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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.
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 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.
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?...
Machine translation is free and quite good now, it's just that Google is at the bottom of the quality curve even for the free ones so few realize it. Look at http://www.freetranslation.com... for a better result.
Cuba is efficient at constraining dissent, yet surprisingly less brutal about it than most dictatorships. They have political prisoners, but they never execute them anymore. Often they let them out of jail and just harass and disrupt them.
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I used your link to translate your post to Chinese and back, and got "Machine translation is free and very good now are google's bottom quality curve even free so rarely realize it. See the Http://www.freetranslation.com... freetranslation.com] better results."
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Darn
Embargoes
Mean
Others
Can
Ruin
All
Civility.
Yanno?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Oh, fuck off. Every goddamned time there's a discussion of the crimes that a communist dictator inflicts on the people he rules, some little commie twat pops up with that "no true Scotsman" excuse.
The Castro brothers are communists. Quit your idiotic lying.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Chinese and back" is not a valid metric. Translation party sites are fun and all, but translation engines are not symmetric because languages are not symmetric. A translation is often going to be imperfect, so using a raw translation as input just amplifies the error level.
The metric you want is: How much effort would a human have to put in to make the translation output idiomatic for the target language? And the answer to that is decreasing rapidly with modern quality rule-based translation engines.
....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?
Read your post again. See those two words right next to each other, "communist dictator"? Those are two unrelated concepts, like capitalist democracy - one refers to the politics of government, which is the part you seem to be objecting to, and the other refers to the economy, and has never been implemented at scale, for all that it's often been emblazoned on the banners of the revolution in order to gather populist support. And in fact "communist dictator" borders on the oxymoronic.
Communism: economic system where the means of production is owned by the people
Now, go ahead and name even one "communist" country where *the people* own the means of production. You can't. What you actually see is the *government* owning the means of production, and that's not remotely the same thing unless the people own the government. Which is clearly NOT the case in a dictatorship. Hell, I challenge you to name even one democracy where you can make that claim with a straight face.
Until such time as we develop the social technology to allow a nation's people to maintain ownership of their government, communism is likely to remain a theoretical impossibility.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If every single implementation of a concept suffers the same set of flaws, perhaps that concept isn't that good in the first place?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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.
"communist dictator"? Those are two unrelated concepts,
Tell it to all the people Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Communism: economic system where the means of production is owned by the people
Nope. That's just the sales pitch. Communists NEVER deliver anything of the kind.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Bingo.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If I a cat is defined as a furry creature with four legs and a tail, and you complain that every cat you've seen has scales, fins, and gills instead, is the problem in the definition of a cat, or that the people claiming to give you "cats" are actually lying through their teeth?
Communism has in fact been deployed very often throughout the world to good effect - in families, communes, monasteries, etc. The problem is that nobody has figured out how to scale it beyond the size of a tight-knit community. And frankly, I can think of very few examples where anyone has even tried. Certainly at the national level, every example shows strong evidence that the leaders of the revolution never had any interest in actually implementing communism, but were simply using it as a rabble-rousing ideal to gather populist support for their own ascent to power.
If you can offer any counterexamples I'd love to hear them - I find the topic very interesting in a "future technologies" sort of way, as something we might try to implement centuries from now, sometime after we've managed to implement a democracy that actually answers to the people and doesn't degrade over time. Until then it seems like something that, even with the best of intentions, is going to almost inevitably foster corruption and abuse of power.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Are there any capitalist dictatorships?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Except that it doesn't. Communism is actually not uncommon within small, close-knit communities. It just doesn't doesn't seem to scale well beyond that (though there's precious little evidence that anyone has ever honestly attempted it) I think though that that is not so much a flaw in the concept itself, as it is a lack of prerequisite social technologies.
In order to honestly claim that "the people" own something, "the people" need to share equal voice in its use - something that sounds suspiciously similar to democracy. And frankly, our attempts at democracy so far have been pretty terrible. There are a few countries that seem to be making some progress, but mostly it rapidly devolves into, at best, an unresponsive bureacracy, and at worst, a corrupt bureaucracy that's *very* responsive to the whims of a small group of wealthy "lobbyists" rather than the people. Certainly the US is a good demonstration of just how far a government can decline even in a nation that was once held up as a shining beacon of the ideals of democracy.
At a small scale democracy can live up to its ideals. And so can communism. At large scale though, both seem to be invoked more as an ideal to distract the populace from reality. The big difference is that democracy has been making slow, painful, forward progress - in large part due to the fact that we started out with inefficient, centralized, totalitarian governments, and have been gradually progressing, in fits and starts, with lots of backsliding, toward increasingly decentralized power structures allowing for more individual autonomy and voice in governance.
Communism though, that's kind of an all-or-nothing gig - I haven't heard a lot of ideas for how to implement communal ownership without centralized control. And that means that economic power will reflect political power. Great if political power is truly democratically distributed, but out here in reality political power is generally even more consolidated than economic power, so any attempt to implement Communism will only serve to re-concentrate economic power into the hands of the few.
Give me a true functioning democracy that lives up to the ideal, and I'd be willing to bet it could implement communism effectively. Whether it would want to or not is a separate question - conflating political and economic power is going to put that much more strain on the integrity of the democracy, plus communism has its own shortcomings in terms of incentive structure. Moreover, a true democracy would likely have already eliminated the gross economic inequality communism is a response to, and it's not at all clear that people actually object to others being richer than them, provided everyone has ready access to a comfortable living and the opportunity for advancement if they choose to pursue it.
Demonizing the ideals of communism though, that is almost always a symptom of someone that wants to shut down conversations about wealth redistribution - i.e. someone that wants to promote the further concentration of wealth, but doesn't have the political power to want it to be under political control.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Very high happiness ratings... and people willing to risk their life crossing a hundred miles of open ocean in craft barely fit to float across a lake.
Either the ratings are a lie, or the picture is far more complicated than they can portray.
Still, some have claimed that the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, and there's some truth to that, but even if you truly have one, how do you keep it benevolent? Historically such arrangements have rarely outlasted a single dictator, and of course there's always the question of what happens to those who voice disagreement with the dictator's policy.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Time for Cubans to install Signal.
Communism has in fact been deployed very often throughout the world to good effect - in families, communes, monasteries, etc.
That's voluntary cooperation, not communism. You're confused.
Communism is the practice of violently attacking anyone who declines to hand over the fruits of their labor to the communists, or even raising an objection to being looted at gunpoint.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's just a matter of time.