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The Cuban CDN
- oblio 10y agoI was expecting an announcement for a new Cloudflare CDN location in Cuba. What I found instead was extremely interesting and funny. I won't spoil it, so go read the article :)
- jgrahamc 10y agoIt's not out of the question that we'll have a PoP in Cuba.
- eastdakota 10y agoIn fact, it's quite probable. Doubt it'll happen in 2016, but bet it will by the end of 2017.
- Zenfinch 10y agoIt will be fascinating to see how fast Cuba in a post embargo-lift landscape can build up ip infrastructure, its cool that by year's end 2017 its probably good enough for a Cloudflare PoP. (though imagine being uniquely placed to the USA along with other factors is a huge plus for building that infra).
- darkr 10y agoAFAIK among the many sanctions imposed on Cuba by the US, none of them involved free and open Internet connectivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba
- Alupis 10y ago> we'll have a PoP in Cuba Why though? Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations. Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?
- CompuHacker 10y agoCubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.
- chillydawg 10y agoBut cloudflare would not.
- walrus01 10y agoSure they would, given a significant percentage of cubans that might have internet access at home or on their phones in the future, US-based spanish language media/websites are good potential paying customers for cloudflare.
- Alupis 10y agoCubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba). It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.
- Graphon1 10y agoIt seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone. In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.
- Alupis 10y ago> And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow. From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc). They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits. So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none. Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.
- walrus01 10y agoOne of the major things we should watch for is a Miami to Cuba submarine cable. The Miami area (and the Terremark/Verizon "NAP of the Americas" IX point/datacenter) is already the landing station for a ton of submarine cables going to latin america. At present there are challenges at OSI layer 1 getting data into/out of Cuba, not including any government regulation/interference, just due to the lack of pipes. There's a fiber cable to Venezuela, but VZ is not very well connected internationally and there's significant challenges with any US company trying to acquire a circuit on that path (do you want to build a POP in Caracas, with what's going on there right now?)
- toomuchtodo 10y agoI did networking in another life, and I'd love to take some vacation time from my current gig to finagle networking in Cuba or Caracas. Dangerous? Of course. Where would the fun be if it wasn't.
- eastdakota 10y agohttps://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team/ https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team/
- toomuchtodo 10y agoWow, appreciate it.
- stronglikedan 10y agoI was expecting an announcement of a CDN service being launched or acquired by Mark Cuban.
- tscs37 10y ago11MBps for 8$ a month... My ISP is ripping me off! In all seriousness, this is amazing. Once again it proves that nobody should underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of harddrives speeding down the highway... or in this case Cubans exchanging Harddrives.
- yardie 10y agoBandwidth is cheap. It's the last mile you are paying for. If you have access to a datacenter you're basically hooked into the firehose.
- greenshackle 10y agoHave you seen this? FedEx Bandwidth: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
- zappo2938 10y agoAlong the same thought is RFC 2549 and RFC 1149 for IPv6, IP over Avian Carriers.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
- roninb 10y agoI wonder what the future of El Paquete Semanal will be once Cuba inevitably gets less ridiculously priced and more available internet access. As it stands, there could be a large percentage of users who don't even have NICs, as all you'd need for El Paquete Semanal is a USB port. I'm also interested in whether it's more of a loan/library service where this org has hundreds or thousands of hard drives that get loaned out once a week and swapped out for new content or if someone has to physically sit and wait for the subscribers to copy data over. The logistics of this are so fascinating, I just want more!
- sspiff 10y agoMost Cuban computers are older (~5-10 years) laptops and a lot of netbooks, which do include WiFi and often RJ-45 Ethernet.
- roninb 10y agoThat actually makes a lot of sense. There's not a particularly good reason for OEMs to make specifically Cuban machines without Ethernet ports or WiFi adapters.
- dleslie 10y agoIt will disappear. El Paquete Semanal is not at all unlike the combination of sneakernet and shareware CDs that I enjoyed in semi-rural western Canada, during the 80s and early 90s. We were crippled by long-distance fees, and very few FidoNet BBS' were available; IIRC, there was one in my local calling area, and it was hideously expensive. The local community bookstore started by selling shareware discs, in 5.25 and 3.5; and when it came available, in CDs. They were professionally packaged, and they restocked every Tuesday. The demand for content was high enough that restocking so frequently didn't mean throwing out old content. If 1tb USB drives were available then we would have used those; but they weren't, and the most economical way to deliver content was through CDs and discs. Since burners were rare, and because disc and floppy medium aren't zero-cost, it made sense for the local bookstore to sell the packaged content. With the advent of high-speed internet to our homes, we were a test area for the deployment of cable internet in around '96, the bookstore stopped selling shareware altogether.
- NelsonMinar 10y agoWhat a fascinating curation problem! A collection of these would make a fine addition to archive.org.
- unimpressive 10y agoNope. They all include (many, many) things which the copyright holders will actively fight over.
- forinti 10y agoI was at the last FISL (http://softwarelivre.org/fisl17?lang=en http://softwarelivre.org/fisl17?lang=en) in Porto Alegre and attended a session by Pablo Mestre (https://twitter.com/elmor3no_ https://twitter.com/elmor3no_) on the free software movement in Cuba. I was really impressed by what they achieved, given that they have little internet access. He mentioned that the largest network was the one linking health-related institutions and that many doctors had internet at home (even if at slow speeds).
- justratsinacoat 10y agoAwesome 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?
- yandrypozo 10y ago"... 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'
- justratsinacoat 10y ago>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.
- sjwright 10y ago
- shklnrj 10y agoThis reminds of the LAN we had in college. We used to use the software DC++ and then students shared the files that they had downloaded. You could access almost any file at 100MBPS.Someone was sure to download the latest episode of what you wanted to watch. If someone did not, then you went on the internet. Sometimes it was fast to download the file via LAN, than to transfer a file from pen drive to the computer. This entire thing was run by students.
- NocturnalWaffle 10y agoPurdue? Purdue still has a strong community based of DC++. People have servers sharing 50+ terabytes of data, with designated release managers and bots to auto download new tv shows, etc.
- shklnrj 10y agoI am from India, my college had decent internet speed but slower Internet speeds(around 1MBPs when it was fast), hence the use of DC++. 100MBPS on lan was pretty fun. This was in 2011. Its interesting to know that Purdue has strong DC++ community, also auto bots is something that I did not know about in college :) From what I have heard from my US friends is that the rules are much more stringent in US about file sharing and colleges enforce it much more strongly.
- jevinskie 10y agoDCgate/Dtella, created by Purdue students, merged DC and IRC (not sure how chat is handled by the newer Dtella). Searches were broadcast over IRC. I set up a bot to scrape the searches and display them in real time using a Comet (pre-WebSocket era!) powered website. From the IP that requested the search, you could determine the dormitory they were in. One IP kept searching for stuff like "clown porn". It was wonderfully entertaining. I forget what the monthly bandwidth quota for non-campus traffic was. Perhaps 50 or 100 GB? Traffic to other campus nodes was "free" and almost guaranteed to speed along at 100 Mbps. I implemented the Tiger hash (used by DC clients) in MMX/SSE2 assembly because it begs for 64-bit integer types. SSE was able to provide a ~2x speedup over regular code, even though I just used SSE for 64-bit types and didn't do any real SIMD. Of course, simply building the DC client for x86_64 provided an even greater speedup but I was stuck with a 32-bit machine at the time. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dtella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dtella Some user experiences with Dtella: https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still_using_dtella/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still... https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdues_secure_file_sharing_community_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdu...
- TwoFx 10y agoThis has also been discussed on the podcast 'This Week in Google' by digital nomad Mike Elgan: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google/episodes/349?autostart=false https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google/episodes/349?autos...
- tuna-piano 10y agoOne super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year. You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy. Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business - which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the officially priced $2 card. But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.
- Nutomic 10y agoI was in Cuba this January, and I didn't get the feel that this was illegal. We bought the cards on a busy street in Havanna with no problems at all. Also, we paid 2 CUC and were told the official price was 1 CUC.
- dandelany 10y agoI did the same last October. It's definitely illegal, only ETECSA kiosks are allowed to sell the cards. But resellers are ubiquitous and it seems that the authorities mostly turn a blind eye.
- fiatjaf 10y agoLike in all other mixed economies, EVERYTHING is illegal, but the authorities mostly turn a blind eye. EXCEPT when they want to destroy your life or make you suffer for any reason, then they'll look at you specifically.
- lerpa 10y agoMake everyone a criminal so you have an excuse to get rid of those you don't like.
- kin 10y agoI wonder who it is that downloads a TB of data to distribute, and if they have a special means they're able to do that.
- newacct23 10y agoedit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just seemed like it was removed because of some delay. Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on their blog I'll repost what I posted here The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet.
- jgrahamc 10y agoWhat are you talking about? There's a moderation delay before comments are posted. I hadn't got around to hitting Accept on yours yet.
- newacct23 10y agoIm sorry for overreacting, it seemed like it was deleted because the comment wasn't appearing even with the "awaiting for moderation" tag so it seemed like it was removed. Things relating to Cuba are personal to me.
- jgrahamc 10y agoThe only comments we don't post on the blog are spam. You'll find plenty of comments on there saying that CloudFlare sucks, etc.
- dvndvn 10y ago> that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet. That is not only why, mesh network requires radio frequency and in Cuba its illegal to deploy radio equipment without permission.
- jakub_h 10y agoOptical/IR links?
- robryk 10y agoI wonder how much of that data is downloaded in digital form from somewhere and how much is digitized specifically for this collection (e.g. movies recorded in a cinema, magazines scanned from print, etc.).
- jgrahamc 10y agoWatch the embedded Vox video.
- lllllll 10y agoBack when internet was really slow here in Spain I used to send CD's and DVD's filled with music, comics, films,etc to an internet friend I had from Greece(can't remember now how we met, maybe soulseek?), and he'd send me back his own curation of contents. This article reminded me a bit of those times. Too bad we are not in contact, we could have a laugh about it :)
- jitix 10y agoReminds me of my college days. I studied at a college in India that was located in the mountains (in Sikkim). While there was decent Internet for all academic work, access for fun stuff was very limited. So our solution was to download as much stuff (games, movies, series, books, etc.) as we could during vacations at home, bring them back and share them on a organically grown LAN. The downloads were sometimes pre-planned: one person downloads this and the other person downloads that. The take is that people always find a way to access stuff from the Internet.
- melvinmt 10y agoThis brings back memories to the Twilight CD-ROMs [1] we had in the Netherlands in the late nineties that came out every month and had all the latest (cracked) games and applications on it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(CD-ROM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(CD-ROM)
- mercer 10y agoOh man, that's some nostalgia. I grew up without internet access, but every once in a while a visitor would bring a bunch of computer magazines (Computer!Totaal was my favorite) that usually came with CD-ROMs full of stuff. In fact, my first experience with porn was because of one of these CD's. One day I found a hidden folder that wasn't accessible through the (godawful) interface, and it was filled with high-res porn images and a few low-res GIFs.
- placeybordeaux 10y agoI wonder if mesh networking could take off in Cuba, there is obviously a desire strong enough that a strong sneakernet has evolved. It'd also be interesting to try and create a better UI for distribution of Internet content with latencies of up to 1 week.
- dvndvn 10y agoWe in the western world don't think about smaller limitations. In most countries, all private radio communications are banned. In India, during even first part of last decade, wifi frequencies are illegal for the people to use. Those days, MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte made a special trip to India to explain to the people who matter, that don't stupidly implement radio ban on WiFi usage.
- k__ 10y agoReminds me of the time, when CDs became mainstream and suddendly many of the classic games fit on one of such CDs. There was one with Warcraft, CnC, Doom, Quake, Monkey Island, One Must Fall, T.I.M., etc. pp. Thousands of hours of fun on just one disk...
- yandrypozo 10y agoThey don't download 851GB each week, what's really new weekly is up 200 Gb
- rezashirazian 10y agoI used to live in Iran when I was a child and we had the equivalent of this but for VHS tapes. Once a week, a man with a large suitcase would come by our house. He would set his suitcase on the table, open it up and show us his collection of American and Europeans (and very illegal) movies. My mom would pick 5-6 and return the tapes we borrowed from the week before. I was very young back then but I remember it vividly. I'd always beg my mom to pick at least one cartoon or a kids movie.
- pradn 10y agoIn Jafar Panahi's excellent film Taxi - a faux-documentary about a taxi driver's day in Tehran, where the driver is played by the director himself - you can see a bootleg video peddler take a ride to a client's place. He even defends his actions to the director (who he recognizes) as promoting free speech.
- lerpa 10y agoThere is a documentary called "Chuck Norris vs. Communism" on Netflix about this.
- jakub_h 10y agoVery illegal in Europe or very illegal in Iran?
- abricot 10y agoTake a wild guess...
- shahriar-alam 10y agoA whole different world! Unbelievable!!
- tech-no-logical 10y agoso, when you did have access to the internet, did the cloudflare captchas drive you as crazy as they do me ? how was the cpm (capthas per minute) ? seriously : it seems cloudflare drives about 90% of the sites I visit, judging from the "I'm not a robot" questions and captchas I get. congrats on the market share.
- navs 10y agoWe never had something nearly as elaborate as this but in Fiji, having anything more than dial up was considered a luxury. Portable Hard Drives weren't as common and USB sticks didn't store as much as they do now. It was all about burning CDs and handing them to friends at school/work. I think this might be the reason why most bus drivers in Fiji have the same damn songs playing ad nauseam.
- drcross 10y agoI'm disappointed by this article and I'm disliking the "noble savage"[1] tone of the rest of the comments. Yes, you may like it for it's quaint feel but I wanted the author to go into details of how the internet actually functions in Cuba, what sort of restrictions are in place and whats happening to move away from this regressive system. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage
- calimac 10y agomight be a superior method of curation than streaming. I wouldn't mind grabbing one every friday.
- PostOnce 10y ago> For 2 CUC a week Cubans have access to a huge repository of media while turning a blind eye to copyright. I find this a very strange thing to say. Why would you even bother to write that? It's not as though they could choose to import this stuff legally for the past many decades, or export any of their own works (the whole reason they would have any respect for some mutual copyright scheme, protecting their exports...) That's not even considering the crappy infrastructure, low income, and probably other issues I'm sure I'm overlooking. Anywhere that's been sanctioned or embargoed for a long time has an insanely high level of piracy, check Iran for another example.
- hidro 10y agoRemind me of a (sort of) similar story of how Iranians consume online content https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552423, though for a different reason.