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Comment by justratsinacoat | Hacker News Reader

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 fuck!? It'd take me weeks to assemble this kind of thing, especially given point #1 above. Sure, a lot of this stuff could be farmed out to scrapers/sickbeard/whatever, but this level of curation plus the quick turnaround plus the distribution (how many portable 1TB drives are circulating?!) plus the download speed requirements... Who is doing this, and how? There's clearly some really great high speed connections in Cuba. Are these guys backed (or at least tolerated) by the state or something?

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Sounds like a warez share - there's a curation group, and a large ftp server (with lots of people having upload credentials)

You give people a credit for uploading something (anything recent, has to not exist currently on the share), in order to get access to download anything from the ftp.

People want to get free stuff, so they contribute some small thing - like an antivirus update that you can download for free from the vendor websites, in exchange you get that camm'ed version of The Martian or whatever you were looking for.

The drive folks make a copy once a week from the main repository, and duplicates it onto portable hard drives.

It doesn't mean one person or even one group of people are doing the uploading and curation, just that one group is copying it down and distributing it (even then it might be a lot of different people doing each individual step).

Old school warez clubs function pretty much like I described. The better clubs enforce some kind of ratio - like for every meg you download, you need to contribute 500k (for 1:2) or 1 meg (for 1:1 ratio) - that really gets good stuff onto the sharing sites and people compete for uploading the best videos/movies/music/warez/games, etc - for community recognition.

Granted, I've been out of the "warez scene" for going on 20 years but the "better clubs" didn't have ratios. For the "public" or your average person that was turned on to a site by their buddy or something, yeah. But once you were really "in", you didn't have to do anything. You just took what you wanted -- even better if you can turn around and upload it elsewhere.

I started out running BBS systems but, like everyone, eventually moved to the Internet where I ran several "semi-private" dedicated servers with lots of storage on "fast" (at the time) connections. Most of them were fully open to those in certain groups but there were a couple that were pretty easy to get an account on, albeit with a ratio requirement. A lot of those accounts tended to get banned pretty quickly, however, as the users would upload miscellaneous crap just so that they could download and nobody wanted to really "monitor" or "evaluate" the stuff in /incoming from the new users.

Thanks for taking me back to my younger days. :)

"... at 851GB ... 11Mbps 24 hours a day" I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB, those guy store all that information in a lot of common hard drives and distribute the package just coping from a portable hard drive to another one, that's the "cloud" for Cubans :(

this article should be named as 'The Cuban CDN and the Cuban cloud'

>I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB

Right, thanks! I made the erroneous assumption that the bulk of the data changed weekly (thanks to that "... 851GB ... at 11Mbps 24 hours a day" thing). Keeping the AV updates/some text-heavy-craigslist-alike current is an entirely different proposition.

Here I thought this was a revolutionary high-throughput sneakernet content accretion system possibly operating under the government/telcos collective nose, but as others point out it's probably more like the warez FTPs of the 90s. Here's hoping wider pipes, both technologically and ideologically, come to Cuba soon.

Hopefully the people performing the distribution know about rsync/robocopy.

I'd recommend watching the video that is linked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E

It talks about the mechanics, largely it looks like someone in Miami is consistently collecting stuff until they get close to 1TB or a week has passed, then that 1TB is flown out to Havana and it's copied and passed around after that.

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

Some guys in Miami with a T-1 and who then carry a drive into Cuba. There are almost as many flights between Miami and Havana as between Miami and New York. The only restriction was that you have to be Cuban to get on the plane in Miami--there are but few exceptions.

A T-1 line? wouldn't it be Cable internet, or more likely Fiber? in Miami, at least

It's been so long since I even heard anyone mention T-1, I had to look up the speed, 1.54 mbps. I remember in the early days of dialup internet access with 14.4k when this was seen as a very highly coveted connection to have access to.

> Fiber

It's most likely Fidel.

T-1, now with an overall rate of 1.544 million bits per second!

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.

So the bandwidth for Cuban consumers is great! The ping, not so much.

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.

Or you could just have 11 1Mbps connections...

Or 1146 9600 baud connections...

One of the comments in the article explained it: there not actually 1TB of new stuff but only about 200G each week. They also have multiple people download it and then combine it before it gets distributed.

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