from Hacker News

El Paquete Semanal

by jrott on 6/11/23, 8:33 PM with 51 comments

  • by dmbche on 6/12/23, 3:26 AM

    "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

    !!

  • by bawolff on 6/12/23, 3:09 AM

    > 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

  • by yosito on 6/12/23, 12:25 AM

    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.

  • by drpixie on 6/12/23, 1:57 AM

    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

  • by ggm on 6/12/23, 1:15 AM

    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.

  • by wpietri on 6/12/23, 12:38 AM

    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!

  • by jgrahamc on 6/12/23, 6:27 AM

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

  • by oconnore on 6/12/23, 12:47 AM

    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.

  • by funkaster on 6/12/23, 4:04 AM

    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

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET

  • by SaintSeiya on 6/12/23, 1:09 AM

    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.

  • by dtx1 on 6/12/23, 12:40 AM

    > 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]

  • by sergiomattei on 6/12/23, 2:11 AM

    > “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.

  • by mpawelski on 6/12/23, 12:16 PM

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

  • by 29athrowaway on 6/12/23, 3:25 AM

    This video talks a bit more about El Paquete Semanal 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

  • by ftxbro on 6/12/23, 2:20 AM

    this some cyberpunk shit

  • by veave on 6/12/23, 8:51 AM

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

  • by Convolutional on 6/12/23, 2:54 AM

    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/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.