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The Cuban CDN

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121–130 of 138 posts

Re: The Cuban CDN

#121
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.

An undercover cop could also bust them for selling beer.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#122
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You need a hotspot for a point-to-point WiFi connection?

Re: The Cuban CDN

#123

I used to live in Iran when I was a child and we had the equivalent of this but for VHS tapes. Once a week, a man with a large suitcase would come by our house. He would set his suitcase on the table, open it up and show us his collection of American and Europeans (and very illegal) movies. My mom would pick 5-6 and return the tapes we borrowed from the week before. I was very young back then but I remember it vividl…

Very illegal in Europe or very illegal in Iran?

Re: The Cuban CDN

#124
post #63

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…

> that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet. That is not only why, mesh network requires radio frequency and in Cuba its illegal to deploy radio equipment without permission.

Optical/IR links?

Re: The Cuban CDN

#125
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…

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 thin…

Haha! This happens at most places to tourists, some auto drivers, road side sellers in India try to rip off the tourists. It happened to me in Times Square when i first came to NYC. A guy was selling music CD's and when i was passing through him, he stopped me, handed over the CD, kinda forced me to buy which i didn't.

So across the world, it's very common the tourists get ripped off.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#126

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.

Smoking weed in Spain is legal since a couple of decades. Selling a small bag is illegal, but this isn't really enforced as it's hard to prove that the bag was for selling and not for self consuming.

Usually police will turn a blind eye both for selling pot and selling beer, unless anything goes wrong and somebody complains.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#127
post #18

This reminds of the LAN we had in college. We used to use the software DC++ and then students shared the files that they had downloaded. You could access almost any file at 100MBPS.Someone was sure to download the latest episode of what you wanted to watch. If someone did not, then you went on the internet. Sometimes it was fast to download the file via LAN, than to transfer a file from pen drive to the computer. Thi…

RIT had a very active DC++ network when I was there in the early 2000's.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#128

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…

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…

Are you sure it wasn't a scam to rip you off? I'm born and raised in Tehran and numerous times I had gone out for dinner passed mid-night, and I simply walked into a restaurant, ordered the food, and ate (assuming the kitchen was still open).

Specially because people in Tehran prefer to have late supper compared to North Americans, it was a lot easier to find food options late at night than say in Toronto where past mid-night the only option is fast-foods.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#129
post #97
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll have a PoP in Cuba Why though? Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations. Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?

> Why though? Cuba has 1/4 of the population of the Caribbean in one relatively small location. Look at their network map [1] and you see they already cover major locations in South America, and has good coverage of the US, but Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean is a blan spot. Looking at their worldwide location, my guess is that they pick their POPs largely based on whether they see a potential for cutting l…

Yup. Plus: Venezuela.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#130
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 flop…

And here i thought i was the graybeard of the party.

Hah. On here I'm still a youngling at 41. I'm sure there are people here with histories of swapping software on punch cards.
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