Slashdot Mirror
Young Cubans Set Up Mini-Internet
An anonymous reader writes: Internet connections remain illegal for Cuban households, but many of the country's citizens still want to tap into the power of networked information exchange. A group of tech-savvy young Cubans has set up a network comprising thousands of computers to serve as their own miniature version of the internet. They use chat rooms, play games, and connect to organize real-life activities. Cuban law enforcement seems willing to tolerate it (so far), but the network polices itself so as not to draw undue attention.
One of the engineers who helped build the network said, "We aren't anonymous because the country has to know that this type of network exists. They have to protect the country and they know that 9,000 users can be put to any purpose. We don't mess with anybody. All we want to do is play games, share healthy ideas. We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in Cuba ... We do the right thing and they let us keep at it."
One of the engineers who helped build the network said, "We aren't anonymous because the country has to know that this type of network exists. They have to protect the country and they know that 9,000 users can be put to any purpose. We don't mess with anybody. All we want to do is play games, share healthy ideas. We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in Cuba ... We do the right thing and they let us keep at it."
We don't mess with anybody. All we want to do is play games, share healthy ideas. We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in Cuba We do the right thing and they let us keep at it.
If you ever want to see how soul destroying communism is there it is. Might as well still have the country controlled by the Mafia, at least it would be more fun.
"We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in Cuba..."
Face it, Americans are too dumb to vote. They just vote based on party line, a single issue (often a pointless one overall like gay marriage or abortion) or even worse, as with the last two elections, based on skin color. And then you get voters who are totally misinformed (Obama isn't an American or conspiracy theorists) or relying on fallacies (For the children! Let's take away some more rights to potentially stop a pedophile when a much easier solution would be to actually parent your kids).
Let's give 99% of Americans a dumb internet where they can waste their meaningless lives on Twitter/Facebook/whatever other timewasting site, and only let the best and brightest worry about politics and vote on the future of the country. We could have actual forums where people debate laws and important issues without trolls or idiots joining in, and we could actually steer this country away from becoming a corporate police state and into a place that actually benefits its people.
AP Headline: "Cuban youth build secret computer network despite Wi-Fi ban "
More accurate? It has been said they do not wish to keep it secret...
:D
Beyond the fact that I was obviously referring to Slashdot calling it a "mini-internet", the article said no such thing. They said that they can't keep it secret. Not that they "do not wish" to keep it secret.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Not a flamebait question/troll even though it might seem so!
This article does indeed show how folk can be creative under a restrictive government: the Cuban authorities don't look like the victim when they are not allowing their own citizens access to the internet (anybody know what their justification is - I'd be interested to know the official reasoning).
But on the other side and in a more general sense, can somebody tell me why the USA still has an embargo against Cuba? (sensible answers only please). It's really perplexing for an outsider so reasonable answers would be welcomed. The USA doesn't have a problem with quite open trade and relations with other nominally communist states (e.g. China, Vietnam). It doesn't mind trading with other countries it was at war with 50 years ago. It doesn't mind trading with countries who had /still have nuclear missiles pointing at it. It doesn't mind embracing countries with poor human rights records.
Is it because of the proximity of Cuba, or some other reason? Really curious, feels like an odd hang over from a cold war that finished before many slashdotters were born...
cheers!
Compuserv, is that you?
I, for one, welcome our new (Cuban internet nerds) Overlords!
You mean like torture and murder of political dissidents, people being routinely thrown into prison for speech that is not only legal but won't have US law enforcement even raise an eyebrow and various other tyrannical sundries then yeah. They can't own a cell phone or computer without the state's permission, but hey... free healthcare people!
This just goes to show how pathetic a lot of leftists are. But but Cuba has some great, free healthcare. Yeah? Cuba's also politically and economically FUBAR to the nth degree compared to even most of Latin America. There's a reason Cubans are more likely to expatriate than people in, say, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic or Honduras to try to sneak into Cuba.
call it, broddernet!!!
Someone set up a LAN.
But no cigar.
I just set up a mini-internet between my phone and my laptop - where is my slashdot article?
When young Cuban's with these naive notions of a wide open free exchange of ideas get their first taste of a modern capitalized internet.
Launch the MPAA dogs and another blocked in Cuba, bomb them. How dare they ran a sharing network without paying copyright fees? Bloody communists!
Hide the cables. Never let anyone see your hardware. Hide. Hide. Hide.
It's always surprised me that there's only one internet; I've thought for a long time that eventually a second network (discounting special purpose networks like Internet2) would arise and networking technology would move faster for competition.
There would, of course, be downsides to such an event; but is IP (version 4 or 6) really that much of an optimum?
I'm no historian, but here is my take so forgive me if I am wrong: When Fidel Casto's party overthrew the government in 1953 there were many US owned businesses and properties that were basically stolen by that new government. It was a hostile act and the US was acting to protect the interests of its citizens without using force. It's not the result of a bunch of old voters in Florida, but the US attempt to get restitution for taken property in a peaceful manner. At this point it seems pointless to maintain the embargo since in all these years it hasn't achieved its goal.
Not using it as a poltiical underground actually is not the right thing. The right thing would be to use this technology to somehow overcome your bullshit government.
You know that when you get that many people doing something like this. That someone will eventually do something that forces the government to act. Not sure what that will be? Hacking into a government computer system, somehow finding a way to connect to the outside world. But you know, once you get a network like this going, some will want more.
Young Cubans Set Up Mini-Internet
So this story's real? I thought someone was Havana laugh.
Thank you, thank you.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
CIA, NED, USAID in any combination.
"This is a local net for local people; we'll have no trouble here!"
Thanks for your reasoned and sensible answers, really good insights. I appreciate your time in giving me some perspectives I'd not considered.
Not something you hear on slashdot every day :-)
my laser printer makes up one fifth of all networked devices on my mini-internet. Fun fact.
Cubans *do* have access to Internet. I (Mexican) have been there several times. In 1998, I became a close friend with a Cuban university teacher, and in 2000 I travelled to Cuba with tens of Linux and Free Software books, hundreds of CDs with distros of the day. I was quite in close contact with the Linux user groups in Santiago and La Habana, and less so but still met some people from Pinar del Río and Baracoa.
My friend later moved to Spain. Yes, he didn't go out the most legal way there is — But he kept in touch with his family. I kept in touch with his family as well (Internet access is not restricted to the university). His mother and his sister both travelled to Spain to visit him, and went back to Cuba.
I went again to Cuba in 2010; I stayed at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, ~10Km from the capital. The university is in a decomissioned soviet naval base; it is a huge university city, with hundreds of student dorm apartments. Every apartment has a computer connected to Internet. They do have strict quotas, but they all have network access.
The embargo, as you mention really harms Cuba. The country is clearly among the materially poorest I have visited. Hopefully things will now improve. No, it's not (only?) a communist regime that has kept them from developing.
"They can't own a cell phone or computer without the state's permission"? Where are you getting this stuff?
We give away old cell phones and computers whenever we visit, and nobody has had any problems. In particular, cell phone penetration is relatively high (compared to the extremely poor economic status of most Cuban residents) and SIM cards can easily be obtained from the state telecom firm.
If the states would each accredit a new medical school, expand seating by 25-50% in core medical programs and such, we could easily start matching Cuba on the professional supply side. The AMA and others won't go for that because it would mean forcing highly paid medical professionals to get competitive on their salaries and such. How about the states start applying price gouging laws? How about they start requiring posting of all fee schedules at medical establishments so consumers can price shop? How about they start throwing doctors in prison for quietly bringing in partners who are out of network so the practice can bill at much higher rates?
Just as radical, how about we start demanding that health insurance act like real insurance. Meaning...
1. It only covers things which are reasonably outside of the person's control.
2. It covers them absolutely past the deductible which should be reasonable.
3. If the buyer becomes indigent once the emergency happens, the insurance company cannot stop paying just because premiums are no longer being paid and the insurance company cannot lawfully back bill for premiums lost when the insured incident happened and the buyer was unable to pay.
Precisely. Whenever people try to make a moral equivalence between some Western nations like the US or UK and some totalitarian hellhole by saying, "The US starts wars too" or "The US discriminates against minorities too" they should remember this kid's quote. But not the bolded part that parent highlights, rather the sentence before it - "We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in [my country]." When the US starts wars that people don't like, half the population tries to influence the government. When minorities are oppressed, people change what happens.
All countries and places have problems, the difference is what people can do deal with them.
No, but India's constitution does declare it a 'sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.' Granted, the democratic part assures that it isn't communist, but until the 90s, India's leading parties all swore by socialism. The only exception was the current ruling party the BJP. Indians do in practice have a right to property, but that's something the government can trump anytime. Although in that aspect, they're probably not much different from the US ever since the Kelo v. City of New London case in the Supreme Court.
they would tell you just fine. we go to war and destroy places, then give them money to rebuild.
we are one of the only places to do this.
if (!start_war($nation)){
start_war($nation);
war_over= false;
if(end_war($nation) {
end_war($nation);
war_over = true;
} }
while (war_over == true) {
spend_money($rebuilding);
}
while(war_over == false) {
spend_more_money($killing);
}
No more beata
If you think five eyes wouldn't act against a group planning to change the government in the USA/Australia/Britain etc without going through the standard election process you'd be dead wrong. I would even be willing to bet money that they would act against groups calling for new elections trying to force current governments to resign.
Yep. People don't realize the AMA functions as a guild to artificially limit the total supply of doctors to keep salaries artificially high. It's also a class system net to keep 99% of doctors to people born into the class. I remember when in the 80s they miss projected the doctor counts and had huge problems in the 90s. This also has weird distorting effects on things like the ratios of plastic surgeons to general practice doctors.
Well, since it's pretty much impossible to have a "secret network" when you're using wi-fi I'm going with the SlashDot headline for accuracy. Especially since an "internet" is any network of smaller networks (there isn't just one behemoth named The Internet).
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... ... ..."
"The Flexner Report[1] is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. Colleges in electrotherapy were closed. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College.
Flexner viewed blacks as inferior and advocated closing all but 2 of the historically black medical schools. His opinions were followed and only Howard and Meharry were left open, while 5 other schools were closed. His perspective was that black doctors should only treat black patients and should serve roles subservient to white physicians. The closure of these schools and the fact that black students were not admitted to many medical schools in the USA for 50 years after Flexner has contributed to the low numbers of American born physicians of color and the ramifications are still felt more than a 100 years later.
What has happened recently though to address the shortage of doctors in the USA is that Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants are doing more of the hands-on work, and new careers like health coaches are showing up, knowledge about nutrition (the basis of health) is spreading through a variety of sources and practitioners from chefs to nutritionists to writers and movie makers, and we are all turning to the internet more for health care advice...
Doctors are becoming more and more like technicians controlling a prescription pad in the process -- which is sad for a bunch of reasons. As Dr. Fuhrman says, many prescriptions are just "permission slips" for continuing bad behavior including eating poorly.
And some specific specialties like oncology and cardiology are being called scams...
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Exposing the fraud and mythology of conventional cancer treatments"
http://www.naturalnews.com/033...
Meanwhile: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.