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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."
Not bad bandwidth, but the lag time can be a bitch.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I see that your memory stick is as big as mine.
-Aegis Runestone-
Great example of the sneakernet in action. Quick RIAA, ban shoes! :-)
This is really smart. Maybe the college kids here in the US could learn a thing or two from this. Why provoke the beast when nobody has to know about your trading?
(I'm not advocating copyright infringement, just pointing out how silly attacks on internet users are)
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Who cares, I'm going to go home and look inside all of my old guitars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers I think this is better and more subtle if they really want the Internet.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pre-revolutionary automobile loaded with thumb drives!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
or did you just get a new batch of porn?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society with perfect free healthcare that the rest of the world should aspire to emulate!? ( see movies by fat slobs who don't know what they're talking about )
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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
Because there are no capitalist counter-revolutionaries in Cuba of course.
What always amuses me is that people decry the reactionary left-wing government of Cuba without seeing it in the wider context of the history of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th century, during which the US made a point of launching vicious attacks on every progressive left-wing government in the hemisphere by organising strikes, spreading propaganda, sponsoring coups and terrorists, and occasionally direct military force. The repression of the Cuban regime is a result of a Darwinian process that has weeded out every left-wing government in the region that didn't shoot or imprison anyone and everyone who even might be on the CIA payroll.
Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them - but thanks to the actions of America there is literally no way their social programmes could've been implemented if they were not prepared to run the country as a dictatorship. Western democracies such as Britain have reacted in a similar way when faced with extreme outside threats.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
We should donate our old memory sticks to them, I've got a 128mb mp3 player which is worthless to westerners but could be of use to people in the third world to dissemenate information.
are you kidding, with 55% packet loss, and 6165731.1 ms lag over 3 miles... i think the little thumb drive method is way easier. not to mention getting carrier pigeons to cross a couple hundred miles of ocean doesn't work very well either. plus carrier pigeons are really bandwidth restricted, they can at most carry .5 ounces of microfilm which then requires a microfilm reader... thumb drives just work in any usb enabled pc, even ones running linux, and you can get a whole month of blog sites, interesting news etc all in one package with a thumb drive. if they're relatives have the cash they can even send feature length films on thumb drives (i've seen 8 GB modules, in divx/xvid format that's a lot of movie)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
And a choice of presidential candidates just one behind the US as well.
Jeez, I finally get it! And here I thought the whole strategy of destroying a country through decades of economic sanctions based on political ideology two generations out of date was one of the great disasters of US foreign policy. But it's actually a clever strategy to turn a whole nation into a think tank and foster innovation the old fashioned way: by creating necessity! It's so simple!
A-Bomb
The real problem I had with Moore's citing of Cuba is that we have no idea how good their official statistics are. Also, if anyone is getting shafted by their medical system, was there any real chance of Moore -- or any outsider, for that matter -- finding out about it?
Dog is my co-pilot.
Do those life expectancy figures include people dying from acute lead poisoning?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
You can't take the sky from me...
1) they are harder to hide(bigger)
2) that's 100$ in the US, not how much it is in Cuba
About 16 years ago, in a time of floppy disks, 486s and joysticks, I also was a part of such a network. Media such as the anarchist cookbook and all kinds of software were passed around by hand through packs of floppy disks from one person to another, spreading through everyone.
Mind you, that took place in a western european country, a free country with freedom of expression as best as the world could muster. Yet, that network, which TFA tries to label as a sign of subversive actions against a government went ahead anyway. How could that be?
The thing is, that has absolutely nothing to do with dissent or trying to overthrow any government. People form data sharing networks because they want to share data. With the internet we belong to multiple P2P networks. Before that we had FTPs. Before that we had BBS. If there is no electronic network available then that doesn't stop anyone. Instead of a computer network, people networks are formed. Nowadays, instead of floppy disks or even CD-RWs we have USB mass storage devices such as flash drives.
So quite simply the article is nothing more than yet another piece of anti-Cuba propaganda. Just because there are people in Cuba sharing media around does that mean that they do it with subversive intentions in mind? If you fire up your FTP client does it mean that you are also trying to overthrow your country's government? What about your USB drive? And what about SD cards? What a rebellion.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Memory stick: generic term for portable flash media, usually USB drives
Memory Stick: name for Sony's flash media format
The capitalization is important
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Totally false. They don't count a child as "born" in Cuba until it has lived for a week. Since a significant portion of infants die during that time, it should not be a surprise their statistics indicate a lower infant mortality rate.
And all they've given up is their inalienable rights as human beings. Yay!
the cuban government is clearly more authoritarian than the us government, on most every measure, according to most any observer (try the great neocon fortresses of human rights watch and amnesty international), by a large order of magnitude
but then you have some people such as yourself, due to hating the usa's tactics in fighting cuba, or in thinking the idea to defeat cuba is not to fight it, or with a laundry list of cold war and colonial era grievances... that it all somehow means that the point here is to prosecute the usa, rather than the clearly worse government: cuba
how does this convoluted kind of thinking present itself? on the subject matter of the evils cuba does, we should... drum roll please... prosecute the usa. the clear enemy of cuba!
(smacks forehead)
how does this work in some people's minds? that the usa gets prosecuted for what its bitter enemies do?
various internet ideologues: fine. you win. the usa sucks. fuck the usa. rah rah rah! the usa is evil! blah blah blah. whatever! i don't care: be my guest, hate the usa, you go on with your bad selves
but in your effort to hate and prosecute the usa, how do you get anywhere in that passion of yours by forgiving regimes which, right now, in the PRESENT TIME, are doing clearly worse than the usa, ON THE SUBJECT MATTER YOU SAY IS IMPORTANT, such as freedom of expression?
i can never understand this kind of thinking
again, someone please explain to me: how on the subject matter of the bad things the usa's bitter enemies do, does the usa gets all the hate?
it just blows my mind how that is possible in someone's mind. you present them with evidence of usa's enemies doing truly vile things, and their reply is to hate the usa
it blows my mind how this kind of thinking works
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Micheal Moore only spoke about their health care system, not the other social problems.
Mind you, with decent free health care, they have something fundamentally good that Americans don't, and the way things are going, never will have.
How many people in the US can't change jobs because of losing health insurance if they do?
I have known a few myself, doesn't seem either fair or pleasant.
Insert Monty Python and the Holy Grail coconut-laden swallow jokes HERE.
Don't copy that floppy.
SRSLY.
in soviet cuba they slashdot YOU!
no?
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 bullshit urban legend about the "low" infant mortality rate in the US has got to stop.
The reason the infant "mortality" rate in the US is low is because the US is one of the very few countries that tries to save the life of severely premature babies and babies with severe birth defects. Not surprisingly, quite a lot of these sad cases die, up to 80% in the case of severely premature babies. By contrast, most other countries don't even try to save those infants, and simply record them as late miscarriages or stillbirths. Since they're never "born" they can't "die," so they don't count in infant mortality statistics. Hey presto! A lower infant mortality rate than the US! Congratulatory headlines in any random self-hating US media outlet...
Here's a related fun fact: university hospitals often have higher death rates than community hospitals for grave disease, e.g. heart attacks, strokes. Is this because they're less competent? Some strange corruption where the richer and more prestigious hospital is screwing up because of its callous disregard for humanity, i.e. the kind of "logic" used to criticize the US infant mortality rate? Nope. It's just because the most serious cases prefer to go to university hospitals, or get transferred there from community hospitals, and because university hospitals often admit people for experimental therapies that usually don't work, whereas less sophisticated hospitals just send folks to hospice or home to die.
Whenever you compare statistics, it really needs to be apples to apples, and when the statistic is so politically-charged as a quality of life versus type of government measurement, you really need to ask some hard and detailed questions about the methodology. It's amazingly easy to lie with statistics.
..so would a hawk or eagle in the mix qualify as a BITM (Bird In The Middle) attack, or DoP (Denial of Pigeon) attack?
I'm impressed. I would expect them to be handing off 8" floppies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Dude, those bits are medicinal.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
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!
With store and forward for email and Usenet.
Though we used to feed a couple of sites with 10Mb tapes...
If all you have is analog phones, or even tapes, you can still run email and get usenet.
Deleted
Wikipedia entry on disparities between way infant mortality is measured.
US News & World Report article on same (doesn't cite sources, though news magazines almost never do).
Slate article on impact of premature births on infant mortality rate.
Boston Globe article on rate of premature births in U.S.
It would appear there is something to the claim that better medical care can skew infant mortality rate upwards.
Think of it as an avian spoofed RESET packet.
I'm sure Comcast is evaluating it even as we speak...
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"I put it to you that the Cuban government is no worse than the United States government, under similar circumstances."
"This is not to condone the Cuban dictatorship (and I am calling it such directly seeing as you seem to have missed me calling it so indirectly in my original post...) - it is merely to explain its actions and its nature."
"In the same way that sharing an environment with dangerous predators has made Hippos extremely aggressive animals, sharing the Western Hemisphere with the U.S. made revolutionary movements there extremely aggressive."
tell me where i am wrong in my understanding of your words: you are saying that the cuban government behaves the way it does because of the usa
W.T.F!?
this utterly blows my mind!
here is my bizarre, neocon, libertarian (is that what you called me?! how did you base that weird judgment!?), imperialist, neocolonial, mercenary capitalist, zionist, orphan children raping opinion:
1. criticize cuba for cuba doing bad things
2. don't criticize the usa for cuba doing bad things
that's it. that's the beginning of my thought. that's the end of my thought. that's my strange, exotic way of thinking
please forgive me if this such an alien concept to you!
(smacks forehead)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
NO ONE can provide any references. You don't understand. The government will imprison/execute anyone trying to establish legitimate statistics regarding the health care system in Cuba. Not only that, the culture of repression will insure that no doctor will give you the honest truth unless you have a boat ready to take him to the US.
I have known many who have fled that land of oppression, and have known a few doctors. It is from them I receive my information. Absent any transparency of the Cuba government, anecdotal evidence is to me far more reliable than propaganda. If you want to believe the shit shoveled to you by the Castro Monarchy, feel free.
Also, if you honestly believe that 0.3% of the population dies every year because of unnecessary surgery - nothing I could possibly quote would be acceptable for you. That is nearly 1/3 of all deaths every year. Total insanity.
"Like all the US citizens! Yay!"
Bush is a fucking idiot and a traitor. Rise up and overthrow that madman.
That would get me found and shot in Cuba, yet strangely, not here in the US.
Funny how the reality of the situation escapes people like you in your rush to spew snide remarks all over the place.
russia tinkers in british affairs. china tinkers in american affairs. cuba tinkers in angolan affairs
etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum
most every country that exists and has ever existed and will ever exist has tinkered in the affairs of other countries
and you want to do two things:
1. conveniently forget all tinkering by any country except american tinkering
2. leverage that american tinkering into direct accountability by the usa for whatever bullshit someone else does
example: britian, france, russia, china, and the usa all had arms deals with iraq. but we'll forget all of that and just think about the usa. next, saddam hussein gassed kurds. so obviously, the usa is responsible for that
this is your superior understanding of the world?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When those "common carriers" are begging for retroactive immunity from handing our communications to bad actors like the Bush Administration, I'd say that "when" is "now".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
Why do individuals who disagree with Michael Moore's movies always resort to calling him "fat"? I don't see how his being overweight has any relevance for his views on guns, corporate crime, or health care.
How about you address the issue he points out: that too many people in the U.S. have too little access to health care.
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 ?
basicly what you are saying is build a token ring network where some poor guy walks around carring the token.. might want to watch out.. i wouldn't be supprised if IBM has a patent for that
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
And all they've given up is their inalienable rights as human beings. Yay!
Er... where do I find these "inalienable rights" for all human beings? Last I checked, the common interpretation was that these only apply to US citizens, if we had to extend them to everyone else our current international (and increasingly domestic) policies would dissolve.
To all of our leaders, since FDR (perhaps before), the only "inalienable right" that the US has stood for is opening your markets to our corporations, and do what we say. Or at least this is the right that we've fought every modern war over.
That said, Cuba has some problems, and should have free elections. I do think, sans the embargo, that they are better off than under the US shill Batista, though. If the people freely decided to be communist, then fine, no business of ours. Appearently communism isn't enough, since we are now trading with Vietnam and China, leaving only two "verboten" states, Cuba and North Korea. Cuba doesn't compare to N. Korea in any way besides economic systems.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Actually, it is more like a high tech version of the old Russian Samizdat during the Soviet era.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I'm not defending the United States when I say they have good intentions. There have been many atrocities committed with good intentions. I think our foreign policy towards Cuba is guided by, perhaps, one part good intentions (we want them to be a democracy, as long as they make all the "right" decisions), two parts pride (we'd like to forget the whole humiliating bay of pigs thing), two parts revenge (for nationalizing the property of US corporations), and three parts stubbornness (if we stop our embargo, it's an admission that we were wrong all along).
Cuba, of course, is at least as responsible for their own government as the United States is for perpetuating things. But, we in the United States can't change Cuba directly (nor can we change the past), we can only change our own foreign policy towards Cuba. As for the causality, my understanding of Cuban history isn't very good, so I'll defer to the other reply to your post, which is written by someone with (perhaps) more understanding than I.
I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the countries we don't currently get along with (and generally label "evil", perhaps not incorrectly), are countries that we've interfered with in self-serving ways in the past. (It's funny you mention Iran...) I think we ought to accept our share of the blame for that. Not more than our share, but not less either.