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The Cuban CDN

blog.cloudflare.com

21–30 of 138 posts

Re: The Cuban CDN

#21

Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…

When you watch the YouTube video linked in the article it seems like lot of the content is gathered in the USA and then brought over on a drive / stick. There are also many people involved in gathering the content.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#22

Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…

Does it have to be coming from within Cuba? It could be some guys in Miami.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#24
One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year.

You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy.

Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business - which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the officially priced $2 card.

But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#25

Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…

It's not like the whole 1TB is being refreshed weekly. File structure tree looks like a spanish language warez site. If I had to guess 85%+ of the disk space is taken up by video.

No, the point is that it's new stuff weekly. Maybe not the entire 1TB, but a lot of it.

Doesn't have to be downloaded. Can be mailed from Miami, transcoded direct from TV, ...

Re: The Cuban CDN

#26
I wonder who it is that downloads a TB of data to distribute, and if they have a special means they're able to do that.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#27
edit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just seemed like it was removed because of some delay.

Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on their blog I'll repost what I posted here

The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#28
post #11
post #5

I wonder what the future of El Paquete Semanal will be once Cuba inevitably gets less ridiculously priced and more available internet access. As it stands, there could be a large percentage of users who don't even have NICs, as all you'd need for El Paquete Semanal is a USB port. I'm also interested in whether it's more of a loan/library service where this org has hundreds or thousands of hard drives that get loaned…

What if instead of a USB drive, it was a truck with wifi that would swing by the front of your house and rsync some files to your computer? To sign up, you'd give your address and wifi password.

Wouldn't the simpler option be to just make it available over the web?

Re: The Cuban CDN

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the whole 1TB is being refreshed weekly. File structure tree looks like a spanish language warez site. If I had to guess 85%+ of the disk space is taken up by video.

No, the point is that it's new stuff weekly. Maybe not the entire 1TB, but a lot of it. Doesn't have to be downloaded. Can be mailed from Miami, transcoded direct from TV, ...

I'm going to guess the data is mostly acquired/downloaded, curated and then hand-carried from Miami, there's frequent flights for Cuban expats.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#30

edit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just seemed like it was removed because of some delay. Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on their blog I'll repost what I posted here The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create…

What are you talking about?

There's a moderation delay before comments are posted. I hadn't got around to hitting Accept on yours yet.

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