El Paquete Semanal
en.wikipedia.org
El Paquete Semanal
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#2I witnessed El Paquete first hand in Cuba. To be honest, it's an easier and cheaper way to get quality content than the mess of walled gardens and DRM we have in the US.
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#3For years I've been joking about selling an "internet battery" for people going off the grid. I had no idea that some mad bastards actually did it!
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#4> It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained.[9][2] Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10]
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#5I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals.
When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited.
In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rarely get wide adoption, such as CJDNS, Hyperboria, Mastadon, Lemmy, Fediverse, ActivityPub, various DHT based tools, and others.
Hypothesis 1: if the threshold for action were high enough in the US, people would adopt these higher tech offerings en masse.
Hypothesis 2: the low tech nature of El Paquete Semanal and similar networks is critical to their success.
If hypothesis 2 is correct, then building a similar network using "boring" technologies would be more impactful than working on high tech open source tools.
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#6I've used it for many years while living in Cuba: for 1 USD I could buy it and someone come home with an external HDD and let me copy it or I would visit them and copy it myself. It was/is our main source of information away from the national media propaganda that constantly bombard us.
The Cuban intelligence services quickly realize the threat of "El Paquete semanal" to bypass its communist censorship and infiltrated and threatened the main distributors to remove anything criticizing the government or news concerning what happens in Cuba. Currently is a shadow of what it was: just a collection of pirated movies, software, music and of course, infiltrated communist propaganda as well.
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#7> It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained.[9][2] Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10]
Indeed
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#8OLPC also at times went with "some of the goodness here is the info, which we can distribute as HDD or CD and not as fetch it live" -So wikipedia and teaching materials do of course get revised but core competency knowledge overt in the older documents is rarely contradicted for maths, music, literacy, natural history, biology, chemistry to high school level.
Whats different in El Paquete Semanal is the "samizdat" quality. I don't generally like the John Perry Barlow "information wants to be free" but it seems plausible that when governments put barriers to information flow, people turn to mechanisms for information flow which do not align with those barriers.
I'm thinking about the number of satellite dishes in the middle east which moved indoors under RF transparent roofing materials, when governments banned dishes to control media access. Now, with Starlink: this might be a bypass to 2 way information flow.
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#9I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals. When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited. In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rare…
The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck.
The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net".
In the US, you can always get access to whatever you need for free, with a little work, by torrenting for example. Torrenting is much less work than El Paquete or the stuff you listed.Why would anyone pay for those offerings instead?
I think it's apples to oranges.
Re: El Paquete Semanal
#10So sneakernet never went away, it just got less fashionable.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum