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The Cuban Memory Stick Underground
Posted by
kdawson
on Thursday March 06, @03:48PM
from the digital-samizdat dept.
from the digital-samizdat dept.
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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Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Internet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
-jcr
Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
Called UUCP (Score:5, Informative)
Though we used to feed a couple of sites with 10Mb tapes...
If all you have is analog phones, or even tapes, you can still run email and get usenet.
Re:Called UUCP (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
I see... (Score:5, Funny)
sneakernet (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:sneakernet (Score:5, Interesting)
(sorry for the cached link, but the original seems to have disappeared)
Re:sneakernet (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just hand them to a citizen of any other country in the world, who can put them in a suitcase and bring them over on the plane.... 8^)
Bandwidth (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a cigar in your pocket (Score:5, Funny)
Want to bring down the Cuban government? (Score:4, Interesting)
But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society w/ (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society (Score:5, Insightful)
nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Citations for above (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia entry on disparities between way infant mortality is measured [wikipedia.org].
US News & World Report article on same [usnews.com] (doesn't cite sources, though news magazines almost never do).
Slate article on impact of premature births on infant mortality rate [slate.com].
Boston Globe article on rate of premature births in U.S. [boston.com]
It would appear there is something to the claim that better medical care can skew infant mortality rate upwards.
Donate old memory sticks (Score:5, Insightful)
Not new. I used to do that. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Image in my head (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Image in my head (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Must be evil capitalist counterrevolutionaries (Score:5, Informative)