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The Cuban CDN

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Re: The Cuban CDN

#101

Post by victornomad »

deegles wrote: post #11
roninb wrote: 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.

Same I asked to some Cubans few years ago. Apparently it's illegal to start a hotspot there. You can end up in jail. in fact if you scan networks you wont find any.

There is some local wired intranets between neighbours though

Re: The Cuban CDN

#102

Post by vidarh »

digi_owl wrote: post #34
dleslie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will disappear. El Paquete Semanal is not at all unlike the combination of sneakernet and shareware CDs that I enjoyed in semi-rural western Canada, during the 80s and early 90s. We were crippled by long-distance fees, and very few FidoNet BBS' were available; IIRC, there was one in my local calling area, and it was hideously expensive. The local community bookstore started by selling shareware discs, in 5.25 and…

Still recall people bringing duffel bags packed with CDRs to LAN parties.

For me it was people bringing boxes full of 5.25" floppies and multiple external floppy drives...

The fun thing, though was the postal swapping, which developed into an art-form involving defrauding the postal service (wax over the stamps etc. to let you scrape off the post mark and reuse the stamp), and dropping the envelope entirely (affixing address labels and stamps straight onto the floppies and just tape a floppy cover in place - some didn't even use a proper cover, but just taped a small cover over the hole in the floppy to prevent dust).

All in the interest in reducing turnaround times and cost, given that top swappers would turn around a ridiculous number of floppies on a daily basis just to keep their network intact - slow down, and be unable to provide stuff that was new enough, and people would drop you in favour of contacts who provided newer stuff (which by the late 80's increasingly meant the best connected people expected "zero day" releases, and then went off into insanity where people expected cracks of games before they were released - some games were released in cracked form before they were even finished, with levels missing etc.)

This was more widespread in Europe than the US, where strict national telecoms regulation in most countries until the EU started deregulating it, coupled with per-minute billing for local calls, meant modem usage remained low until well into the 90's.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#103

Post by 1propionyl »

smallnamespace wrote: post #94
stavros wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer. See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?" The guy…

Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't an undercover cop.

Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem, because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth.

Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in more touristy and "Americanized" places.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#104

Post by drcross »

I'm disappointed by this article and I'm disliking the "noble savage"[1] tone of the rest of the comments. Yes, you may like it for it's quaint feel but I wanted the author to go into details of how the internet actually functions in Cuba, what sort of restrictions are in place and whats happening to move away from this regressive system. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage

Re: The Cuban CDN

#106

Post by primitivesuave »

stavros wrote: post #91
emilsedgh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of a funny story. I used to live on Tehran, Iran. All restaurants, stores and businesses must be closed after 12:00 AM in Tehran. So one night me and a friend were driving around the town in midnight and we were quite hungry. So we found a nice guy selling tea in the winter and there were other people around. We asked them if we can find food anywhere in town in this hour. One of them gave us an addre…

Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer. See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?" The guy…

I've been to Barcelona as well, the beer sellers are terrible human beings. They will hover around you like flies, then one of them will put a beer down next to you in the sand. When you refuse it, he'll pick up the beer and say "Look, it has sand all over it, it's ruined now. Pay me for it." They are of South Asian like myself, and I'm sure many Indian travelers make the mistake of talking to them when the best thing to do is completely ignore them.

The next night I was ambushed by four of them in the subway, they wanted to put their number in my phone and started getting really aggressive. I smacked the shit out of two of them before a bystander intervened. If I had handed my phone to them I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten it back.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#107

Post by themartorana »

1propionyl wrote: post #103
smallnamespace wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't an undercover cop.

Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem, because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth. Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in more touristy and "Americanized" places.

Is the illegalization (made up a word) of weed in Europe at all a USA export as well? Or did they come to it on their own?

Re: The Cuban CDN

#108

Post by fiatjaf »

jdietrich wrote: post #95
fiatjaf wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like in all other mixed economies, EVERYTHING is illegal, but the authorities mostly turn a blind eye. EXCEPT when they want to destroy your life or make you suffer for any reason, then they'll look at you specifically.

It's not just mixed economies: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

US is a mixed economy too :P

Re: The Cuban CDN

#109

Post by jevinskie »

shklnrj wrote: post #45
NocturnalWaffle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purdue? Purdue still has a strong community based of DC++. People have servers sharing 50+ terabytes of data, with designated release managers and bots to auto download new tv shows, etc.

I am from India, my college had decent internet speed but slower Internet speeds(around 1MBPs when it was fast), hence the use of DC++. 100MBPS on lan was pretty fun. This was in 2011. Its interesting to know that Purdue has strong DC++ community, also auto bots is something that I did not know about in college :) From what I have heard from my US friends is that the rules are much more stringent in US about file sha…

DCgate/Dtella, created by Purdue students, merged DC and IRC (not sure how chat is handled by the newer Dtella).

Searches were broadcast over IRC. I set up a bot to scrape the searches and display them in real time using a Comet (pre-WebSocket era!) powered website. From the IP that requested the search, you could determine the dormitory they were in. One IP kept searching for stuff like "clown porn". It was wonderfully entertaining.

I forget what the monthly bandwidth quota for non-campus traffic was. Perhaps 50 or 100 GB? Traffic to other campus nodes was "free" and almost guaranteed to speed along at 100 Mbps.

I implemented the Tiger hash (used by DC clients) in MMX/SSE2 assembly because it begs for 64-bit integer types. SSE was able to provide a ~2x speedup over regular code, even though I just used SSE for 64-bit types and didn't do any real SIMD. Of course, simply building the DC client for x86_64 provided an even greater speedup but I was stuck with a 32-bit machine at the time. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dtella

Some user experiences with Dtella:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdu...

Re: The Cuban CDN

#110

Post by PostOnce »

> For 2 CUC a week Cubans have access to a huge repository of media while turning a blind eye to copyright.

I find this a very strange thing to say. Why would you even bother to write that? It's not as though they could choose to import this stuff legally for the past many decades, or export any of their own works (the whole reason they would have any respect for some mutual copyright scheme, protecting their exports...) That's not even considering the crappy infrastructure, low income, and probably other issues I'm sure I'm overlooking.

Anywhere that's been sanctioned or embargoed for a long time has an insanely high level of piracy, check Iran for another example.

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