The Cuban Internet Crisis
medium.com
medium.com
As the cofounder of one of the most popular cuban websites, revolico.com, I'm suffering this since 2007. We launch revolico on December '07, on march '08 the government blocked our IPs, then when we circumvent this censorship, they made a DNS spoofing nationwide.
Nevertheless revolico is still the #1 classifieds ads site of the island, way ahead of the government offering, our users are doing a lot of crazy and creative stuff to get acces to the site.
So Cuba, besides having an internet penetration of less than 5%, strongly censor the link, which is even sadder. I predict that access will increase in the near/medium term, but unfortunately proportionally with the censorship.
Information really only travels in one direction, so it is not even close to the real internet, but we could image an enterprising paquete shop bundling in some encryption software and forum software to enable two-way communication.
More here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-in...
So yes, the sneakernet can be used to distribute education materials, movies, texts and the like, but the real benefits of the internet only develop with low latency and multidirectional communication.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
Cuba occupies far too much space on the media relative to its size/population.
I think the most important difference is that in Brazil, if you don't have Internet access, you might at least have a friend who does, or you can go to a cibercafé. In Cuba you don't have that option.
Although Cubans do not enjoy complete political freedom, most people there have a higher standard of living than before the revolution, almost everyone knows how to read and write and most social services are free (Cubans have better healthcare than US citizens).
Far from trying to make them equal.
In Cuba, the authorities even have trouble locking dissidents up, more often than not. In NK, mass executions and mass imprisonment are the norm, and the differences between prison, labor and army service is at best murky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_military_government
And i really wonder how long the democracy will last if they get too uppity towards US policies...
In the end the Monroe doctrine still seems to be adhered to:
Where's google with their phalanx of balloons and a cached copy of wikipedia?
http://cubayatwittea.blogspot.nl/2013/01/como-acceder-intern...
All these efforts to put smartphones in the hands of starving people seems motivated by mega-corporations eager to "open up new markets", exploit vulnerable people, and increase their tracking datasets using people too naive to know any better. Most Americans resist privacy invasions because they've been a bit educated on the topic, so let's move on to people who don't know better?
Second, in many ways the developing world is better leveraging the internet than the developed world. Travel is a huge issue in the developing world so being able to do remote transactions becomes far more valuable. Access to education and professionals is more limited so information becomes more valuable not less.
Or why doesn't BT in the UK just build its own mobile network instead of buying EE
Because for profit companies want to make as much money as possible and spectrum is limited. Which is more or less why buying an empty field in the Brazil is ridiculously cheaper than the same sized empty field in downtown London.
You don't need to start by building a nationwide network when you start out. 1 Cell tower can handle a little over 1200 calls at the same time and cover up to 1,500 square miles using 2002 teck. So start with one tower in the major city(s) for a few million and add towers as needed after that with the revenue from customers.
Which is why there is a cell network in every country. The problem is a few towers is not going to cut it once someone is covering the country.
PS: Building a modern tower in the US costs ~300k USD as a baseline including equipment and construction costs (though you can have more than one network per tower). Covering the UK wold cost at a minimum ~30million USD for the towers assuming ~1k square miles per tower. Less if you include significant gaps, laying the ground network is adds costs. But you would probably pay 10x just for the spectrum and you would want a much higher density in city's, and land is not free etc.
Heck, having better communications directly helps with food and jobs; you have a much easier time finding the guy who needs a worker or has a spare bag of rice if you're both online. Might even help with "clean water"; you can find information on how to make water potable and sanitation in general.
I couldn't tell you for sure whether getting smartphones to a village is a higher priority than installing a good well, but the smartphones are worth enough that I don't think that either choice is obviously superior.
2) "Americans resist privacy invasions" What.
Then they would travel from village to village to help locals with various issues (saving crops from pests, figuring out minor illnesses etc).
Basically they were carrying around the equivalent of a library in a shoulder bag.
More recently an article mentioned a farmer somewhere in Africa that had gone to a netcafe to look up solutions to his failing crops.
A strong argument for getting the third world online is to help create more jobs. This sounds like a corporate sound bite, but it's a complex issue where job opportunities are a few degrees removed from providing broad access to the internet in and of itself.
In a lot of developing countries the only jobs that are available are supporting existing industries that are heavily dominated by mega-corporations that are much more focused on resource extraction/profits than they are on developing human capital: Clothing industry in India, Tourism in Mexico/Caribbean, Mining Natural Resources everywhere.
While much of the initial profits and use cases for bring a country online are frivolous and tend to mirror 1st world consumption patterns, the internet access is critical infrastructure for supporting a more decentralized economy.
As adoption of the internet, and telecommunications infrastructure more generally take hold, economic opportunities that didn't exist before will start to emerge: Mobile payments in Kenya, Bitcoin merchants in Chile, or even the selling US produced content in Cuba (the "paquete").
Access to decentralized communication networks enables people in developing countries to participate in the economy on more favorable terms and enables people to work and start businesses without having to work through existing gatekeepers (I think this is why people have responded so negatively to the internet.org model).
I would love to see some studies on internet or network driven economic development, maybe as an alternative to Import Substitution.
You cab buy/sell almost anything on the black market.
For reference, 1 CUC = 1.10 USD
Its priced at the level to limit access. This is a feature of the communist government, not a bug that needs fixing.
All political control of information is a bug that needs fixing.
of course the Cuban authorities could shoot it down or jam the signal but it might be fun anyway. I wonder how many cubans have devices that could connect to the internet if it were available.
Damn it, the island has been getting all kinds of crap from CIA and like since the revolution.
As such it would not surprise me if leadership is paranoid to the max about foreign "assistance".
Call me obsessive but once I've fixed that, their entire article read better.
This site does a good job explaining the issue - especially with the two gifs that show the problem of how browsers/CSS handle justified text.
http://designforhackers.com/blog/never-justify-type-on-the-w...
Most blogs are single column. Justifying the text will create variations in the space between words which makes it harder to read with little benefit other than an overall aesthetic that may or may not be more pleasing to look at as a whole.
Alternately, you may get lower conversion as the aligned text creates a "stop here" signal that makes the reader less likely to wander into the ad space. Should be worth A-B testing.
In a web browser, text composition is done line by line (because that was more practical for the compute resources available in 1995, and no one has bothered to implement the better alternative, even though every device used today has more than enough CPU to handle it), there is no hyphenation, and you can forget about optical adjustment. As a result, justified text invariably looks like complete garbage, with dramatically varying amounts of space from line to line. These turn into distracting “rivers” of whitespace running down the page.