Cuba's “Internet” is a thumb drive that moves by bus | Hacker News Reader

Cuba's “Internet” is a thumb drive that moves by bus

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104 pointssteven82 comments

Here's where I put on my old-man hat. You youngsters reading this might be flabbergasted, but this is how things worked in the olden-days, before the Internet.

An example, there use to be this guy names Fred Fish who would compile Amiga freeware onto floppies and trade them at Amiga user group meetings. I believe he lived in Idaho. Where he got the freeware was anybody's guess. But through a thin network of people trading software, the Fish disks (as they became known) spread far and wide. I didn't have an Amiga, but one of my friends did, and he had probably 30 Fish disks, which composed most of the library of software he used (there were about 1000 of these disks).

Generally, they weren't transmitted by BBS, nobody had internet. These were literally n-th generation copies of the original disks Fred Fish first put together on his computer and gave out at his local group and to his friends. People from around the world ended up with Fish disks, which are usually reverently numbered according to the release packages that Fred put together.

People used to organize "copy parties" where we'd all haul our huge computers, tower-CRT monitor, sometimes speakers, over to somebody's house and we'd spend all night copying floppies and sharing software and .mod files and whatever else. Showing off games and drinking and smoking and doing all other kinds of crazy things. Fish disks were common sights at these parties and everybody wanted to fill out their collection or get the latest one...which may have percolated thousands of miles and over oceans -- by hand to get to this party.

The movie "Hackers" is a terrible movie from a technical standpoint, but it really nails the feel of this culture. Competitive and cooperative, doing something a little bit wrong, mostly at night. Viruses in those days were designed to spread in this kind of environment of social sharing, embedding themselves in weird spots on floppy disks and taking up just hundreds of bytes.

Modems started to kill lots of it off, and widespread Internet killed off the rest. But it was an amazing time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish

I remember typing in programs from magazines and printouts we'd get from friends.

My "computing" teacher in Junior High School used to get floppies and tapes sent to him from some friends in American universities, so we got to play around with the source code for some games on the Commodore PET. I still remember cutting notches in our 5.25" floppies to make them double sided.

We had acoustic couplers but living in rural Nova Scotia we couldn't afford the long-distance charges and none of us were ever good enough to be phreakers.

Good times.

I remember the only problem with cutting the notch to make the disc double sided was it turned the other way when upside down and the dust collected by the fabric hair brush unloaded all the dust back onto the disc :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Sneakernet

Back in 1992 or 1993 I got a CD-ROM drive for my Amiga and a CD with Fish disks 1-600 I think. Even though it was shortly before the Web started to take off you can't imagine how amazing it was at the time to explore all those disks.

I would certainly enjoy if this still happened locally. Not saying I prefer it over the web, but sharing things face-to-face is way more fun than putting it on Github (of all places) and letting people download a zip. One thing missing from the good ole' days is the interaction between programmers. Now days, you have to join some startup-club to get to talk code with others. You end up being pitched by 30 different founders to build their idea. No thank you. Same as LAN parties. I guess end of rant...

Wow. Fred Fish and his Fish Disks! Haven't thought of that for years. Used to love them - a huge amount of my Amiga software in the mid to late 80's came from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish

The disks: ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/amiga/fish/

... and now really sad to hear that he's not with us any more.

I'd love this to be brought back. Often I feel we're too reliant on connectivity, something that felt amazing (booting from PXE, package repository, github etc) but now I feel it would be a good thing to be able to git the web and have a complete (obviously not complete, but a core set) local copy.

ps: wikipedia dumps is less than 64GiB, less than 100 with user/talk pages. A 256GB flash memory device (SD or key) is less than 100$.

Debian distribute most of their 'main' repository as ISO images - the first DVD will allow you to install a desktop and then you can 'register' DVD2 and DVD3 and install a huge range of software for your computer without an internet connection. The snag is updates: you get a delta DVD for each point release. When I tried the system out, I ended up needing about 200Mb off the update DVD!

To my knowledge, Debian is the only major distro that has this alternative available.

Debian does so much it's scary. I guess that's a remnant practice from the past when DVD distribution was the main way to get the debian system. I remember usbkey as a medium too (maybe less expensive for one shot needs), but I'm not sure it was a linux distro or something else.

I sincerely hope that the Debian project continues to distribute the 3 DVD set for a few releases more!

PS: I can remember swapping punched paper tapes with ascii art on them to run on the teletypes...

> how things worked in the olden-days, before the Internet.

That's exactly the problem in Cuba. It feels like a time capsule from the 80's. It is not only about PCs and networking. We are talking about people that have to craft their own spare parts for cars from 50s-60s.

They have a submarine cable from Venezuela that gives them networking but giving the sad state of Internet connection in Venezuela I guess that is not of much help anyway.

Problem, and the thing that makes it special.

I don't think any of my cuban friends would use "special" to describe it :)

I remember those days. Oh boy now I feel old! :)

Floppies, huh? We did that with CDs - whoever had a CD writer was a god among the users :-).

I remember a guy from a radio station coming with a hard drive full of songs (though most were probably illegally ripped), that was the biggest collection anyone has ever seen, and it spread around like fire :-)

I also remember getting baskets of floppy disks with cracked games from car boot sales with my dad in the late 90s.

Yep, fun times -- However when PCLink and BBSs came about I was grounded for a month because I racked up a $926.00 phone bill calling long distance from Tahoe to San Jose to play The Pit and Trade Wars.

eventually convinced my high school to setup a CAD lab and have a school BBS. We had a backdoor site on the BBS that we hosted early warez from ~1991 that was local to Tahoe.

Our middle school had "Computer Club" one morning a week, so you'd try to get there early and grab the 128k Apple //e so you could copy a disk with only two swaps.

> What should the US do about Cuban connectivity?

Um, nothing? I don't mean this from a sense of "who cares?" but more from a sense of "let Cubans figure out what works for them". If they ask for help, provide it. But don't go interfering unnecessarily where interference is not particularly asked for.

I suspect that the world would be a much different place if we'd followed that dictum in the first place.

There are tons of capitalists the most notable being Carlos Slim, who will solve Cuba's internet connectivity problems in no time. This shit at this point is trivial. It's a question of cost. I am sure they will figure something out for their tiny Island nation.

> tiny Island nation.

It's not actually tiny. A little larger in area and population than Michigan. Only 7 US states are larger or more populous.

For a more international comparison it's about the same size as Bulgaria but has a lot more people.

I mean, by comparison to the entire U.S., Michigan's non-water area is only 2.5% of the overall U.S.

Relativistically and logistically speaking, it's a tiny amount of land to cover with internet.

Carlos Slim can't solve anything in Cuba. The problem with Cuba's connectivity is not the economic embargo nor is it technology (Chinese companies can supply everything needed for that). The problem is entirely political and cultural. The regime is already on thin ice, as over 2 million Cubans have access to the state-controlled internet (like clubs or through cafes) or a cell phone.

If they ask for help, provide it. But don't go interfering unnecessarily where interference is not particularly asked for.

Except the US still has a number of trade embargoes in place with Cuba, so while they could ask for help it's possible the people they ask would be legally bound to say no. Lifting decades old sanctions that hurt both Cuba and the US (in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export trade) would be something the US could, and should, do.

A trade embargo with a country on grounds of it being ideologically different falls under "interfering unnecessarily" in my opinion.

Steps are actively being made in to lift the trade embargoes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

> A trade embargo with a country on grounds of it being ideologically different falls under "interfering unnecessarily" in my opinion.

That sort of hand waving does a disservice to history. Initially the embargo was enacted because Cuba nationalized industries without providing fair compensation (a).

It's true that the embargoes have been more ideological since then, but the ideology is that fairly basic human rights (life, liberty, free speech) should be respected (b).

All that being said, the Castros are pretty entrenched. Maybe healthier interaction with Cuba would promote human rights faster. But you don't have to make straw man assertions to make that point.

a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Political...

The nationalisations that caused the first trade embargo followed hostile moves from the Eisenhower administration by e.g. reducing trade quotas and through the refusal of an American owned refinery to sell to the Cuban government. The rest of the nationalisation followed as a retaliation against the that trade embargo.

Basically Eisenhower shot himself in the foot by first rebuffing early advances by Castro that sent Castro head first into the arms of the Soviets, and then it just got worse from that.

It had nothing to do with ideology on either side, but with money and power.

America was shocked by the nationalizations in Mexico in the decades before, so it's unsurprising that this was considered bad form. Embargo was always the escalation of choice then.

I believe Castro was also pretty Marxist well before 1959. That would have constrained what any politician in the US could have done.

Your second point is pretty hollow, as there are MANY nations that we trade with that violate the basic human rights of their own citizens or those in neighboring countries/territories.

My point is that there are points more tangible than ideological differences. I honestly don't have a dog in this fight, but I think there are fair points on the other side of things that are being glossed over instead of addressed.

They seized tons of American property without compensation. They've also fueled communist revolutions with money, supplies, and troops.

They offered a compensation in the forms of treasure bonds, payable in 20 years.

The Revolution was not marxist until 1961, two years after Castro came into power, and after the USA began being openly hostile to it.

People there were literally dying of hunger, the redistribution of land succeeded in feeding them.

But of course seizing the land owned by a corporation is a violation of Human Rights, whereas underpaying workers to the point they die of starvation is just business. /s

Agreed... let them figure things out their own way.

Yeah except the US basically ruined Cuba's economy with sanctions for what 50+ years? And another ~25 after there was no more soviet threat - just to stick it to the damn unrepentant commies. Because forcing the rest (majority) of the populace to experience economic hardship for dozens of years is really an admirable foreign policy.

The US didn't ruin Cuba's economy. Cuba did it to itself with the nationalization of all industry, prohibition of any private enterprise, limited access to information, and restricted freedom of movement, among other things. The Castros don't care about the well-being of the Cuban people, only their own hold on power. In the 90s, after the collapse of the USSR and its subsidies brought the Cuban economy to its knees, the Castros temporarily liberalized parts of the economy. As soon as the situation improved enough to prevent a revolt, they renewed the crackdown on private enterprise with a vengeance.

> The US didn't ruin Cuba's economy. Cuba did it to itself

This is almost entirely fiction, although I'm sure this is the common political narrative. Cuba is a small island in the middle of the Caribbean cut-off from it's biggest and most developed trading partner, which would have been what 70-90%+ of the economy?

But yes of - course the arch-villain fidel castro and those damn commies.

Suppressing the middle class, nationalizing industries, disaffecting business people all contribute to tanking their economy. Didn't the cutting-off happen AFTER all that?

> Suppressing the middle class,

This is the modern narrative for revolutions in Latin/South America? "Middle Class", really? Because well fed people providing for their families decided to take up arms? Or because the well-fed were a tiny minority, and the rest lived in poverty under the economic oppression of former colonialists?

Don't know what that's all about; sorry to press your hot button. But a stable society needs a middle class. You take businesses away, drive people to leave their homeland, its gonna be disruptive.

Castro solved that problem. Poverty for everyone.

Communism doesn't work. I don't understand why so many people here with anti-US bones to pick won't or can't understand that The idea Castro's Cuba would have been wonderfully prosperous while Pol Pot, Stalin, the Jong-un dynasty, etc all have failed is ridiculous. Cuba did model itself after these regimes politically, with requisite horrible human rights abuses to keep the population from asserting their natural rights as free citizens who should be able to petition their government, hold property, start businesses, etc.

China is only doing well because it liberalized so much so quickly and more or less run a capitalist market economy.

In the most generous remotely tenable reading of the facts for the US policy, it protected the Cuban policies you point to by providing an easy, convenient, and credible PR scapegoat for the deleterious effects of the Cuban policies, thereby reducing pressure on the regime to alter them.

Given conditions, what else could have realistically be done? Post Bay of Pigs, things were gonna be hostile ( and Fidel Castro fed politically on the dischord ). Cuba sort of wanted to be offline. The Revolution timed with Eisenhower's departure, so Kennedy set the tone.

Bay of Pigs was a busted op; there is long term blowback from those.

Might be worth gaining a little perspective on the Caribbean in general - James Michener's "Caribbean" is quite good , an easy and entertaining read and sketches out the basic historical framework. We don't think of the historical significance of any of the climes which were once Spanish holdings enough in English speaking cultures, IMO.

Of particular interest is the effect of the uprising in Haiti, which we still feel today.

Also, I am somewhat surprised Canada didn't jump on trade with Cuba - ten years ago, vacations there were advertised in Montreal. The Canadian embassy in Cuba never closed nor did the Cuban embassy in Canada.

Yes, but the last 25 years, for what? Unlike North Korea or China (our major economic partner) Cuba has neither a greater record of human rights abuses nor Nuclear weapons.

Edit: I'm not arguing Castro is not bad, but as far as dictators goes he is probably a lesser evil; as it stands US Foreign policy has done nothing to displace Castro* but a great deal to oppress the Cuban populace.

*(although we did displace a number of democratically elected governments in other Latin American nations) -

I won't disagree, but Castro used animus against the Yanqui for political gain for forever. Over the last 25 years, it may be that the Florida based Cuban expat political bloc alone was enough to set that in stone.

Given that the US has handicapped Cuban economic development for half a century with an aggressive embargo, it's a bit late for noninterference.

> I suspect that the world would be a much different place if we'd followed that dictum in the first place.

Especially the "if they ask for help". Castro toured the US and asked for help after the revolution. The US administration slammed the door in his face. So he went to the Soviets, who welcomed him with open arms.

It seems like google is in Cuba right now, talking about this: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/google-testing-the-wat...

I think we already tried to do something when we deployed the "secret Cuban Twitter":

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26872866

It's been a while now since "El Paquete" became the main distribution channel of online content in Cuba, a lot has been written about this before.

A less known aspect of this topic is the net neutrality issues that this kind of distribution imply. At the end of the day, all the content come from this mighty anonymous source that download and distribute the content for a profit, presumably a huge profit. This source is god, he or she has the last word of what get in and what is left out.

So, since the beginning of "El Paquete" my website revolico.com went in. Revolico content (classifieds ads) is like a basic need in a market with almost 100% goverment control over the retail space (price fixing, availability, etc.), but about a month ago our content was left out, with a note that said that it would no longer be available because it has been used to for the purposes of “personal and political defamation against the country and its citizens.”, I was like WTF, is this the goverment infiltrating "El Paquete"? is a nasty move of our competitors? Who knows, the problem is that one guy has the power to decide what is ditribute it and what is not. This is not good by any mean.

Two weeks after revolico came back to "El Paquete", everything points that the customers were asking for it, so the producers were forced to include it again.

"El Paquete" is one of the best things that is happen in Cuba digital space right now, but a not centralized version is mandatory to make it less vulnerable to goverment control or other kind of arbitrariness.