the minimum they need is to be able to rent a 1U slot for a server in a suitably well connected data centre for smaller locations.
I've worked at places where "setting up a POP" meant exactly that, and I've worked at places that insisted on setting up $2 million monstrosities in custom built racks no matter how small the local market was. Unsurprisingly, the latter company went bankrupt.
I haven't used Cloudflare, but aren't you paying to make your website globally available? Good access from Cuba is one small part of that. Maybe not the part you care about, but other people might - that's what happens with bundling.
> aren't you paying to make your website globally available?
No, any website (unless blocked by a nation-state) is by default accessible globally.
Yes, Cloudflare's CDN offers increased performance for global visitors, but with so few people online in Cuba, there's very little sense in fronting the cost of building all this infrastructure just to have a Cloudflare PoP there. There's many other nations much larger and better connected that CloudFlare does not have a PoP in, so why pick Cuba?
Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster. Getting online in the first place might be a bigger concern for starters...
You pay a CDN to get better performance (globally) than you would get by default. It's up to the provider to decide what "better performance" means and build more infrastructure to support that.
As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries to spend it on.
> As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved
This was a public discussion, and therefore I have every right to "chime in".
As a paying customer, I have even more of a right to "chime in", as Cloudflare decisions may impact my business.
Putting a PoP in Cuba because "bleeding hearts from decades of terrible government policy" isn't a sound business decision. Nobody has offered any better explanation of advantages other than the novelty, and frankly, if that's the core reason... that's a bad decision and a blatant waste of money.
> Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster.
A big concern for Cubans could very well have, is having webpages load several seconds faster (I don't think we're talking miliseconds). They are paying per minute.
We issue SSL certificates for all plans, including our Free tier, and terminate HTTPS traffic all over the world. You don't need a Business plan for that.
Sure they would, given a significant percentage of cubans that might have internet access at home or on their phones in the future, US-based spanish language media/websites are good potential paying customers for cloudflare.
It will be fascinating to see how fast Cuba in a post embargo-lift landscape can build up ip infrastructure, its cool that by year's end 2017 its probably good enough for a Cloudflare PoP.
(though imagine being uniquely placed to the USA along with other factors is a huge plus for building that infra).
I wonder what the future of El Paquete Semanal will be once Cuba inevitably gets less ridiculously priced and more available internet access. As it stands, there could be a large percentage of users who don't even have NICs, as all you'd need for El Paquete Semanal is a USB port.
I'm also interested in whether it's more of a loan/library service where this org has hundreds or thousands of hard drives that get loaned out once a week and swapped out for new content or if someone has to physically sit and wait for the subscribers to copy data over. The logistics of this are so fascinating, I just want more!
El Paquete Semanal is not at all unlike the combination of sneakernet and shareware CDs that I enjoyed in semi-rural western Canada, during the 80s and early 90s. We were crippled by long-distance fees, and very few FidoNet BBS' were available; IIRC, there was one in my local calling area, and it was hideously expensive.
The local community bookstore started by selling shareware discs, in 5.25 and 3.5; and when it came available, in CDs. They were professionally packaged, and they restocked every Tuesday. The demand for content was high enough that restocking so frequently didn't mean throwing out old content. If 1tb USB drives were available then we would have used those; but they weren't, and the most economical way to deliver content was through CDs and discs. Since burners were rare, and because disc and floppy medium aren't zero-cost, it made sense for the local bookstore to sell the packaged content.
With the advent of high-speed internet to our homes, we were a test area for the deployment of cable internet in around '96, the bookstore stopped selling shareware altogether.
Thanks for your input, this is a really interesting parallel. Although, you didn't have to worry about censorship and a repressive government in Canada, you're probably right that it will disappear.
Do you remember what kinds of software was available at the bookstore? Was it only media like games/simulations/etc or did they have business/productivity software and operating systems?
There was all manner of shareware; applications and games alike. There was also your regular boxed software, where the likes of Microsoft Works and Turbo C were available for purchase at obscene prices.
I picked up Linux at that same book store, it came on a CD with a book from SAMS publishing called "Using Linux". It was Slackware, iirc, using a 1.x kernel of some kind.
For me it was people bringing boxes full of 5.25" floppies and multiple external floppy drives...
The fun thing, though was the postal swapping, which developed into an art-form involving defrauding the postal service (wax over the stamps etc. to let you scrape off the post mark and reuse the stamp), and dropping the envelope entirely (affixing address labels and stamps straight onto the floppies and just tape a floppy cover in place - some didn't even use a proper cover, but just taped a small cover over the hole in the floppy to prevent dust).
All in the interest in reducing turnaround times and cost, given that top swappers would turn around a ridiculous number of floppies on a daily basis just to keep their network intact - slow down, and be unable to provide stuff that was new enough, and people would drop you in favour of contacts who provided newer stuff (which by the late 80's increasingly meant the best connected people expected "zero day" releases, and then went off into insanity where people expected cracks of games before they were released - some games were released in cracked form before they were even finished, with levels missing etc.)
This was more widespread in Europe than the US, where strict national telecoms regulation in most countries until the EU started deregulating it, coupled with per-minute billing for local calls, meant modem usage remained low until well into the 90's.
What if instead of a USB drive, it was a truck with wifi that would swing by the front of your house and rsync some files to your computer? To sign up, you'd give your address and wifi password.
Same I asked to some Cubans few years ago. Apparently it's illegal to start a hotspot there. You can end up in jail. in fact if you scan networks you wont find any.
There is some local wired intranets between neighbours though
Presumably this would be in areas where downloading over the internet is difficult/prohibitive, like in Cuba. Just connect to the truck's wifi, not the internet at large.
That actually makes a lot of sense. There's not a particularly good reason for OEMs to make specifically Cuban machines without Ethernet ports or WiFi adapters.
I used to live in Iran when I was a child and we had the equivalent of this but for VHS tapes. Once a week, a man with a large suitcase would come by our house. He would set his suitcase on the table, open it up and show us his collection of American and Europeans (and very illegal) movies.
My mom would pick 5-6 and return the tapes we borrowed from the week before. I was very young back then but I remember it vividly. I'd always beg my mom to pick at least one cartoon or a kids movie.
In Jafar Panahi's excellent film Taxi - a faux-documentary about a taxi driver's day in Tehran, where the driver is played by the director himself - you can see a bootleg video peddler take a ride to a client's place. He even defends his actions to the director (who he recognizes) as promoting free speech.
> For 2 CUC a week Cubans have access to a huge repository of media while turning a blind eye to copyright.
I find this a very strange thing to say. Why would you even bother to write that? It's not as though they could choose to import this stuff legally for the past many decades, or export any of their own works (the whole reason they would have any respect for some mutual copyright scheme, protecting their exports...) That's not even considering the crappy infrastructure, low income, and probably other issues I'm sure I'm overlooking.
Anywhere that's been sanctioned or embargoed for a long time has an insanely high level of piracy, check Iran for another example.
Reminds me of my college days. I studied at a college in India that was located in the mountains (in Sikkim). While there was decent Internet for all academic work, access for fun stuff was very limited. So our solution was to download as much stuff (games, movies, series, books, etc.) as we could during vacations at home, bring them back and share them on a organically grown LAN. The downloads were sometimes pre-planned: one person downloads this and the other person downloads that.
The take is that people always find a way to access stuff from the Internet.
Back when internet was really slow here in Spain I used to send CD's and DVD's filled with music, comics, films,etc to an internet friend I had from Greece(can't remember now how we met, maybe soulseek?), and he'd send me back his own curation of contents. This article reminded me a bit of those times. Too bad we are not in contact, we could have a laugh about it :)
I was really impressed by what they achieved, given that they have little internet access. He mentioned that the largest network was the one linking health-related institutions and that many doctors had internet at home (even if at slow speeds).
This brings back memories to the Twilight CD-ROMs [1] we had in the Netherlands in the late nineties that came out every month and had all the latest (cracked) games and applications on it.
Oh man, that's some nostalgia. I grew up without internet access, but every once in a while a visitor would bring a bunch of computer magazines (Computer!Totaal was my favorite) that usually came with CD-ROMs full of stuff.
In fact, my first experience with porn was because of one of these CD's. One day I found a hidden folder that wasn't accessible through the (godawful) interface, and it was filled with high-res porn images and a few low-res GIFs.
This reminds of the LAN we had in college. We used to use the software DC++ and then students shared the files that they had downloaded. You could access almost any file at 100MBPS.Someone was sure to download the latest episode of what you wanted to watch. If someone did not, then you went on the internet. Sometimes it was fast to download the file via LAN, than to transfer a file from pen drive to the computer.
Purdue? Purdue still has a strong community based of DC++. People have servers sharing 50+ terabytes of data, with designated release managers and bots to auto download new tv shows, etc.
I am from India, my college had decent internet speed but slower Internet speeds(around 1MBPs when it was fast), hence the use of DC++. 100MBPS on lan was pretty fun. This was in 2011.
Its interesting to know that Purdue has strong DC++ community, also auto bots is something that I did not know about in college :) From what I have heard from my US friends is that the rules are much more stringent in US about file sharing and colleges enforce it much more strongly.
DCgate/Dtella, created by Purdue students, merged DC and IRC (not sure how chat is handled by the newer Dtella).
Searches were broadcast over IRC. I set up a bot to scrape the searches and display them in real time using a Comet (pre-WebSocket era!) powered website. From the IP that requested the search, you could determine the dormitory they were in. One IP kept searching for stuff like "clown porn". It was wonderfully entertaining.
I forget what the monthly bandwidth quota for non-campus traffic was. Perhaps 50 or 100 GB? Traffic to other campus nodes was "free" and almost guaranteed to speed along at 100 Mbps.
I implemented the Tiger hash (used by DC clients) in MMX/SSE2 assembly because it begs for 64-bit integer types. SSE was able to provide a ~2x speedup over regular code, even though I just used SSE for 64-bit types and didn't do any real SIMD. Of course, simply building the DC client for x86_64 provided an even greater speedup but I was stuck with a 32-bit machine at the time. :)
We had this going at UBC as well. Since it was all internal LAN traffic, it didn't count against the 7 GB / day upload / download quota which was really tight if you like HD content.
There was one at Cambridge as well. Never bothering using it, but I could see the appeal:
* My college limited external traffic to 8GB per 10 day period (this was after we negotiated an increase in 2011). After that, it was a £0.25/GB charge plus throttling (<128Kbps after 15GB usage)
* Having an IP address with the reverse DNS entry of <studentID>.<college>.cam.ac.uk made P2P for TV/movies etc. a poor idea (services like MegaUpload were popular though, as was the ad-hoc sharing of files locally)
11MBps for 8$ a month... My ISP is ripping me off!
In all seriousness, this is amazing. Once again it proves that nobody should underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of harddrives speeding down the highway... or in this case Cubans exchanging Harddrives.
We in the western world don't think about smaller limitations. In most countries, all private radio communications are banned. In India, during even first part of last decade, wifi frequencies are illegal for the people to use. Those days, MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte made a special trip to India to explain to the people who matter, that don't stupidly implement radio ban on WiFi usage.
Reminds me of the time, when CDs became mainstream and suddendly many of the classic games fit on one of such CDs. There was one with Warcraft, CnC, Doom, Quake, Monkey Island, One Must Fall, T.I.M., etc. pp.
I'm disappointed by this article and I'm disliking the "noble savage"[1] tone of the rest of the comments. Yes, you may like it for it's quaint feel but I wanted the author to go into details of how the internet actually functions in Cuba, what sort of restrictions are in place and whats happening to move away from this regressive system. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage
We never had something nearly as elaborate as this but in Fiji, having anything more than dial up was considered a luxury. Portable Hard Drives weren't as common and USB sticks didn't store as much as they do now. It was all about burning CDs and handing them to friends at school/work. I think this might be the reason why most bus drivers in Fiji have the same damn songs playing ad nauseam.
I wonder how much of that data is downloaded in digital form from somewhere and how much is digitized specifically for this collection (e.g. movies recorded in a cinema, magazines scanned from print, etc.).
edit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just seemed like it was removed because of some delay.
Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on their blog I'll repost what I posted here
The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet.
Im sorry for overreacting, it seemed like it was deleted because the comment wasn't appearing even with the "awaiting for moderation" tag so it seemed like it was removed. Things relating to Cuba are personal to me.
so, when you did have access to the internet, did the cloudflare captchas drive you as crazy as they do me ? how was the cpm (capthas per minute) ?
seriously : it seems cloudflare drives about 90% of the sites I visit, judging from the "I'm not a robot" questions and captchas I get. congrats on the market share.
You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy.
Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business - which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the officially priced $2 card.
But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.