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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".
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.
I wouldn't call it the "answer" to the Internet... but in a country like Cuba which can skip generations of technology (i.e. no worry about having a POTS infrastructure), it can provide reasonable services.
I consider this more of a Redbox-like service, except instead of DVDs, one is copying movies to a SD card to be consumed, which could be easily made into a kiosk. If the kiosk supported formatting the SD card, it would be a reasonably malware-free way to do that.
I am surprised this isn't done more often. Not just movies, but things like operating system ISOs, cumulative patch updates, applications, larger games like MMOs, and other items, this might be a useful future.
I can see Redbox making some money from a similar thing. Select movies, plug in a USB, SD, or MicroSD device, have it copy them, and go from there. Since there are already thorough DRM systems in place, the movies would expire after a time, and can easily be renewed via the Web (passing keys and licensing info is a lot less than the actual MPEG data). Bonus points where one obtain ISO images of an OS and all the latest patches.