The Cuban Memory Stick Underground

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."

Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Internet

[gnick (1211984)]

Not bad bandwidth, but the lag time can be a bitch.

Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern

[jcr (53032)]

I'm impressed. I would expect them to be handing off 8" floppies.

-jcr

Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern

[gnick (1211984)]

Wow, and I thought back when I was playing Quake MY lag was bad!

Actually, I believe that there was an attempt to port Quake [wikipedia.org] so that it's playable via Sneakernet.

Called UUCP

[Colin Smith (2679)]

With store and forward for email and Usenet.

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

[hairykrishna (740240)]

I worked at a site that, for security reasons, had to be air gapped from the 'net. All the email was handled via tape. Worked fine as long as you didn't mind only getting new email twice a day.

Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern

[kesuki (321456)]

are you kidding, with 55% packet loss, and 6165731.1 ms lag over 3 miles... i think the little thumb drive method is way easier. not to mention getting carrier pigeons to cross a couple hundred miles of ocean doesn't work very well either. plus carrier pigeons are really bandwidth restricted, they can at most carry .5 ounces of microfilm which then requires a microfilm reader... thumb drives just work in any usb enabled pc, even ones running linux, and you can get a whole month of blog sites, interesting news etc all in one package with a thumb drive. if they're relatives have the cash they can even send feature length films on thumb drives (i've seen 8 GB modules, in divx/xvid format that's a lot of movie)

Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern

[Duncan Blackthorne (1095849)]

..so would a hawk or eagle in the mix qualify as a BITM (Bird In The Middle) attack, or DoP (Denial of Pigeon) attack?

I see...

[Aegis Runestone (1248876)]

I see that your memory stick is as big as mine.

sneakernet

[graveyhead (210996)]

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

[Hatta (162192)]

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.

Re:sneakernet

[powerlord (28156)]

Why not just package an offline Wikipedia Reader [209.85.165.104] onto some memory sticks, and let them loose. :)

(sorry for the cached link, but the original seems to have disappeared)

Re:sneakernet

[grcumb (781340)]

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.

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

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pre-revolutionary automobile loaded with thumb drives!

Is that a cigar in your pocket

[Timesprout (579035)]

or did you just get a new batch of porn?

Want to bring down the Cuban government?

[Gordonjcp (186804)]

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.

But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society w/

[nedburns (1238162)]

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

[arthurpaliden (939626)]

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.

Re:But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society

[The End Of Days (1243248)]

And a choice of presidential candidates just one behind the US as well.

nonsense

[Quadraginta (902985)]

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.

Citations for above

[Solandri (704621)]

I was curious enough to do some quick googling on the above claim.

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

[andyfrommk (1021405)]

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.

Not new. I used to do that.

[GreatBunzinni (642500)]

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.

Re:Image in my head

[swb311 (1165753)]

Who cares, I'm going to go home and look inside all of my old guitars.

Re:Image in my head

[fireman sam (662213)]

Dude, those bits are medicinal.

Re:Must be evil capitalist counterrevolutionaries

[Scrameustache (459504)]

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].