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Cuba Is Blocking Text Messages That Contain Words Like 'Democracy' (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Cuban government is blocking text messages that contain words such as "democracy," "human rights," and "hunger strike," according to an investigation from local dissidents. In a Spanish-language report published last week, prominent blogger Yoani Sanchez and journalist Reinaldo Escobar found that the government is filtering 30 keywords and blocking the transmission of any texts that contain them. Reuters later confirmed that messages containing the Spanish words for "democracy" and "human rights" did not reach their destination, nor did those containing Sanchez's name or "Somos Mas": an opposition group that worked on the investigation. Texts that included the word "protest" were transmitted, the agency reported on Tuesday, and those that were blocked were marked as "sent" on the sender's phone. It's not clear how long the communist government has been filtering keywords and blocking texts, and activists suspect that there may be more terms that it is targeting. Cuba has long been accused of committing human rights abuses, including arbitrary detentions and restrictions on freedom of speech. "We discovered not just us but the entire country is being censored," Eliecer Avila, the head of Somos Mas, tells Reuters. "It just shows how insecure and paranoid the government is."
is state of the art I am sure. Have a cigar!
Take THAT, amigo!
Just hope Cuba doesn't end up like this
http://www.rinconcete.com/imag...
So is socialism, but mob rule is also a failure. These are just false ways of ruling ourselves that do not work, but we are afraid to abandon.
What is best for Cuba? I do not know... but it is not socialist leaders, nor mob rule.
Alternative Right.
The sure sign of a treasured system of government and a joyous society: you're not allowed to talk about other people's way of life. Or leave.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I am curious why some of the Somos Mas leadership are not yet wearing Colombian neckties.
Silence is a state of mime.
use a VPN
The Swedes love Cuba. They go there by the boat load and clog up the beaches. They never leave the tourist areas though.
> according to an investigation from local dissidents
In other news, according to an investigation by local vegans, tofu tastes just as good as steak!
I'm not an encryption expert, nor have I ever been. I was a CDMA expert some 20 years ago, when Qualcomm was drinking their Ovaltine. Twitter is based on SMS (Short Message Service), as defined by the IS-95 spec. Every once in a while, defined by the slot cycle index, itself defined by the carrier (it's a tradeoff between battery life and how long the user waits for their phone to ring), the handset will query the base station "Hey bud, got anything for me?" and gets a yea/nay response. One of these messages has to be 255 bytes long, and there are an unused 153'ish unused bytes in it. Those 153'ish bytes are how SMS messages are sent. Twitter has overhead, hence you have 142 byte twitter msgs.
Keep in mind this is just a simple "hey bud!" shouted across a crowded party. The handset and the base station never setup a call, which is a lot of overhead.
To encrypt this channel you need an app on both ends to do the encryption, send the encrypted message over SMS (which uses some binary codes to do things like send long DTMF tones so ya gotta convert to ASCII first), then the other end needs to decrypt the message. Which to my encryption == magic mind means you have to set up a call.....
We all know these things are trivial to bypass. Dem0cracy, Hemocracy, Lemocracy, Democray-cray, that's the beauty of language. Youse carn mekitup azz yo gogo un thur missage stil gitz throo. If all else fails send an MMS of the txt.
I would be suspicious about this story. Yoani Sanchez's independance has been suspicious for a long time for the support she got: what independent blogger can afford to translate in more than 20 languages? And how could she get major media coverage in such a short time?
Moreover, the keyword censorship would be a rather stupid move from the government, as it is quite easy to spot.
I am curious why some of the Somos Mas leadership are not yet wearing Colombian neckties.
Please explain.
Google "Columbian Necktie". It doesn't mean what you think it might mean.
They are also blocking "Streisand effect", the irony
Time for some 31337 speak then eh?
Democracy is a fucking farce. We're brainwashed from birth it's the best system of government in the world but every Democracy has been captured by the elite. The people think they're empowered but at elections they only get to choose between one or two establishment candidates who looking after themselves and their donors and not the sucker who votes for them.
So do what everyone else does, Cuba. Tell the punters the have a democracy, hold sham elections where only establishment candidates can win and boast about your "Democratic" values. https://www.google.com/search?...
Darn
Embargoes
Mean
Others
Can
Ruin
All
Civility.
Yanno?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is not a defence of Cuba. It's calling out all the countries that are censoring content. Which in practice is *EVERYBODY*. It's called copy"right", but it's far from just copy"right"'d content. Canada, Europe and a bunch of countries censor Nazi related stuff (which is totally legal in the United States). And it goes a lot farther than just Nazi memorabilia/propaganda/opinions. Australia and other countries jail people who deny the holocaust. This is far from the only example. Most countries have a blacklist in the guise of protecting children. The boogie man that was used to justify the online censorship has been predominately FUD over paedophiles and child pornography. In reality it's been shown that these lists also censor political material, and in many cases completely legal, but controversial material, like adult pornography. Now they are also being used to censor copy"right"d content. The Freenet (anonymity network like Tor) guys say it best: "You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law" and "The core problem with copyright is that enforcement of it requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free speech if someone is monitoring everything you say."
If there's anything kids these days are good at, it's taking common words and phrases we use in everyday speech and turning them into obscure undecipherable abbreviations for text messages.
Lets be honest here, even in the US do you even realize how often you are censored? For example, on Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites while your comments are visible to you, often no one else can see them because you're on a secret blacklist. If only people knew... maybe they would watch more TV? ha
when Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Metafilter, and Hacker News were blocking words like "Gamergate" no tech site seemed to care
....is a communist country! Duh!
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Hence the idea of a constitutionally limited government. A government that cannot do whatever it wants. And knowing that people want power have a competing set of powers (checks and balances so to speak) so that the federal government can do only what it's constitutionally allowed to do; local governments (states if you will) have other powers and the people in government - namely Executive and Legislative branches are jealously guarding their powers and privileges.
Of course if the population (hence their elected officials) think that the purpose of government is the distribution of largess then things dissolve.
In sum - Democracy does suck. Thankfully the framers of the US Constitution were aware of that. Hopefully our population will return to the sentiment that giving more and more power to the government - especially the Federal Government - is a very bad idea.
Vote Third Party in 2016 and beyond.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Crap so that means the Chinese can't listen to Guns N' Roses latest album?
No conflict of interest there. You know, like owning infrastruture and making potloads of cash of owning people's lives.
Note that first of all this is not a "news" story. It's a bunch of charges made by one side in a deep political debate. There's no attempt at substantiation, and not even the pretense of the courtesy of allowing the other side to comment. Second, that so many fierce "independent thinkers" at Slashdot have just accepted the charges and assumed they must be true. Because after all everyone knows Cuba is bad, right? And how do we know? Because "a lot of people" say so. And you make fun of Trump supporters.
Irony or just caught up in the rhetoric?
I can't see the parent comment (anyone else unable to change their browsing thresholds?) , so I apologize if I misinterpreted anything that would be clearer in context.
The problem in maintaining a democracy is I think not the distribution of largess - obviously such distribution needs to be coupled with a societal awareness that you can only squeeze the golden goose so hard without killing it, but while that excess may lead to the collapse of an economy, it won't directly degrade the legitimacy of the democracy.
The problem is in how do you keep the government in line with the will of the people? As we can clearly see in the US, the elites have almost completely captured the process - the primary input of the populace is to, every few years, choose which establishment puppet they want to have sell them out. Even if 90% of the population disagrees with the decisions being made in the government, their opinion is essentially irrelevant.
Personally I like the idea of a "legislative jury" randomly selected from the populace for each piece of legislation. Give them absolute veto power - it doesn't matter if you have 100% backing from congress and the president, if you can't convince a supermajority of a randomly selected group of citizens that your bill is in the best interest of the nation, it's dead. Obviously jury corruption would have to be guarded against, but at the very least it would spread the bribes around.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Time for Cubans to install Signal.
It's just a matter of time.