7 ms·

El Paquete Semanal

183 points by jrott 3y ago

yosito 3y ago
I witnessed El Paquete first hand in Cuba. To be honest, it's an easier and cheaper way to get quality content than the mess of walled gardens and DRM we have in the US.
- stavros 3y ago
  Piracy is nothing if not convenient.
  - cainxinth 3y ago
    It explains the success of Spotify. It was among the first music services more convenient than P2P downloading and manually tagging MP3s.
wpietri 3y ago
For years I've been joking about selling an "internet battery" for people going off the grid. I had no idea that some mad bastards actually did it!
- drpixie 3y ago
  And also done as a local wifi server - https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/
  - wpietri 3y ago
    That is amazing and heartwarming.
dtx1 3y ago
> It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained.[9][2] Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10]
- SaintSeiya 3y ago
  Indeed
oconnore 3y ago
I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals. When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited. In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rarely get wide adoption, such as CJDNS, Hyperboria, Mastadon, Lemmy, Fediverse, ActivityPub, various DHT based tools, and others. Hypothesis 1: if the threshold for action were high enough in the US, people would adopt these higher tech offerings en masse. Hypothesis 2: the low tech nature of El Paquete Semanal and similar networks is critical to their success. If hypothesis 2 is correct, then building a similar network using "boring" technologies would be more impactful than working on high tech open source tools.
- dmbche 3y ago
  The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck. The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net". In the US, you can always get access to whatever you need for free, with a little work, by torrenting for example. Torrenting is much less work than El Paquete or the stuff you listed.Why would anyone pay for those offerings instead? I think it's apples to oranges.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    You make a lot of good points. There's also the issue of scale. The US has a lot of land mass, and a whole lot of people at the very opposite edges of that huge land mass. Sneakernets work better across shorter distances.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- drpixie 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "threshold for action" but I think cost has a great deal to do with it. Running a cable (copper or fibre) along a street is expensive. So is putting up a wireless tower. And either have to be connected to the next town (cable, microwave, satellite, etc) and so on. Passing around some USB sticks is much cheaper - has rather poor latency but fine bandwidth :) I'd like to see some kind of peer-to-peer system doing the same thing. I imagine small devices (phones, raspberry pis etc) close enough that they could propagate updates or messages autonomously, and providing local wifi access to their collection of data. Perhaps fetching more recent updates from users when someone with more recent data wanders into town. Wouldn't work for streaming movies but might provide a nice sneakernet alternative.
SaintSeiya 3y ago
I've used it for many years while living in Cuba: for 1 USD I could buy it and someone come home with an external HDD and let me copy it or I would visit them and copy it myself. It was/is our main source of information away from the national media propaganda that constantly bombard us. The Cuban intelligence services quickly realize the threat of "El Paquete semanal" to bypass its communist censorship and infiltrated and threatened the main distributors to remove anything criticizing the government or news concerning what happens in Cuba. Currently is a shadow of what it was: just a collection of pirated movies, software, music and of course, infiltrated communist propaganda as well.
ggm 3y ago
OLPC also at times went with "some of the goodness here is the info, which we can distribute as HDD or CD and not as fetch it live" -So wikipedia and teaching materials do of course get revised but core competency knowledge overt in the older documents is rarely contradicted for maths, music, literacy, natural history, biology, chemistry to high school level. Whats different in El Paquete Semanal is the "samizdat" quality. I don't generally like the John Perry Barlow "information wants to be free" but it seems plausible that when governments put barriers to information flow, people turn to mechanisms for information flow which do not align with those barriers. I'm thinking about the number of satellite dishes in the middle east which moved indoors under RF transparent roofing materials, when governments banned dishes to control media access. Now, with Starlink: this might be a bypass to 2 way information flow.
- tonywastaken 3y ago
  In Cuba there are also satellite dishes under RF transparent roofing materials, usually DirectTV dishes smuggled from the US. I wonder if people have done the same with Starlink.
drpixie 3y ago
So sneakernet never went away, it just got less fashionable. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
- goda90 3y ago
  I don't remember where I read it but there was sneakernet for remote villages in India(?) where the bus stop had a computer that transferred data to/from the bus that only came through every few days. People would request what they wanted and it would be sent back on later buses.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Between the two methods, this is also an unintended analogue to how interplanetary Internet would look like. Mars colony designers and hard sci-fi writers, take note.
    - anthk 3y ago
      nncp-go it's a thing.
- qwertox 3y ago
  It's possible to send HDDs full of data to cloud services. Amazon even quotes Andrew S. Tanenbaum https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/ https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001918654-Fireball-FAQ https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001918654-Fi...
sergiomattei 3y ago
> “It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained. Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.” Curious to note. This opens the possibility of it being almost like The Matrix: a “resistance” movement that’s even then ultimately controlled by the system.
- dmbche 3y ago
  You should read 1984 - you're in for a treat. Snowpiercer as well.
  - speedgoose 3y ago
    In the big classics you also have Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      There is no evidence that the islands in Brave New World are not to be taken at face value.
ftxbro 3y ago
this some cyberpunk shit
Convolutional 3y ago
It's bizarre how the US attempted to block Cuba from getting the Internet, and still blocks Cuban Internet through many means ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/github-and-trade-controls https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g... ), but the presentation is that the suppression of content is of Cuban origin. It reminds me of when the US said Cubans were not allowed to leave Cuba, and the mental hospitals and prisons were filled with political prisoners. Castro announced anyone who wanted to leave Cuba, even those prisoners or mental patients, could go to Mariel harbor and leave if they wished. Suddenly the US did a turnabout and began demanding Castro stop letting Cubans leave Cuba, and too many were prisoners and mental patients, when the US suddenly discovered those were the inhabitants of Cuba's prisons and mental hospitals.
- tonywastaken 3y ago
  This is a positive, unbalanced spin on the Cuba issue if I’ve ever seen one. Read about what this person is talking about for yourself here, especially the section titled “Emigration process and violence”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
- drpixie 3y ago
  From outside (I am not American) the anti-Cuba position seems to have an almost religious fervor! Almost like They're socialist, we're capitalist; it's natural, true, and necessary that we must oppose everything about them. Similar to the catholic v protestant division that was very strong in the anglo world last century. Surely, if one really wanted to dismantle an evil empire, one would open the borders as much as possible and release the forces of greed and assimilation.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    In politics it's helpful to have an antagonist to point at and blame for everything bad. There's a villain in every story, and I best point him out to you in case you think it's me. Cuba is somewhat unique in that there are lot of ex-Cubans clustered in Florida, a swing state, who are there by virtue of being anti-Cuban-government. They are in favor of any policy that hurts the govt, even if it hurts the people left in Cuba more. Ultimately all this animosity boils down to the nationalisation of private (US) property in the 60s. An unforgivable crime As Amerixan William Wallace might have said "you can take our freedom, but you can't take our money." Politically though being anti-Cuban has little downside, and wins important votes.
bawolff 3y ago
> Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10] It seems like another conclusion could be they just don't want to give gov an easy excuse for a crackdown. Even in dictatorships optics matter, and its much easier to shutdown something for being porn
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
29athrowaway 3y ago
This video talks a bit more about El Paquete Semanal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E In Havana they also used to have "StreetNet" until 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPjJM6yYS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPjJM6yYS8
dmbche 3y ago
"Internet in Cuba is limited due to current government rules and regulations but also due to US sanctions that block Cuban access to some platforms like Zoom.[5] Cuba's Internet connection is via the ALBA-1 cable to Venezuela. The United States refuses to allow an undersea cable to pass 100 miles from Cuba to Florida. " From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba !!
- mparnisari 3y ago
  Lol. That last sentences says "citation needed".
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
funkaster 3y ago
If you know Spanish and want to learn more about a similar topic, The Street Network[0] is a great episode about SNET[1], how it was formed, interview to key players in it and how it crashed. Really good journalism and a great insight into how people tried to stay connected inside Cuba without internet. [0]: https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-street-network https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-street-network [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET
jgrahamc 3y ago
I got a copy of El Paquete a while back and wrote about what it covered here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/
- pelagicAustral 3y ago
  Nice article. Fascinating stuff indeed.
veave 3y ago
I read this and I can't help but think the CIA is involved.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mpawelski 3y ago
Linus did a short video about it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Duspzmudk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Duspzmudk

183 points by jrott 3y ago

I witnessed El Paquete first hand in Cuba. To be honest, it's an easier and cheaper way to get quality content than the mess of walled gardens and DRM we have in the US.

stavros 3y ago
Piracy is nothing if not convenient.
- cainxinth 3y ago
  It explains the success of Spotify. It was among the first music services more convenient than P2P downloading and manually tagging MP3s.

wpietri 3y ago

For years I've been joking about selling an "internet battery" for people going off the grid. I had no idea that some mad bastards actually did it!

drpixie 3y ago
And also done as a local wifi server - https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/
- wpietri 3y ago
  That is amazing and heartwarming.

dtx1 3y ago

> It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained.[9][2] Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10]

SaintSeiya 3y ago
Indeed

oconnore 3y ago

I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals. When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited. In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rarely get wide adoption, such as CJDNS, Hyperboria, Mastadon, Lemmy, Fediverse, ActivityPub, various DHT based tools, and others. Hypothesis 1: if the threshold for action were high enough in the US, people would adopt these higher tech offerings en masse. Hypothesis 2: the low tech nature of El Paquete Semanal and similar networks is critical to their success. If hypothesis 2 is correct, then building a similar network using "boring" technologies would be more impactful than working on high tech open source tools.

dmbche 3y ago
The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck. The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net". In the US, you can always get access to whatever you need for free, with a little work, by torrenting for example. Torrenting is much less work than El Paquete or the stuff you listed.Why would anyone pay for those offerings instead? I think it's apples to oranges.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  You make a lot of good points. There's also the issue of scale. The US has a lot of land mass, and a whole lot of people at the very opposite edges of that huge land mass. Sneakernets work better across shorter distances.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
drpixie 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by "threshold for action" but I think cost has a great deal to do with it. Running a cable (copper or fibre) along a street is expensive. So is putting up a wireless tower. And either have to be connected to the next town (cable, microwave, satellite, etc) and so on. Passing around some USB sticks is much cheaper - has rather poor latency but fine bandwidth :) I'd like to see some kind of peer-to-peer system doing the same thing. I imagine small devices (phones, raspberry pis etc) close enough that they could propagate updates or messages autonomously, and providing local wifi access to their collection of data. Perhaps fetching more recent updates from users when someone with more recent data wanders into town. Wouldn't work for streaming movies but might provide a nice sneakernet alternative.

SaintSeiya 3y ago

I've used it for many years while living in Cuba: for 1 USD I could buy it and someone come home with an external HDD and let me copy it or I would visit them and copy it myself. It was/is our main source of information away from the national media propaganda that constantly bombard us. The Cuban intelligence services quickly realize the threat of "El Paquete semanal" to bypass its communist censorship and infiltrated and threatened the main distributors to remove anything criticizing the government or news concerning what happens in Cuba. Currently is a shadow of what it was: just a collection of pirated movies, software, music and of course, infiltrated communist propaganda as well.

ggm 3y ago

OLPC also at times went with "some of the goodness here is the info, which we can distribute as HDD or CD and not as fetch it live" -So wikipedia and teaching materials do of course get revised but core competency knowledge overt in the older documents is rarely contradicted for maths, music, literacy, natural history, biology, chemistry to high school level. Whats different in El Paquete Semanal is the "samizdat" quality. I don't generally like the John Perry Barlow "information wants to be free" but it seems plausible that when governments put barriers to information flow, people turn to mechanisms for information flow which do not align with those barriers. I'm thinking about the number of satellite dishes in the middle east which moved indoors under RF transparent roofing materials, when governments banned dishes to control media access. Now, with Starlink: this might be a bypass to 2 way information flow.

tonywastaken 3y ago
In Cuba there are also satellite dishes under RF transparent roofing materials, usually DirectTV dishes smuggled from the US. I wonder if people have done the same with Starlink.

drpixie 3y ago

So sneakernet never went away, it just got less fashionable. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

goda90 3y ago
I don't remember where I read it but there was sneakernet for remote villages in India(?) where the bus stop had a computer that transferred data to/from the bus that only came through every few days. People would request what they wanted and it would be sent back on later buses.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Between the two methods, this is also an unintended analogue to how interplanetary Internet would look like. Mars colony designers and hard sci-fi writers, take note.
  - anthk 3y ago
    nncp-go it's a thing.
qwertox 3y ago
It's possible to send HDDs full of data to cloud services. Amazon even quotes Andrew S. Tanenbaum https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/ https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001918654-Fireball-FAQ https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001918654-Fi...

sergiomattei 3y ago

> “It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained. Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.” Curious to note. This opens the possibility of it being almost like The Matrix: a “resistance” movement that’s even then ultimately controlled by the system.

dmbche 3y ago
You should read 1984 - you're in for a treat. Snowpiercer as well.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  In the big classics you also have Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    There is no evidence that the islands in Brave New World are not to be taken at face value.

ftxbro 3y ago

this some cyberpunk shit

Convolutional 3y ago

It's bizarre how the US attempted to block Cuba from getting the Internet, and still blocks Cuban Internet through many means ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/github-and-trade-controls https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g... ), but the presentation is that the suppression of content is of Cuban origin. It reminds me of when the US said Cubans were not allowed to leave Cuba, and the mental hospitals and prisons were filled with political prisoners. Castro announced anyone who wanted to leave Cuba, even those prisoners or mental patients, could go to Mariel harbor and leave if they wished. Suddenly the US did a turnabout and began demanding Castro stop letting Cubans leave Cuba, and too many were prisoners and mental patients, when the US suddenly discovered those were the inhabitants of Cuba's prisons and mental hospitals.

tonywastaken 3y ago
This is a positive, unbalanced spin on the Cuba issue if I’ve ever seen one. Read about what this person is talking about for yourself here, especially the section titled “Emigration process and violence”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
drpixie 3y ago
From outside (I am not American) the anti-Cuba position seems to have an almost religious fervor! Almost like They're socialist, we're capitalist; it's natural, true, and necessary that we must oppose everything about them. Similar to the catholic v protestant division that was very strong in the anglo world last century. Surely, if one really wanted to dismantle an evil empire, one would open the borders as much as possible and release the forces of greed and assimilation.
- bruce511 3y ago
  In politics it's helpful to have an antagonist to point at and blame for everything bad. There's a villain in every story, and I best point him out to you in case you think it's me. Cuba is somewhat unique in that there are lot of ex-Cubans clustered in Florida, a swing state, who are there by virtue of being anti-Cuban-government. They are in favor of any policy that hurts the govt, even if it hurts the people left in Cuba more. Ultimately all this animosity boils down to the nationalisation of private (US) property in the 60s. An unforgivable crime As Amerixan William Wallace might have said "you can take our freedom, but you can't take our money." Politically though being anti-Cuban has little downside, and wins important votes.

bawolff 3y ago

> Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10] It seems like another conclusion could be they just don't want to give gov an easy excuse for a crackdown. Even in dictatorships optics matter, and its much easier to shutdown something for being porn

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

29athrowaway 3y ago

This video talks a bit more about El Paquete Semanal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E In Havana they also used to have "StreetNet" until 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPjJM6yYS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPjJM6yYS8

dmbche 3y ago

"Internet in Cuba is limited due to current government rules and regulations but also due to US sanctions that block Cuban access to some platforms like Zoom.[5] Cuba's Internet connection is via the ALBA-1 cable to Venezuela. The United States refuses to allow an undersea cable to pass 100 miles from Cuba to Florida. " From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba !!

mparnisari 3y ago
Lol. That last sentences says "citation needed".

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

funkaster 3y ago

If you know Spanish and want to learn more about a similar topic, The Street Network[0] is a great episode about SNET[1], how it was formed, interview to key players in it and how it crashed. Really good journalism and a great insight into how people tried to stay connected inside Cuba without internet. [0]: https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-street-network https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-street-network [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET

jgrahamc 3y ago

I got a copy of El Paquete a while back and wrote about what it covered here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/

pelagicAustral 3y ago
Nice article. Fascinating stuff indeed.

veave 3y ago

I read this and I can't help but think the CIA is involved.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mpawelski 3y ago

Linus did a short video about it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Duspzmudk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Duspzmudk