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Networking The Internet

Cuba's Answer To the Internet Fits In Your Pocket and Moves By Bus 78

Posted by samzenpus from the starting-small dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Susan Crawford reports on "El Paquete" (the package), Cuba's answer to the internet, an informal but extraordinarily lucrative distribution chain where anyone in Cuba who can pay can watch telenovelas, first-run Hollywood movies, and even search for a romantic partner. The so-called "weekly package," which is normally distributed from house to house contains the latest foreign films a week, shows, TV series, documentaries, games, information, music, and more. The thumb drives make their way across the island from hand to hand, by bus, and by 1957 Chevy, their contents copied and the drive handed on. "El Paquete plays to Cuban strengths and needs," writes Crawford because Cubans are great at sharing. "And being paid to be part of the thumb-drive supply chain is a respectable job in an economy that is desperately short on employment opportunities." Sunday the "weekly package" of 1 terabyte is priced at $ 10, then $2 on Monday or Tuesday and $1 for the rest of the week.

The sneakernet is still in use today in other parts of the world including Bhutan where a sneakernet distributes offline educational resources, including Kiwix and Khan Academy on a Stick to hundreds of schools and other educational institutions. Google once used a sneaknet to transport 120 TB of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway".
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Cuba's Answer To the Internet Fits In Your Pocket and Moves By Bus More

Cuba's Answer To the Internet Fits In Your Pocket and Moves By Bus

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  • Bandwidth is high (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15, 2015 @01:43PM (#49915667)

    But the latency is a bitch.

    • I hear the data overages suck too.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Adriax ( 746043 )

        Roughly 13mbps download speeds with a 4 terabyte limit for $40 a month. With that limit you're hard pressed to hit overages.
        Cuba has better internet via physically shifting bits than the majority of the US.

        • Cuba has better internet via physically shifting bits than the majority of the US.

          Oh please. Show us the numbers.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dave420 ( 699308 )
            According to Akamai's numbers (admittedly from 2014), the average US internet connection was 11.5mb/s. If it hasn't beaten the speedy Cuban internet infrastructure since, it's certainly comparable by this metric.

  • 1 TB thumb drive? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For poor people, the Cubans sure are rich. Even I can't afford to shell out for a 1 TB thumb drive. Must take forever to copy all that data...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      the Cubans sure are rich.

      Seriously?

      Lets say it costs 1000 dollars. How many people on sunday would have to buy your services to go positive ROI? Hell lets say it takes a month. That means you only need 25 'regulars' on sunday. Everything after that is gravy.

      It is in economic terms considered a 'fixed cost'.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        Initial start up costs would be high but once purchased could be reused. No different than buying a laptop or smart phone.

        • The startup costs are probably spread over other uses too: If you already need to buy a laptop for work, it's going to be tempting to get into the underground data business for a little extra cash.

          I used to do it back in school - in the late nineties, when not everyone had internet. I was one of the first, and for a time made a few quid a month* flogging floppy discs with pokemon-related material on.

          I hated that fad, but it was profitable. Unfortunately I often got paid in not-very-good trading cards.

          *That

    • That link shows them exchanging a hard drive. It also mentions how they also distribute with thumb drives, and the pricing for it. I'm guessing the thumb drives don't include the HD video, and that the 1TB drive stays with it's owner.

      Got me too...

  • So... (Score:4, Funny)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @01:52PM (#49915743) Journal
    On a scale from 'good god, man, kill that vile pustulent mass with fire' to 'AOL user's emachine running win98' exactly how malware poxed do we expect this service to be?

    It is possible that the low value of the target nodes offers some protection; but I still have to lean toward "so much cyber-syphilis you can feel the pus ooze out when you try to plug it in".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Maxwell ( 13985 )
      How would infecting their own customers PC help the distributors?

    • On a scale from 'good god, man, kill that vile pustulent mass with fire' to 'AOL user's emachine running win98' exactly how malware poxed do we expect this service to be?

      That's an interesting question. I wonder if the fact that you can see the person on either side of the chain, and that the route of the package can probably be traced at each step of the way, changes whether or not malware can be spread at all.

      If you could find out exactly who sent you the data you get, and everyone you send data to knows

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        Hmm. A lot of "mal" in "malware" is poor execution, not necessarily in malicious intent. This was especially true in the early days when most of the stuff was written by people just to see whether they could. This goes right back to the Morris Worm.

        We're in an age where people who are really malicious can pay to have someone do a pretty good job, in which case you won't necessarily ever know they're doing it. I'm thinking about whoever is in charge of Cuban "internal security". They must surely be aware

      • The trouble is that attribution is always tricky. If I knew that the guy who slipped me the virus did it deliberately and lived two blocks away, I'd be distinctly tempted to 'explore a spectrum of kinetic responses'. However, if I suspect that the odds are very good that he gave it to me because he got infected by somebody else, and it was pure happenstance, rather than malice, that his computer happened to be the one to be previously infected and write a malicious autorun file to the drive, or the like, th

        • For a sneakernet chain of any nontrivial length, the perp would have to be pretty dumb, pretty bold, or pretty overt to stand out from the crowd of victims just passing the pox along.

          Yeah, I guess, but remember, there will be the last person who had the sneakernet who did NOT get infected with the malware, and then a chain of people who are ALL infected with the malware.

          The guy in between is the perp. And since it's sneakernet, the order is known.

          But I get your point.

  • Old saying (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @01:52PM (#49915751) Journal

    "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of CD-ROMs". That's what it was when I heard it. It goes back further [wikipedia.org]

  • About 18 years ago. You could copy substantial parts of the then Internet. Today that would be a medium size memory stick.

    • Honestly, these days you can (literally) buy a 4 pack of 32GB memory stick in the express checkout at Wal Mart for under $10.

      The first time I saw a PC with a 1GB hard drive, we stared at it in awe ... it was about 98% free space, and nobody had any idea of what you'd put on it.

      And you can buy a 1TB hard drive for under $100 without even trying that hard.

      Now, take a teenager, and try to explain punching holes in a 360K 5.25" floppy so you could flip it and get 720K. They might not even believe you.

      • Re:the first google server was 10x4 GB (Score:4, Insightful)

        by psm321 ( 450181 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @03:02PM (#49916257) Journal
        I want to know where this Walmart is that I can buy a 4-pack of 32GB sticks for $10 (seriously, if it's real I want to know...)

        • Honestly, I might be a little off on the count .. a few gig here, a few gig there ...

          but my wife works in storage, and I once paid $700 for 16MB of RAM ... and the two of us were in the express lane at WalMart absolutely gobsmacked that what used to cost huge amounts of money for storage was suddenly in a blister pack of 4 brightly colored units for under $10.

          I can't say for sure if it was 4x8, 4x16, or 4x32 .. but I was just standing there going "you have to be f-ing kidding me".

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by SeaFox ( 739806 )

            If it was less than $10 it might not have even been 4x8GB.
            According to their website, you're lucky to get ONE drive for less than $10. [walmart.com]

            Buying flash drives in retail stores is like buying USB and HDMI cables in stores -- an exercise only to be done when you really HAVE to have it now. For everything else, there's NewEgg and Monoprice.

      • 1GB? When I got my first PC, it had a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking "what would you EVER put on this to fill up that huge of a drive." Of course, nowadays, I carry a "hard drive" with hundreds of times the storage capacity, not to mention a better monitor, faster processor, and faster connection to the Internet. It fits right in my pocket when I'm not using it to browse the web, make calls, play games, etc. It makes me wonder what my kids will wistfully think about the tech they use nowadays whe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        The first time I saw a PC with a 1GB hard drive, we stared at it in awe ... it was about 98% free space, and nobody had any idea of what you'd put on it.

        I remember thinking the same thing about the first 5MB hard drive I encountered in an IBM PC.

        When data CDs first came out there were questions about what kind of game could fill one up. That was answered in short order because the second game to be released on CD media, one of the early Kings Quest games, took 2 CDs leading to the "King's Quest XXXXVIII -

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        Now, take a teenager, and try to explain punching holes in a 360K 5.25" floppy so you could flip it and get 720K.

        360K is already double-sided. A more typical use case was to double capacity from 140K to 280K when used with an Apple II.

    • I remember back in high school computer class (early nineties) we learned that Bell Canada's customer database was 4 TB.

      That's 4 million megabytes, this was an inconceivably enormous amount of storage back then, when 1.44MB floppies were state of the art, and hard drives (if you had one at all) ranged between 20-80 MB.

      Nowadays 4 TB is a comfortably sized 1080p movie collection.

  • This is an answer...? (Score:3)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @02:01PM (#49915831)

    This is Cuba's answer to the internet?

    This is like the US Military calling the Nerf toy company to answer ISIS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      We can make a fortune if we can dig-up that old Fidonet code!

      Imagine, being able to exchange e-mail with someone in three or four days!

    • None of the immediacy, but none of the ads either.

      In terms of not treating the internet as a life and death thing requiring you access the latest thing on NetFlix NOW ... meh.

      As someone who still watches movies on little plastic discs through a player and TV which aren't connected to the intertubes, I say never underestimate the value of offline data.

      And in a country where the average person is really poor and trying to eke out enough to eat, I'd say good for them.

    • Re:This is an answer...? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mlts ( 1038732 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @02:30PM (#49916061)

      I wouldn't call it the "answer" to the Internet... but in a country like Cuba which can skip generations of technology (i.e. no worry about having a POTS infrastructure), it can provide reasonable services.

      I consider this more of a Redbox-like service, except instead of DVDs, one is copying movies to a SD card to be consumed, which could be easily made into a kiosk. If the kiosk supported formatting the SD card, it would be a reasonably malware-free way to do that.

      I am surprised this isn't done more often. Not just movies, but things like operating system ISOs, cumulative patch updates, applications, larger games like MMOs, and other items, this might be a useful future.

      I can see Redbox making some money from a similar thing. Select movies, plug in a USB, SD, or MicroSD device, have it copy them, and go from there. Since there are already thorough DRM systems in place, the movies would expire after a time, and can easily be renewed via the Web (passing keys and licensing info is a lot less than the actual MPEG data). Bonus points where one obtain ISO images of an OS and all the latest patches.

  • This is interesting (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I might be going to Cuba for an Esperanto conference, and was wondering what to take for the hosts that would be appreciated. You can't take laptops (registered by customs on entry, or pay a huge tariff on exit if you can't produce it). So I thought that what might be appreciated is thumb drives full of data- in this case, a copy of the Esperanto wikipedia, ebooks, music, videos, etc, plus of course the same in Spanish.

  • Who is letting it happen? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @02:13PM (#49915943)
    The article wonders why the Cuban government is letting this happen and then goes on to say it makes $5 million a month and no one knows who is running it. At $5 mill a month a lot of government types can make a nice tidy profit while still controlling and observing what goes int El Paquete. As long as nothing that think will cause problems is in it why not run a lucrative media empire? One that is protected from competition, because well, you and your police can easily take care of the competition; besides if you are already bringing it in their is less incentive for someone else to do so and that saves you the expense of tracking them down. If things go south you can always leave and live off your earnings. Just because you are a good socialist doesn't mean you don't appreciate what capitalism can offer you.

  • when i posted this:

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

    but this quaint sneakernet will probably rapidly disappear now

    i can't see cuba resisting the obvious benefits of freer internet access any longer. they're paranoid control freaks, but they're not that stupid (i hope)

    the political ramifications are obvious too, but cuba's political model died last century

  • And replace 'Avian' with 'Cuban'

  • Big Bad Cuba (Score:4)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Monday June 15, 2015 @03:09PM (#49916303) Journal

    Think of this Cuban sneakernet. Now remember the fact that for the past half-century, the United States has seen Cuba as the biggest threat in the Western Hemisphere. So much a threat that you couldn't even allow Americans to visit there or Cubans to come here. Hell, you couldn't even legally buy a Cuban cigar in the US, so great was the threat from this tiny island nation. And even after 60 years of embargo and sanctions a president says, "What is all this bullshit with Cuba? You think maybe we could knock it off now?" we STILL have right-wing legislators who shit on the floor in fury at the thought of normal relations with them.

    It's ironic that the US keeps it's off-shore black site prison in Cuba, so it can hold Afghani cabdrivers who nobody can remember why we picked him up back in 2004. But god forbid we should actually have a conversation with their government, because OMFG COMMUNISM!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      A prison where the prisoners get better health care than many Americans.

      • A prison where the prisoners get better health care than many Americans.

        So you're prepared to believe whatever the government tells you about how good Guantanamo prisoners have it?

        And, considering how bad our health care system has been for so long now, I bet there are lots of prisons where the inmates get better health care than many Americans.

        • Gitmo is US run. GP was talking about Cuba as a whole - Havana, Santiago de Cuba, et al

          • Gitmo is US run. GP was talking about Cuba as a whole - Havana, Santiago de Cuba, et al

            Got it. Thanks for straightening me out.

  • It is called "sneakERnet" because you walk the data over from one place to the other using your sneakers / tennis shoes / athletic footwear (not everyone knows what a sneaker is...like a grinder/sub/hoagie/po'boy).

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