14 ms·

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

104 points by steven 11y ago

jkot 11y ago
In 1987 public TV in communist Czechoslovakia distributed programs for 8 bit computers. TV presenter always said "switch on the magnetophones...", followed by 5 minutes of modem beeps :-)
ja27 11y ago
Similar article from last month: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/13117/tech-cuba-reforms/ http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/...
mxfh 11y ago
What happened to those wireless-plus-wheels approaches from about 10 years ago? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506193.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506193.stm Low-cost Communication for Rural Internet Kiosks Using Mechanical Backhaul: http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2006/mobicom_kiosks.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2006/mobicom_kiosks...
xacaxulu 11y ago
Probably safer at least.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
Now that's a fault tolerant distributed network. IP is jealous in some ways. Can you email with El Paquete? I also wonder if content is higher quality or at least more carefully curated than on the always connected internet.
chx 11y ago
This is how piracy worked in Hungary during the nineties. Maybe at first it was floppy disks that I can't remember but I remember 120MB QIC tapes (floppy interface, crazy slow) then DAT tapes then hard drives. Weekly delivery from Austria.
malkia 11y ago
Things worked for me like this while growing as a kid in Burgas, Bulgaria, up until I graduated in 1994. There was a guy that used to carry a big back of disks - Apple ][, but mostly PC, where he would let people copy off things he got, but often he charged - for example I had to pay something like $1 for Mission Impossible back then (the Apple ][ and the PC game - can't remember which one I've got). Open source wasn't really in my mind then, and It was a really good awesome moment when I saw that there are sources for a compression program (zip/unzip). Until then we've had PKWARE Arc, PKWARE Zip, LHA, LZH - and everything that was coming was only DOS binaries (no source). And then one day he got this disk with these sources, and for some reason he let me borrow the disk and copy it.
anc84 11y ago
> She did make that movie, she called it “Offline,” and she handed me a copy. It’s like El Packete, going in the other direction, and this time with meaningful content: I brought it back with me to the U.S. I hope you will watch it today. Links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlPiG-pDvGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlPiG-pDvGA which of course is blocked in Germany because > Unfortunately, this video is not available in your country because it could contain music from UMG, for which we could not agree on conditions of use with GEMA. Gate-keepers here, gate-keepers there. Youtube is a proprietary service that (can) arbitrarily disable access to whatever you shove into it. Please always remember that. If you want to spread your creations without other people controlling them, consider P2P or hosting them yourself.
- Liblor 11y ago
  I use a VPN that tunnels through Sweden and I just got the GEMA "error message", but I don't even live in Germany (so information leak should not be the case). After changing the VPN exit node to another country, it worked. "Gate-Keepers" can be a problem, but hosting videos on your own can be quite expensive, so I'd recommend to use several distribution ways/different hosters.
danko 11y ago
To be clear here, it's not a single thumb drive (as the title implies) but a network of thumb drives distributed through an ad-hoc parcel service. Frankly, it doesn't sound that different than the old shareware and disc-based multimedia subscription services that used to exist in the US in the early-to-mid-90s (such as LAUNCH and SoftDisk). The biggest difference I can see is that (a) it's largely pirated content and (b) there's seems to be some user generated content as well.
huxley 11y ago
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." — Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks (1989)
- ethbro 11y ago
  More importantly, never underestimate the invisibility of one station wagon full of tapes among thousands that aren't.
indexboy 11y ago
Venezuela here, there is 2 daily flights from venezuela to cuba, everyone that travels there goes with around 200 flash drives, sd cars, etc. The airlines (cubana and conviasa) doesnt care about what u take to cuba, ive seen ppl taking up to 3 fridges as their baggage
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > sd cars Now that would be an interesting evolution of Tanenbaum's maxim quoted earlier by huxley (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719710). :-)
- indexboy 11y ago
  Oh, forgot to say they also take pirates dvd vcd etc, with everything, software, books, movies, music, piracy regulation in venezuela doesnt exist and cuba ppl is untochable due to venezuela and cuba friendship so is kinda smuggling paradise.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    > piracy regulation in venezuela doesnt exist Is that literally true like in Iran, or is it simply not enforced? Venezuela signed the Berne convention.
drivingmenuts 11y ago
> 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.
- hcentelles 11y ago
  It seems like google is in Cuba right now, talking about this: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/google-testing-the-waters-in-cuba-118974.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/google-testing-the-wat...
- x5n1 11y ago
  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.
  - OneMoreIdol 11y ago
    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.
  - jahnu 11y ago
    > 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.
    - evilduck 11y ago
Zardoz84 11y ago
Looks like a evolution of RFC 1149 : https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
bane 11y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish
- sehugg 11y ago
  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.
- gregrata 11y ago
  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 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.
mangecoeur 11y ago
Ironically, this Cuban 'internet' is more secure and surveillance-free than the real one.
- hcentelles 11y ago
  Not really, unfortunately: http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-paquete-the-answer-would-seem-to-be-yes/ http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-pa...
GizaDog 11y ago
Cuba's mystery fiber-optic Internet cable stirs to life http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-cuba-internet-idUSBRE90L13020130122 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-cuba-internet-i... They have the pipe but the state controls it.
- dharma1 11y ago
  Was gonna say, just get Venezuela to pay for an underwater cable. Guess they did already, but only for select few.. at least they don't need to buffer their youtube videos :D Was there for a couple of months 10 years ago touring with a band. Great trip and wonderful people, but I doubt the government are gonna allow unrestricted access to information via the internet if the state newspapers/radio is anything to go by.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
hcentelles 11y ago
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. More on this: http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-paquete-the-answer-would-seem-to-be-yes/ http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-pa... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-in...
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Where is revolico hosted? What are your analytics like in a country with so little internet penetration? Does being in El Paquete mean that people are seeing ads that are now weeks or even months old?
  - hcentelles 11y ago
    The app is hosted in a typical cloud computing environment. The traffic from Cuba is 4M page views monthly. El Paquete gets updated every week so the people are seeing ads active the week before. We sell premium listing, our clients ask us for the right timing so its ads gets into El Paquete in the firsts positions.
Maken 11y ago
Is "El Packete" the real name of the thing or is the journalist constantly misspelling "El Paquete" though the article?
- lx 11y ago
  It's "el paquete" and it's not a thumb drive but instead 1TB of data moved around every week in external HDD.
- jordigh 11y ago
  God, I kept cringing as I kept reading the misspelling over and over again. Cubans in Cuba are very conscientious spellers and have excellent education in Spanish (education in Cuba has its perks). Seeing English spellings in Spanish writing attributed to Cubans is quite painful.
- jwise0 11y ago
  It is El Paquete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal The pervasive misspelling concerned me. If the basic details are wrong, what chance is there of the actual cultural details being right? It seems like the author does not speak fluent Spanish, which makes it difficult to trust their understanding of how el paquete actually travels.
martin1975 11y ago
This is sad. Hopefully satellite providers like O3B (http://www.o3bnetworks.com/customers/ http://www.o3bnetworks.com/customers/) make a dent in this market. It seems O3B exists primarily to satisfy connectivity needs for places just like Cuba.
paulhauggis 11y ago
but they have healthcare that is better than the US amirite?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
snorvell 11y ago
It's spelled paquete. An interesting sideline to this is the question of who or what produces this product. There's a compelling argument that the government might be behind it, or at the very least have some hand in its production and distribution. http://cubanotes.com/who-or-what-is-behind-cubas-peculiar-version-of-netflix/ http://cubanotes.com/who-or-what-is-behind-cubas-peculiar-ve...
keithpeter 11y ago
Quote from OA "El Packete is a very slow high-capacity Internet access connection; someone (no one knows who) loads up those drives with online glitz and gets them to Cuban shores..." On the off-chance anyone relevant in Miami is reading this: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum distributes 8GB to 10Gb of Creative Commons licensed classical music, mostly chamber. Might be useful to fill the odd corner of the media over (say) a month or two of releases. Or just put The Concert podcast on each release... http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library?filter=composer http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library?filt... ...older more classically minded citizens might appreciate the gesture.

104 points by steven 11y ago

jkot 11y ago

In 1987 public TV in communist Czechoslovakia distributed programs for 8 bit computers. TV presenter always said "switch on the magnetophones...", followed by 5 minutes of modem beeps :-)

ja27 11y ago

Similar article from last month: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/13117/tech-cuba-reforms/ http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/...

mxfh 11y ago

What happened to those wireless-plus-wheels approaches from about 10 years ago? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506193.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506193.stm Low-cost Communication for Rural Internet Kiosks Using Mechanical Backhaul: http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2006/mobicom_kiosks.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2006/mobicom_kiosks...

xacaxulu 11y ago

Probably safer at least.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

Now that's a fault tolerant distributed network. IP is jealous in some ways. Can you email with El Paquete? I also wonder if content is higher quality or at least more carefully curated than on the always connected internet.

chx 11y ago

This is how piracy worked in Hungary during the nineties. Maybe at first it was floppy disks that I can't remember but I remember 120MB QIC tapes (floppy interface, crazy slow) then DAT tapes then hard drives. Weekly delivery from Austria.

malkia 11y ago

Things worked for me like this while growing as a kid in Burgas, Bulgaria, up until I graduated in 1994. There was a guy that used to carry a big back of disks - Apple ][, but mostly PC, where he would let people copy off things he got, but often he charged - for example I had to pay something like $1 for Mission Impossible back then (the Apple ][ and the PC game - can't remember which one I've got). Open source wasn't really in my mind then, and It was a really good awesome moment when I saw that there are sources for a compression program (zip/unzip). Until then we've had PKWARE Arc, PKWARE Zip, LHA, LZH - and everything that was coming was only DOS binaries (no source). And then one day he got this disk with these sources, and for some reason he let me borrow the disk and copy it.

anc84 11y ago

> She did make that movie, she called it “Offline,” and she handed me a copy. It’s like El Packete, going in the other direction, and this time with meaningful content: I brought it back with me to the U.S. I hope you will watch it today. Links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlPiG-pDvGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlPiG-pDvGA which of course is blocked in Germany because > Unfortunately, this video is not available in your country because it could contain music from UMG, for which we could not agree on conditions of use with GEMA. Gate-keepers here, gate-keepers there. Youtube is a proprietary service that (can) arbitrarily disable access to whatever you shove into it. Please always remember that. If you want to spread your creations without other people controlling them, consider P2P or hosting them yourself.

Liblor 11y ago
I use a VPN that tunnels through Sweden and I just got the GEMA "error message", but I don't even live in Germany (so information leak should not be the case). After changing the VPN exit node to another country, it worked. "Gate-Keepers" can be a problem, but hosting videos on your own can be quite expensive, so I'd recommend to use several distribution ways/different hosters.

danko 11y ago

To be clear here, it's not a single thumb drive (as the title implies) but a network of thumb drives distributed through an ad-hoc parcel service. Frankly, it doesn't sound that different than the old shareware and disc-based multimedia subscription services that used to exist in the US in the early-to-mid-90s (such as LAUNCH and SoftDisk). The biggest difference I can see is that (a) it's largely pirated content and (b) there's seems to be some user generated content as well.

huxley 11y ago

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." — Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks (1989)

ethbro 11y ago
More importantly, never underestimate the invisibility of one station wagon full of tapes among thousands that aren't.

indexboy 11y ago

Venezuela here, there is 2 daily flights from venezuela to cuba, everyone that travels there goes with around 200 flash drives, sd cars, etc. The airlines (cubana and conviasa) doesnt care about what u take to cuba, ive seen ppl taking up to 3 fridges as their baggage

JadeNB 11y ago
> sd cars Now that would be an interesting evolution of Tanenbaum's maxim quoted earlier by huxley (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719710). :-)
indexboy 11y ago
Oh, forgot to say they also take pirates dvd vcd etc, with everything, software, books, movies, music, piracy regulation in venezuela doesnt exist and cuba ppl is untochable due to venezuela and cuba friendship so is kinda smuggling paradise.
- jordigh 11y ago
  > piracy regulation in venezuela doesnt exist Is that literally true like in Iran, or is it simply not enforced? Venezuela signed the Berne convention.

drivingmenuts 11y ago

> 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.

hcentelles 11y ago
It seems like google is in Cuba right now, talking about this: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/google-testing-the-waters-in-cuba-118974.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/google-testing-the-wat...
x5n1 11y ago
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.
- OneMoreIdol 11y ago
  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.
- jahnu 11y ago
  > 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.
  - evilduck 11y ago

Zardoz84 11y ago

Looks like a evolution of RFC 1149 : https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

bane 11y ago

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

sehugg 11y ago
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.
gregrata 11y ago
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 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.

mangecoeur 11y ago

Ironically, this Cuban 'internet' is more secure and surveillance-free than the real one.

hcentelles 11y ago
Not really, unfortunately: http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-paquete-the-answer-would-seem-to-be-yes/ http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-pa...

GizaDog 11y ago

Cuba's mystery fiber-optic Internet cable stirs to life http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-cuba-internet-idUSBRE90L13020130122 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-cuba-internet-i... They have the pipe but the state controls it.

dharma1 11y ago
Was gonna say, just get Venezuela to pay for an underwater cable. Guess they did already, but only for select few.. at least they don't need to buffer their youtube videos :D Was there for a couple of months 10 years ago touring with a band. Great trip and wonderful people, but I doubt the government are gonna allow unrestricted access to information via the internet if the state newspapers/radio is anything to go by.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

hcentelles 11y ago

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. More on this: http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-paquete-the-answer-would-seem-to-be-yes/ http://cubanotes.com/is-the-cuban-government-censoring-el-pa... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-in...

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Where is revolico hosted? What are your analytics like in a country with so little internet penetration? Does being in El Paquete mean that people are seeing ads that are now weeks or even months old?
- hcentelles 11y ago
  The app is hosted in a typical cloud computing environment. The traffic from Cuba is 4M page views monthly. El Paquete gets updated every week so the people are seeing ads active the week before. We sell premium listing, our clients ask us for the right timing so its ads gets into El Paquete in the firsts positions.

Maken 11y ago

Is "El Packete" the real name of the thing or is the journalist constantly misspelling "El Paquete" though the article?

lx 11y ago
It's "el paquete" and it's not a thumb drive but instead 1TB of data moved around every week in external HDD.
jordigh 11y ago
God, I kept cringing as I kept reading the misspelling over and over again. Cubans in Cuba are very conscientious spellers and have excellent education in Spanish (education in Cuba has its perks). Seeing English spellings in Spanish writing attributed to Cubans is quite painful.
jwise0 11y ago
It is El Paquete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal The pervasive misspelling concerned me. If the basic details are wrong, what chance is there of the actual cultural details being right? It seems like the author does not speak fluent Spanish, which makes it difficult to trust their understanding of how el paquete actually travels.

martin1975 11y ago

This is sad. Hopefully satellite providers like O3B (http://www.o3bnetworks.com/customers/ http://www.o3bnetworks.com/customers/) make a dent in this market. It seems O3B exists primarily to satisfy connectivity needs for places just like Cuba.

paulhauggis 11y ago

but they have healthcare that is better than the US amirite?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

snorvell 11y ago

It's spelled paquete. An interesting sideline to this is the question of who or what produces this product. There's a compelling argument that the government might be behind it, or at the very least have some hand in its production and distribution. http://cubanotes.com/who-or-what-is-behind-cubas-peculiar-version-of-netflix/ http://cubanotes.com/who-or-what-is-behind-cubas-peculiar-ve...

keithpeter 11y ago

Quote from OA "El Packete is a very slow high-capacity Internet access connection; someone (no one knows who) loads up those drives with online glitz and gets them to Cuban shores..." On the off-chance anyone relevant in Miami is reading this: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum distributes 8GB to 10Gb of Creative Commons licensed classical music, mostly chamber. Might be useful to fill the odd corner of the media over (say) a month or two of releases. Or just put The Concert podcast on each release... http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library?filter=composer http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library?filt... ...older more classically minded citizens might appreciate the gesture.