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The Cuban Memory Stick Underground
circletimessquare writes "The NyTimes has an aticle describing how students and others in Cuba have taken to passing around media on memory sticks, as this is the only way they can get around state-controlled media. Also driving this phenomenon is the fact that there are so few places to get on the Internet. In Old Havana there is only one Internet cafe; getting online there for an hour costs 1/3 of the average Cuban's monthly wages. Local entrepreneurs get the memory sticks from European friends, since they are scarce to find in Cuba through normal channels, and expensive."
Then the US should drop their trade sanctions, and station ships off the Cuban coast, or possibly blimps flying over Cuba, with *huge* wireless network systems on. Basically, turn a ship into one giant floating wireless AP, with a satellite connection to the Internet. Then give all the people USB wireless adaptors.
They have first rate low tech preventative and pre/post natal health care. Which gives them a lower infant mortality rate than the US and a life expectancy just a bit lower that the US.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Do those life expectancy figures include people dying from acute lead poisoning?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Still, this brings up an interesting idea for a project: construct a network where multiple packets are carried in bursts on physically delivered storage media (such as a USB drive) where you can only retrieve those packets addressed to you when it arrives and not monitor the others. Obviously encryption would be required, but design it for reasonable packaging and retrieval from the thumb drive. Anyone could add packets to the media after retrieving their own. Basically, formalize a community sneakernet. Best if it can be made compatible with a private LAN of, say, an apartment building that has no direct connection to the Internet.
You have 26 days left to get the RFC in by April 1.
Not to say that I think it is entirely a joke. This could be useful when we discover we cannot trust the common carriers any more.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This used to be a standard exam question when I taught CS, only back then he was only armed with a floppy. As floppys got larger faster tha bandwidth increased (back then it was proabbly 2400bps dialup) the poor guy kept having to ride further and further.
Lets see - the file will take 8*4x10^9/256x10^3 (back in asynch dialup days that multiplier was 10, not 8) = 0.125x10^6 seconds. Lets suppose the bicyclist average 10 miles per 3600 seconds. So break even is 10*1.25x10^5 /3.6x10^2 ~ 4x10^3 (4000) miles.
For extra marks: How large a thumbdisk would a swimmer need to carry from Florida to Cuba so that the transfer rate would be faster than the entire bandwidth of the island? There are no extra marks for speculating where the swimmer would carry it.
Squirrel!
Why not just package an offline Wikipedia Reader onto some memory sticks, and let them loose. :)
(sorry for the cached link, but the original seems to have disappeared)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Do you really beleieve that?? I live i Sweden (2.76 deaths/1,000 live births according to some statistics) and I absolutely promise you we DO try to save our infants at every cost and not just record them as "miscarriages" and "stillbirths". The trend continues even after the first year. 8 children of 1000 in the US won't live to their 5th birhday, 3 in Sweden, this is one area where our obsessive "security above everything", "no visits from anyone else but the immediate family", then "always wear a helmet", "don't swim until 1 hour after eating", "use seatbelts" etc etc attitude actually has some effects. (Don't know if it's worth it, sometimes you want to live dangerously and cross the street without looking three times, but we do live longer lifes)
So which "most countries" are you referring to? In which countries don't the parents and doctors want to save the infants?
20 years ago Sweden had a child mortality rate of 6.9 but we have managed to get it down significantly since then. Advanced medical care actually actually have very little effect on child mortality, instead it's the _basic_ healtcare (for all, cause if you leave out 5% of the popuplation, the infant mortality may become 50/1000 there screwing up your statistics) which is most effective. That's why Cuba manage to compete with US on this statistic.
In summation: you're wrong, it's not an "urban legend" and it boggles the mind how you can beleive your country is the only one trying to keep your newborn alive.
(and low infant mortality = good. low means less dead since it's measured as dead/not dead 6 dead out of 1000 which Cuba and US have is actually quite "ok" compared with Angola (192) but maybe they're just trying to hard over there)
I wouldn't go so far as to say the US allowed social democrats to gain power in Western Europe - it is more a case that Western European democracies were older, stronger, and lest corrupt than the generally fledgling ones that the US crushed in Latin America. It would take a lot more to institute a coup d'etat in France than in Venezuela, and IMHO that is purely the reason the US has never tried it.
That said, the US has tried to use a lot of soft power over the years to drag Europe to the right. The Murdoch media in Britain, for example, was instrumental in keeping the Labour party out of power in the 1980s and also played a major roll in convincing the British public it was necessary to invade Iraq. 45 minutes my fucking arse.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Okay, I'm tired of waiting for someone else to post this. The steps taken to get around the censorship gives rise to the new slogan: "Cuba, putting the sneak back into sneakernet."
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
They have first rate low tech preventative and pre/post natal health care.
Well, I agree with the 'low tech' part. As for the rest, getting the nurses there to stop reusing hypodermic needles would be a good start. I was waiting at a clinic in Havana with my (Cuban) ex-girlfriend for a blood test and was amazed at the Cubans waiting their turn to get an injection from the same needle. At least they washed it in a tray of water between shots. Yeah, Cuba is the high tech health care capital of the world. I demanded that they do *not* use a shared needle for my girlfriend and they were willing to comply for the rich foreigner. It just costs a bit extra and most Cubans don't have the extra money to pay for the new needle. Also, I hope you aren't expecting a large selection of drugs or say, bandaids (only available at the biggest hospitals in Havana) or antibiotic ointment (haha, that's a good one). Also, outside of Havana there are rolling blackouts on a regular basis. Just hope you aren't getting some medical procedure when that happens. They do have basic antibiotics at least, but not much else. Vitamins are often prescribed by doctors there for all kinds of ailments. And even the largest hospitals seem to lack those machines that go "bing".
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Look ... we understand that you can only have a democratic "lunatic left" ideology if you believe cuba is perfect. Cubans risk their lives to get out of the country ... lots and lots of them do.
What more do you really need to know ?
I worked at a site that, for security reasons, had to be air gapped from the 'net. All the email was handled via tape. Worked fine as long as you didn't mind only getting new email twice a day.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Possibly replying to a troll (the mod-gods think so anyway), but here goes...
I last visited Cuba about 6 years ago, and took a laptop and a couple of large - for 2002 - thumbdrives. The Cuban customs official noticed them, casually asked how much capacity they had, then carried on about her business. Maybe customs would pay more attention now, but 6 years ago they didn't seem to care about laptops, USB drives, CD-ROMs (blank or full of data), cameras, books (including a critical biography of Karl Marx by a conservative biographer), or pretty much anything else I was bringing in.
...And before the oh-so-obvious remark that I was a tourist and wouldn't be able to pass my potentially subversive material to real Cubans - Cuban tourist resorts aren't golden prisons. I wandered around the town I was staying in (sorry, forgotten the name, somewhere on the North East), I wandered around Havana, I spoke to random people about random nonsense. I had ample opportunity to pass someone a USB drive. In hindsight, I should have done... though the 64MB I had back then would probably be ridiculed by even a Cuban these days...
This is where the serious fun begins.