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The Cuban Memory Stick Underground

Posted by kdawson on Thu Mar 06, 2008 02:48 PM
from the digital-samizdat dept.
Censorship
circletimessquare writes "The NyTimes has an aticle describing how students and others in Cuba have taken to passing around media on memory sticks, as this is the only way they can get around state-controlled media. Also driving this phenomenon is the fact that there are so few places to get on the Internet. In Old Havana there is only one Internet cafe; getting online there for an hour costs 1/3 of the average Cuban's monthly wages. Local entrepreneurs get the memory sticks from European friends, since they are scarce to find in Cuba through normal channels, and expensive."
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Submission: The Cuban Memory Stick Underground by circletimessquare (444983)
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  • Not bad bandwidth, but the lag time can be a bitch.

  • I see... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aegis Runestone (1248876) on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:52PM (#22666914) Homepage Journal
    I see that your memory stick is as big as mine.

  • sneakernet (Score:4, Informative)

    by graveyhead (210996) <fletch.nationofcriminals@com> on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:52PM (#22666928) Homepage
    Great example of the sneakernet in action. Quick RIAA, ban shoes! :-)

    This is really smart. Maybe the college kids here in the US could learn a thing or two from this. Why provoke the beast when nobody has to know about your trading?

    (I'm not advocating copyright infringement, just pointing out how silly attacks on internet users are)

    • Re:sneakernet (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta (162192) on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:57PM (#22667018) Journal
      Sounds like an opportunity for propagandizing. Take a few thousand cheap USB keys, fill them with american media, put them in a water tight enclosure and drop them off outside cuban waters.

  • Bandwidth (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:56PM (#22666986)
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pre-revolutionary automobile loaded with thumb drives!

  • Is that a cigar in your pocket (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:56PM (#22666988)
    or did you just get a new batch of porn?

  • Want to bring down the Cuban government? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gordonjcp (186804) on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:57PM (#22667010) Homepage
    Then the US should drop their trade sanctions, and station ships off the Cuban coast, or possibly blimps flying over Cuba, with *huge* wireless network systems on. Basically, turn a ship into one giant floating wireless AP, with a satellite connection to the Internet. Then give all the people USB wireless adaptors.
    • As much as I defend Cuba, I do have to agree that the state-control of media outlets continues to piss me right the hell off. However, the article does make a very interesting omission:

      Yes, the internet cafe does cost a lot in Cuban dollars. However, it is in downtown Havana, which means it's in tourist central, so it's likely that the people who go there are part of the tourist economy, which means they can make thirty or forty Canadian dollars in a day, and spend every last second of spare time in th

      • Re:Want to bring down the Cuban government? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MightyYar (622222) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:26PM (#22667436)

        Riiight... because Cuba can't defend its own sovereignty.
        I don't think you are suggesting that Cuba's defenses are capable of defending the island against invasion by the US... if you are, that would be silly. The Bay of Pigs was not a US invasion, though it did have financial support from the US. Had there been some kind of active military support, they might have stood a chance.

        In any event, they haven't even tried to kick the Americans out of Gitmo.

        If it was that easy, don't you think that the Americans would have invaded by now?
        No, because part of the deal ending the Cuban Missile Crisis was a promise to the Soviets not to invade.

        • Re:Want to bring down the Cuban government? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by jcr (53032) <jcr@mac. c o m> on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:52PM (#22667988) Journal
          But, despite their living conditions, many Cubans are happy with their country and don't want to embrace American style capitalism either.

          Sure, there's a lot of apparatchiks in Cuba, just like there are in any totalitarian regime.

          I think most of them still largely believe in the ideals of Casto and Guevara.

          It's amazing what propaganda can accomplish when any dissenters can be tossed in Jail. Lots of north koreans worship that repugnant little elvis impersonator who rules their country.

          -jcr

  • But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society w/ (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nedburns (1238162) on Thursday March 06 2008, @02:57PM (#22667020)
    But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society with perfect free healthcare that the rest of the world should aspire to emulate!? ( see movies by fat slobs who don't know what they're talking about [imdb.com] )

    • Re:But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arthurpaliden (939626) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:05PM (#22667132)
      They have first rate low tech preventative and pre/post natal health care. Which gives them a lower infant mortality rate than the US and a life expectancy just a bit lower that the US.
      • And a choice of presidential candidates just one behind the US as well.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by STrinity (723872)
        Do those life expectancy figures include people dying from acute lead poisoning?
      • And all they've given up is their inalienable rights as human beings. Yay!

      • nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Quadraginta (902985) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:43PM (#22667800)
        This bullshit urban legend about the "low" infant mortality rate in the US has got to stop.

        The reason the infant "mortality" rate in the US is low is because the US is one of the very few countries that tries to save the life of severely premature babies and babies with severe birth defects. Not surprisingly, quite a lot of these sad cases die, up to 80% in the case of severely premature babies. By contrast, most other countries don't even try to save those infants, and simply record them as late miscarriages or stillbirths. Since they're never "born" they can't "die," so they don't count in infant mortality statistics. Hey presto! A lower infant mortality rate than the US! Congratulatory headlines in any random self-hating US media outlet...

        Here's a related fun fact: university hospitals often have higher death rates than community hospitals for grave disease, e.g. heart attacks, strokes. Is this because they're less competent? Some strange corruption where the richer and more prestigious hospital is screwing up because of its callous disregard for humanity, i.e. the kind of "logic" used to criticize the US infant mortality rate? Nope. It's just because the most serious cases prefer to go to university hospitals, or get transferred there from community hospitals, and because university hospitals often admit people for experimental therapies that usually don't work, whereas less sophisticated hospitals just send folks to hospice or home to die.

        Whenever you compare statistics, it really needs to be apples to apples, and when the statistic is so politically-charged as a quality of life versus type of government measurement, you really need to ask some hard and detailed questions about the methodology. It's amazingly easy to lie with statistics.
    • The real problem I had with Moore's citing of Cuba is that we have no idea how good their official statistics are. Also, if anyone is getting shafted by their medical system, was there any real chance of Moore -- or any outsider, for that matter -- finding out about it?
    • Micheal Moore only spoke about their health care system, not the other social problems.

      Mind you, with decent free health care, they have something fundamentally good that Americans don't, and the way things are going, never will have.

      How many people in the US can't change jobs because of losing health insurance if they do?

      I have known a few myself, doesn't seem either fair or pleasant.

  • Donate old memory sticks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andyfrommk (1021405) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:08PM (#22667182) Homepage
    We should donate our old memory sticks to them, I've got a 128mb mp3 player which is worthless to westerners but could be of use to people in the third world to dissemenate information.

  • Working so well (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bombula (670389) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:15PM (#22667274)
    Jeez, I finally get it! And here I thought the whole strategy of destroying a country through decades of economic sanctions based on political ideology two generations out of date was one of the great disasters of US foreign policy. But it's actually a clever strategy to turn a whole nation into a think tank and foster innovation the old fashioned way: by creating necessity! It's so simple!

  • Not new. I used to do that. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GreatBunzinni (642500) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:26PM (#22667426)
    About 16 years ago, in a time of floppy disks, 486s and joysticks, I also was a part of such a network. Media such as the anarchist cookbook and all kinds of software were passed around by hand through packs of floppy disks from one person to another, spreading through everyone.

    Mind you, that took place in a western european country, a free country with freedom of expression as best as the world could muster. Yet, that network, which TFA tries to label as a sign of subversive actions against a government went ahead anyway. How could that be?

    The thing is, that has absolutely nothing to do with dissent or trying to overthrow any government. People form data sharing networks because they want to share data. With the internet we belong to multiple P2P networks. Before that we had FTPs. Before that we had BBS. If there is no electronic network available then that doesn't stop anyone. Instead of a computer network, people networks are formed. Nowadays, instead of floppy disks or even CD-RWs we have USB mass storage devices such as flash drives.

    So quite simply the article is nothing more than yet another piece of anti-Cuba propaganda. Just because there are people in Cuba sharing media around does that mean that they do it with subversive intentions in mind? If you fire up your FTP client does it mean that you are also trying to overthrow your country's government? What about your USB drive? And what about SD cards? What a rebellion.

  • A very long pedal (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tired and Emotional (750842) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:56PM (#22668072)
    You need to transfer a 4Gbyte file. Your Internet connect speed is 256Kb/s. How far must you be transferring the data for it to be faster to transfer it via your connection rather than via a man on a bicycle carrying a thumb drive?

    This used to be a standard exam question when I taught CS, only back then he was only armed with a floppy. As floppys got larger faster tha bandwidth increased (back then it was proabbly 2400bps dialup) the poor guy kept having to ride further and further.

    Lets see - the file will take 8*4x10^9/256x10^3 (back in asynch dialup days that multiplier was 10, not 8) = 0.125x10^6 seconds. Lets suppose the bicyclist average 10 miles per 3600 seconds. So break even is 10*1.25x10^5 /3.6x10^2 ~ 4x10^3 (4000) miles.

    For extra marks: How large a thumbdisk would a swimmer need to carry from Florida to Cuba so that the transfer rate would be faster than the entire bandwidth of the island? There are no extra marks for speculating where the swimmer would carry it.

    • Re:Must be evil capitalist counterrevolutionaries (Score:4, Insightful)

      by damburger (981828) on Thursday March 06 2008, @03:07PM (#22667168)

      Because there are no capitalist counter-revolutionaries in Cuba of course.

      What always amuses me is that people decry the reactionary left-wing government of Cuba without seeing it in the wider context of the history of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th century, during which the US made a point of launching vicious attacks on every progressive left-wing government in the hemisphere by organising strikes, spreading propaganda, sponsoring coups and terrorists, and occasionally direct military force. The repression of the Cuban regime is a result of a Darwinian process that has weeded out every left-wing government in the region that didn't shoot or imprison anyone and everyone who even might be on the CIA payroll.

      Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them - but thanks to the actions of America there is literally no way their social programmes could've been implemented if they were not prepared to run the country as a dictatorship. Western democracies such as Britain have reacted in a similar way when faced with extreme outside threats.

      • Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them
        But they are still an improvement over the dictator they replaced [wikipedia.org].
      • the cuban government is clearly more authoritarian than the us government, on most every measure, according to most any observer (try the great neocon fortresses of human rights watch and amnesty international), by a large order of magnitude

        but then you have some people such as yourself, due to hating the usa's tactics in fighting cuba, or in thinking the idea to defeat cuba is not to fight it, or with a laundry list of cold war and colonial era grievances... that it all somehow means that the point here is

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by DeadChobi (740395)
          I don't hate the ideals that the USA originally aspired to, especially the idea that we can govern ourselves as a group and still maintain a cohesive society. What I hate is what we've done as a country, consistently, to other countries. We interfere with their development, we ignore their soverignty, and we have even stolen land from them. Yes, it's been a while since we've invaded a country and taken land from them, but it's happened.

          I love the ideals that we aspire to, but as a country there is a pattern

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by damburger (981828)

          I put it to you that the Cuban government is no worse than the United States government, under similar circumstances. The Cuban government is subject to monthly threats of annihilation from its northern neighbour, who possess the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Faced with a far less potent threat from Imperial Japan, the United States started rounding up people based on their ethnicity and putting them into camps. Faced with a far less potent threat from the Soviet Union, the United States s

              • "I put it to you that the Cuban government is no worse than the United States government, under similar circumstances."

                "This is not to condone the Cuban dictatorship (and I am calling it such directly seeing as you seem to have missed me calling it so indirectly in my original post...) - it is merely to explain its actions and its nature."

                "In the same way that sharing an environment with dangerous predators has made Hippos extremely aggressive animals, sharing the Western Hemisphere with the U.S. made revol
                  • russia tinkers in british affairs. china tinkers in american affairs. cuba tinkers in angolan affairs

                    etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum

                    most every country that exists and has ever existed and will ever exist has tinkered in the affairs of other countries

                    and you want to do two things:

                    1. conveniently forget all tinkering by any country except american tinkering
                    2. leverage that american tinkering into direct accountability by the usa for whatever bullshit someone else does

                    example: britian, france, russia, china, and the usa all had arms deals with iraq. but we'll forget all of that and just think about the usa. next, saddam hussein gassed kurds. so obviously, the usa is responsible for that

                    this is your superior understanding of the world?
    • Memory stick: generic term for portable flash media, usually USB drives
      Memory Stick: name for Sony's flash media format

      The capitalization is important

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