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Cuba: US Using New Weapon Against Us -- Spam
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about accusations from Cuban officials about a spamming campaign against the country by the U.S.. "Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam. 'It's overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,' said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA. At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba's creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages. The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature. Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over about five hours."
This is pretty serious business. At a potential maximum of 140 octects/message, that's (just)Over 40 Megabytes delivered in the course of 5 hours.
Just think. To deliver an attack like that, the US government must have had some sort of time machine, with Ronald Reagan shouting "Now witness the destructive power of this fully armed and operational ARPANET!" before turning on, um, maybe a couple dozen modems at once.
If you read the article it's unlikely that it's a spammer. Apparently the USA has actively spammed Cuba in the past under the argument of 'fostering free speech'. We built and distributed programs that are illegal in Cuba. It would be similar to people from Iraqi coming over to the USA and physically forcing as many people as they could to wear headscarfs under the argument of improving our morals. They have no more right to force their values on us as we do to force our values on Cuba's population.
Our government confirms it had these programs. They were stopped due to funding cuts (some funding cuts actually work, yay!). This article isn't about the 300,000 text messages that are known to have been sent by USA back in 2009, but about Cuba's new claim that the USA has refunded and restarted it's spamming efforts. I really hope we're not wasting money on crap like this.
I work at an SMS aggregator. We are the fat pipe. We run at a peak capacity of 2000 messages per second per connection to an operator. Cuba has one operator (officially).
Operators are capable of handling more than we can send, but in that 5 hours we could have flooded their network with 36m messages. 300k is a drop in the bucket.
If we used multiple routes instead of direct to the operator, we could have run hundreds of millions in that same period.
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We had all kinds of crazy ideas for killing Castro. 10 Ways the CIA tried to kill Castro