The Cuban Memory Stick Underground 427
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:4, Funny)
Think of it as an avian spoofed RESET packet.
I'm sure Comcast is evaluating it even as we speak...
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At least in cuba you don't get slashdotted...
Re:Handing off thumb drives - The new Cuban Intern (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, I believe that there was an attempt to port Quake [wikipedia.org] so that it's playable via Sneakernet.
Maybe for a short-range, medium-latency sneakernet. For the networking stats of this sneakernet, you might need a different variant [wikipedia.org].
Still, this brings up an interesting idea for a project: construct a network where multiple packets are carried in bursts on physically delivered storage media (such as a USB drive) where you can only retrieve those packets addressed to you when it arrives and not monitor the others. Obviously encryption would be required, but design it for reasonable packaging and retrieval f
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)
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When those "common carriers" are begging for retroactive immunity from handing our communications to bad actors like the Bush Administration, I'd say that "when" is "now".
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no?
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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)
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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^)
RIAA just goes after lowest common demoninator (Score:2)
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?
Who says this isn't already widely taking place? Private DC [wikipedia.org] hubs come to mind. Additionally, I can assure you there are many private FTP servers, sitting on fat pipes, maintained and expanded (content-wise) by groups of like-minded individuals. I am speaking from past experience in this case, and knowing human nature.. if some of my nerd friends did this in college, then many others are doing the same currently. The RIAA just goes after the lowest common demoninator, which in many cases means people sit
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But why not just copy hard drives? With 500 GB for $100, that's a heck of a lot of music.
That's what we did back in college. 5 or 6 of us that were all active in collecting large sets of large files would each bring a couple of drives to one of our houses, set up a couple of boxes for copying, and share 100's of GB of data in a matter of hours. Of course, that was before DVD-burners and thumb drives were accessible to college students so who knows what the popular methods are these days...
Hey wait - Anyone know what the popular methods are these days? I've been out of the loop for a while.
Modern method (Score:2)
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2) that's 100$ in the US, not how much it is in Cuba
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(I'm also not advocating copyright infringement, just pointing out a method that friends of mine were using a whole half decade ago for mass transfer)
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Bandwidth (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a cigar in your pocket (Score:5, Funny)
Want to bring down the Cuban government? (Score:4, Interesting)
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A new life awaits you in the off-shore colonies. A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
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Or even a little more. TFA says that "the state-owned cafe charges a third of the average Cuban's monthly salary -- about $5 -- to use a computer for an hour", so that puts you at over 6 months salary to have $100.
The average Cuban is very poor. I doubt that there are a lot of computers in individual households, and that's not gonna change soon
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Re:Want to bring down the Cuban government? (Score:4, Insightful)
In any event, they haven't even tried to kick the Americans out of Gitmo.
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Also what makes you think that those people have there own PCs?
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Where do you think they use their memory sticks?
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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
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And placing a trade embargo on a country for nearly 50 years means they want to be friends?
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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)
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Wait, are those the Cubans, or American kids with toys made in China? I'm confused.
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And all they've given up is their inalienable rights as human beings. Yay!
Er... where do I find these "inalienable rights" for all human beings? Last I checked, the common interpretation was that these only apply to US citizens, if we had to extend them to everyone else our current international (and increasingly domestic) policies would dissolve.
To all of our leaders, since FDR (perhaps before), the only "inalienable right" that the US has stood for is opening your markets to our corporations, and do wha
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.
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Well, I agree with the 'low tech' part. As for the rest, getting the nurses there to stop reusing hypodermic needles would be a good start. I was waiting at a clinic in Havana with my (Cuban) ex-girlfriend for a blood test and was amazed at the Cubans waiting their turn to get an injection from the same needle. At least they washed it in a tray of water between shots. Yeah, Cuba is the high tech health care capital of the world. I dem
The consumer way of looking at the world (Score:2)
All societies have pros and cons. Personally, even though I'm a geek, I'd say having a reasonable healthcare for all should be prioority ofver bandwidth for all.
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Re:But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But.. but.. I thought Cuba is a utopian society (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
European friends (Score:2, Troll)
I can hear it already... (Score:2)
Yo está apesadumbrado, podría usted descargar el Internet sobre esto?
And for once, it'll actually make sense!
(If the translation sucks, blame babelfish.
Well at least (Score:2)
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Memory Stick: name for Sony's flash media format
The capitalization is important
Donate old memory sticks (Score:5, Insightful)
Working so well (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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Note that the article also never made any blanket statements like, "All networks are created with subversive intent."
What the author left unsaid, and what you might have realized if you were not a complete simpleton, is that all sorts of people create all sorts o
I wish China or some nation would just send to (Score:2)
But, do it in some diplomatic Asian way that might gain inroads into Cuba. Apparently, the US/Western ways must suck pretty bad. SOME government SOMEwhere needs to overtly defy the US. Externally oppressing Cuban citizens and denying US citizens visitation of Cuba is plain evil and heinous. It's just a matter of time before Cuba opens up. i just think their elite don't
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"Cuba has the "same effect on U.S. administrations that the full moon has on a werewolf.""
"What is the likelihood that the United States and Cuba will resume diplomatic relations?
Given the range of issues dividing the two countries, experts say the possibility of normalization remains distant. "We don't use that language [normalization] anymore because the relationship is so toxic," Sweig says. Wayne Smith, director of the Cuba program at the Center for International Pol
Consider, if you will (Score:2)
Interesting eh?
Steven
A very long pedal (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The Embargo is retarded. (Score:2)
Re:Image in my head (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Image in my head (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Must be evil capitalist counterrevolutionaries (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Must be evil capitalist counterrevolutionaries (Score:5, Informative)
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People like you are the scariest of all.
Okay, perhaps you're not one of "those" people (Michael Moore, you are!). However, from your apology for the regime in Cuba, and the socialist policies (programs) you seem to embrace, I'll make that assumption.
What you don't realize is that the greatest force of all, which you seem to embrace, is the force of the herd mentality (Tyranny of the Majority). The moment you force someone into your viewpoint, you've become a tyrant.
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this is an attitude i can't fathom (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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I love the ideals that we aspire to, but as a country there is a pattern
" Yes, it's been a while " (Score:2)
make a list of the usa's cold war and colonial era crimes, and you have a list which is pretty much no better or worse than any other major country that has ever existed
such that you aren't really commenting intelligently on the reality you find yourself in today, right now
if you wish to grouse about history, go in a corner and do that
but if you wish to make comments that are relevant to what is happening in the world right now, look at who is doing bad things in the world right now
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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
wait (Score:2)
this is where you lose: "the usa did something bad once, so we can't criticize what cuba is doing bad now"
this is an incredibly useless way of thinking about the world you live in
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i understand what you are saying (Score:3, Insightful)
"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
here's some wacky ideas for you to mull over (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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someone please explain to me: how on the subject matter of the bad things the usa's bitter enemies do, does the usa gets all the hate?
Because the USAs' dear friends do worse things, but the hate is not applied appropriately.
Look at Pakistan [wikipedia.org], look at Saudi Arabia [wikipedia.org]. Why all the hate for Cuba when the USAs' friends are also doing truly vile things?
criticize saudi arabia for saudi crimes (Score:2)
criticize the usa for american crimes
criticize cuba for cuban crimes
DON'T criticize the usa for cuban crimes
DON'T criticize the usa for saudi crimes
DON'T criticize the usa for pakistani crimes
that's the kind of weirdo i am
i'm sorry if this kind of thinking is so strange and exotic to people!
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I'm not defending the United States when I say they have good intentions. There have been many atrocities committed with good intentions. I think our foreign policy towards Cuba is guided by, perhaps, one part good intentions (we want them to be a democracy, as long as they make all the "right" decisions), two parts pride (we'd like to forget the whole h
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I wouldn't go so far as to say the US allowed social democrats to gain power in Western Europe - it is more a case that Western European democracies were older, stronger, and lest corrupt than the generally fledgling ones that the US crushed in Latin America. It would take a lot more to institute a coup d'etat in France than in Venezuela, and IMHO that is purely the reason the US has never tried it.
That said, the US has tried to use a lot of soft power over the years to drag Europe to the right. The Murdo