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Cuba's Answer To the Internet Fits In Your Pocket and Moves By Bus
HughPickens.com writes: Susan Crawford reports on "El Paquete" (the package), Cuba's answer to the internet, an informal but extraordinarily lucrative distribution chain where anyone in Cuba who can pay can watch telenovelas, first-run Hollywood movies, and even search for a romantic partner. The so-called "weekly package," which is normally distributed from house to house contains the latest foreign films a week, shows, TV series, documentaries, games, information, music, and more. The thumb drives make their way across the island from hand to hand, by bus, and by 1957 Chevy, their contents copied and the drive handed on. "El Paquete plays to Cuban strengths and needs," writes Crawford because Cubans are great at sharing. "And being paid to be part of the thumb-drive supply chain is a respectable job in an economy that is desperately short on employment opportunities." Sunday the "weekly package" of 1 terabyte is priced at $ 10, then $2 on Monday or Tuesday and $1 for the rest of the week.
The sneakernet is still in use today in other parts of the world including Bhutan where a sneakernet distributes offline educational resources, including Kiwix and Khan Academy on a Stick to hundreds of schools and other educational institutions. Google once used a sneaknet to transport 120 TB of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway".
The sneakernet is still in use today in other parts of the world including Bhutan where a sneakernet distributes offline educational resources, including Kiwix and Khan Academy on a Stick to hundreds of schools and other educational institutions. Google once used a sneaknet to transport 120 TB of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway".
But the latency is a bitch.
For poor people, the Cubans sure are rich. Even I can't afford to shell out for a 1 TB thumb drive. Must take forever to copy all that data...
Mass storage under user control will be deemed illegale (MPAA and RIAA docet) and then only criminals will have hard drives and thumb drives etc... Ah the rosy future....
On a scale from 'good god, man, kill that vile pustulent mass with fire' to 'AOL user's emachine running win98' exactly how malware poxed do we expect this service to be?
It is possible that the low value of the target nodes offers some protection; but I still have to lean toward "so much cyber-syphilis you can feel the pus ooze out when you try to plug it in".
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of CD-ROMs". That's what it was when I heard it. It goes back further
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
About 18 years ago. You could copy substantial parts of the then Internet. Today that would be a medium size memory stick.
This is Cuba's answer to the internet?
This is like the US Military calling the Nerf toy company to answer ISIS.
I might be going to Cuba for an Esperanto conference, and was wondering what to take for the hosts that would be appreciated. You can't take laptops (registered by customs on entry, or pay a huge tariff on exit if you can't produce it). So I thought that what might be appreciated is thumb drives full of data- in this case, a copy of the Esperanto wikipedia, ebooks, music, videos, etc, plus of course the same in Spanish.
The article wonders why the Cuban government is letting this happen and then goes on to say it makes $5 million a month and no one knows who is running it. At $5 mill a month a lot of government types can make a nice tidy profit while still controlling and observing what goes int El Paquete. As long as nothing that think will cause problems is in it why not run a lucrative media empire? One that is protected from competition, because well, you and your police can easily take care of the competition; besides if you are already bringing it in their is less incentive for someone else to do so and that saves you the expense of tracking them down. If things go south you can always leave and live off your earnings. Just because you are a good socialist doesn't mean you don't appreciate what capitalism can offer you.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Is it just me or is the quote at the end trying to refer to how fast the station wagon is moving...?
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway" -- bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway. Latency is how long it takes to get there.
when i posted this:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
but this quaint sneakernet will probably rapidly disappear now
i can't see cuba resisting the obvious benefits of freer internet access any longer. they're paranoid control freaks, but they're not that stupid (i hope)
the political ramifications are obvious too, but cuba's political model died last century
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And replace 'Avian' with 'Cuban'
Think of this Cuban sneakernet. Now remember the fact that for the past half-century, the United States has seen Cuba as the biggest threat in the Western Hemisphere. So much a threat that you couldn't even allow Americans to visit there or Cubans to come here. Hell, you couldn't even legally buy a Cuban cigar in the US, so great was the threat from this tiny island nation. And even after 60 years of embargo and sanctions a president says, "What is all this bullshit with Cuba? You think maybe we could knock it off now?" we STILL have right-wing legislators who shit on the floor in fury at the thought of normal relations with them.
It's ironic that the US keeps it's off-shore black site prison in Cuba, so it can hold Afghani cabdrivers who nobody can remember why we picked him up back in 2004. But god forbid we should actually have a conversation with their government, because OMFG COMMUNISM!
You are welcome on my lawn.
The 1970s called, they want their sneakers back.
Oh wait, this is Cuba, land of the 1950s US automobiles. Nevermind.
Because Cuba's beaches are full of them. Too bad the Cuban's can't enjoy their own beaches.
The big ISPs are using data caps to try to kill streaming and encourage downloading+sneakernet.
It makes sense. Imagine you are CEO a media company who is also in the ISP business. Since you're a media company, your primary objective is to lose money and maliciously harm all your investors, because you hate them and you hate yourself. At first you're heartened to see that your media subscriptions are falling, but you look at the books and the overall revenue isn't falling at all. A little forensic accounting and it hits you: you still have end-consumers, but they're just more indirect than they used to be. They're paying streaming services (like Netflix) who in turns pays you for the content. The fucking revenue is still coming in, so it's making you look as though you're trying to run a business instead of destroy an old company. This won't do.
But you're an ISP too, so the idea hits you: data caps.
If a customer watches an average of 90 hours of TV per month but their caps only allows for 60 hours, then you have a way to influence the customers' behavior. The cap kills streaming, but it won't have nearly as much impact on people playing local files, even though downloading consumes just as much bandwidth (actually more, since the bitrate/quality is often much higher).
A house might have a 60-hours-of-video cap, but a group (e.g. neighborhood) of ten houses has a 600 hour cap, so a large sneakernet-integrated society essentially has no cap, provided they learn to work together. One person downloads a 5GB file: that's only 5GB, whereas if ten people streamed the lower-quality 3GB version, that's be 30GB. So your opponent (the enemy who keeps giving you that unwanted revenue) is going to download.
The second step of the plan is that you make sure that the file they're downloading, isn't for sale at any price. And that happens to be the case. Pirates have the very best product on the market (nice convenient files that Just Work and can be trivially moved around and managed, and yes, of course that also includes sharing) whereas you can't really do that with streams, DRMed optical discs, etc.
The upshot is that the customers have no way to get what they want while also paying you. So they stop paying you. Victory!
So, to recap: 1) don't sell files comparable to what pirates offer, or else people might buy them. Make sure that the ideal customer-oriented solution results in 0 revenue for you. 2) Data caps to encourage sneakernet sharing.
reminds me of the high energy physics group at my university shipping a u-haul of 8mm tapes (2.2 gig per) of supercollider data from Fermilab to Mississippi back in ~90. the bandwidth of I-55 was unbelievable.
Data can be exfiltrated by usb, just write it to a hidden folder and wait for the drive to come back around to you.
Which is specifically NOT the modus operandi of the majority of viruses aroudn (except a few like Stuxnet which had very specific targets).
Thus this would require writing custom code to address this very specific and unusual configuration.
So who's going to throw the ressources at writing a completely new virus specifically targetting the few movie sharing sneakernets around the world ?
As the poster above has noted: nobody. Nobody gives a fuck about Cuba and other such sneakernets.
There's no point in getting these machine or the data on them.
It's not worth blackmailing them. The cuban will probably earn even less money than the chinese guy who would have written the USB-transmitted ransom ware.
It's not worth trying to own the machine: you can't use it for DDOS nor Spam nor some alt-coin mining.
Whatever data they have probably concerns goods and money that are probably valued to 0.0001$ on your local market...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It is called "sneakERnet" because you walk the data over from one place to the other using your sneakers / tennis shoes / athletic footwear (not everyone knows what a sneaker is...like a grinder/sub/hoagie/po'boy).