There's A Secret, Illegal Internet
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- Опубліковано 25 тра 2023
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In repressive countries, resourceful citizens have found ways to smuggle online content and effectively create an underground "offline" Internet.
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I'm Cuban and this video is 100% correct. For a short video, Linus did a great job summarizing our "underground internet" situation. I would love to see a longer and more in-depth video about Cubans' struggle with internet.
i would love to learn more about it! cuba is such a beautiful country, and after the fall of the ussr, that it managed to survive and continue on says so much about the spirit of cubans in general
I remember a left leaning media company doing a report on this several years ago. I want to say it was Vox or Vice.
I thought I wouldn’t see this comment until Monday!
I saw a documentary about the Snet setup in Cuba and I am a little sad that it is gone.
I mean the joy of traveling there to see it would have been a network enthusiast's dream, at least that documentary showed parts of it in great detail.
Asere, que bola!
Here in Germany downloading copyrighted media/software is strictly forbidden. So my university network which ran not only in the university but also on the student accomodations had its own "secret" intranet portal where the students shared all the media they had. One could find pretty much anything there and download it super fast. Was a pretty clever workaround and I guess is still in use.
We have a similar thing for course literature at my university in Sweden. You need the password and username and you're good to go
Thankfully, that isn't a situation in Croatia, police doesn't even raise an eyebrow when it comes to internet piracy.
👍
@@filiphabek271 Same in Macedonia. I've pirated so many movies, tv shows, anime (hentai), programs and other stuff to the point that if I lived in Germany, they'll probably brought back the death penalty just for me. I mean I have over 1TB of pirated anime on my hdd.
In my school in sweden we would just use the school internet to pirate because it was really fast. Sometimes the network guy would track you down and ask whats up, but was cool with it so long as you dont tank the internet for long.
We never called it offline internet, we called it sneakernet. It started with taking a floppy out of your computer and putting on your shoes and walking over to your friend's house.😂
You took the words out of my mouth. :)
High latency, significantly higher bandwidth.
Not one mention of sneakernet in the video, son I am disappoint ;-)
@@EikoandMog never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes going down the highway
@@zyeborm Or the amount of data a messenger pigeon can carry on micro-SD cards (RFC 1149, Internet Protocol over Avian Carriers).
As a cuban this is a very good summary of the situation. The one thing you didn't take into account is that most cubans can't even with internet subscribe to services since cuban banks because of the embargo are restricted. So even with internet access they will still need to watch pirated content.
Is it really piracy if you live someplace the digital product is not being sold in? They don't lose anything physically if a copy is downloaded so theft of property is a stretch and then they don't lose any money from sales if they were never going to sell to you. They don't even lose money hosting the content all the way from uploading to download data costs and everything in between that invloves the servers. For it to be piracy there needs to be a victim of piracy, there is no physical loss so that's out, and they were not selling to you as well as they had nothing to do with the servers the content was on they cannot claim a monetary loss from sales or just the server costs. Piracy? Nope, just downloading content that someone uploaded to a server so Cubans can have a clean conscience when they download the latest blockbuster movie that was not in local theaters nor ever will be.
And that's the thing about pirated copy counts and their claims of monetary loss. Every download to a region or country that it is not officially available in for sale is not a monetary loss because there was no sales involved and therefor the MPAA can go suck an eggplant when they say anything about the download counts.
@JETWTF i agree that there is no loss and it may not be technically piracy, my comments where more along the lines of even with access to internet the cubans will still not have easy access to the content, even if they most of the time would just like you rather pay for a streaming service.
This is an interesting scenario where centralized finance can gatekeep a large group of people from engaging with a foreign market
Bitcoin fixes this.
@Visstnok Not exactly, in cuba, the access to computers or even parts is very difficult. Youcan'tt go to any stores to buy any of this. The only way is for the people that can travel to sell them, and there are regulations for the amount you can bring with you. As you can imagine, the market price of everything is 3 to 4 times the price as in the rest of the world. For example, im a programmer, i wanted to buy a computer and the prices for second hand laptops with celerons, 8 gb of ram and 500gb hard drives was about 800 dollars. Take into account as well, cubans dont receive a salary in dollars but in cuban pesos and the conversion is about 200 pesos for dollar nowadays. So setting up a farm is discarded for 99% of the population. And the ones that can probably don't need to. But even if this wasn't the case a vast percentage of the population that is not technically savy are not going to go this route and will stick to what is easier for them, someone brings them a terabite or 2 every week of shows and movies...
Never thought I'd ever hear Linus utter the word "doujinshi"
Also never thought he'd butcher it completely.
I wasn't the only person thinking this then 😅
i thought i heard it but it didn't sound right so i assumed i misheard lol
thats what he says at 3:17 ?!
damn
doujinshi itself is basically self-published magazine, there are a lot of safe or original doujinshi sold on event across Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, etc.
I bet a lot of people outside Japan are thinking something else 👀👀
My man really said "doo-jin-chi" 💀💀💀
Cuban viewer (who moved to the US): thanks for covering this subject :)
Never thought I'd see Linus discuss the shady methods that get used over there to keep up with US shows and movies. One thing that also gets spread around is bootleg videogames. I fondly remember being in elementary school and trading burnt DVDs and flash drives with friends and getting to experience games like the older GTAs or Serious Sam.
i think el paquete semanal is super cool, and would love to hear more about it from a cuban!
@@ExperimentIV Years ago (circa 2015-2017) I was watching videos from a Mexican youtuber, a travel vlogger called Alan Estrada to improve my Spanish. In one of his travels to Cuba he was stunned to realize that people there knew of him and he had many fans who followed his every videos. Videos brought on external HDD from el paquete semanal! That was quite the shock for him. It was the first time I ever heard of this way of exchanging content. Reminded me of the late 90s early 00s and exchanging burnt CDs and DVDs of music, divxs and cracked video games. Oh these were the days
But how do you guys play all the latest live service games!!?? I'm only kidding of course.
@@CasepbXeven we should pirate live service games until the day they stop making them live service
Ftfy: the shady methods that get used over there by the government to people from US shows and movies.
Can you make more videos like this about recent tech history, and maybe make them a bit longer? I tire of the usual CPU reviews, but I love this kind of thought provoking content that provides a larger context about the digital world and how other people experience it.
dude do yourself a favor and go find someone who actually knows what they're talking about and researches History instead of this Think Tank shit show Linus shamelessly published
I second this! I thoroughly enjoyed this video and would love to see more like it learning history about how certain countries handled varying technologies differently
Seriously. This is the best content LMG had made in a while. And there's probably tons of unique interesting stuff like this they could get into
the Havana Street Network part of the video really showed how modular and decentralized the internet is. along with what they mean by "anyone can add to the internet". I've connected routers before between rooms and buildings, but I've never considered that if you were to continue that process you'd be pretty much building out another internet.
also find it fascinating to see how that isolated internet began to develope its own web
hmm remind me of a nation, oh yea the mainland china which fundamentally operate another internet or intranet depend on viewpoint
Not pretty much. Literally. That network fits the description of an internet. It does not fit the description of the world wide web. But how world wide is the world wode web if doesn't reach some places haha
I see. that's fascinating. so they literally built another internet, as well as another web. just one that wasn't world wide.
Technically it's not the internet but an intranet.
@@FlyboyHelosim so instead of international network, it's intRanation nAtwork?
I am from Cuba and I approve this message. (90% of the information is correct, some small details that a non-native could not understand)
I have memories of the Weekly Pack since 2007, but it was monthly at first, and only up to 256gb, which was the normal size of removable hard drives of the time.
😂😂😂 I laughed for 5 minutes when I heard the pronunciation of Linus for Paquete Semanal
I was a ¨Paquetero¨ for a while (the people that build the Weekly Package), and if anyone would like specific details on how it works, I can provide them.
How was it distributed? Did people go to some location with their own drives and download stuff, or was it hand delivered?
@@MrFastFox666 Few people had fast Internet access, and they downloaded as much content as possible, which they put together in a parent company. From there there was a huge courier system, including the national bus system that delivered hard drives all over the country. It arrived at Headquarters in the Provinces, which once again had their own messengers (on foot or by bicycle). that they then took it to houses that then sold the content to people. It's a huge system involving thousands of people and all this happened every week in a 48 hour window!
Con gusto quisiera saber, caballero!
The main thing I'm interested in knowing is how they'd try to bypass the low bandwidth of cuban Internet to get gigabytes of stuff downloaded in time.
I came here to look for the comment laughing at that pronunciation. I actually laughed out loud. Poor Linus. He tried.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurdling down the highway" - Andrew S. Tennanbaum
How many current viewers know what “tapes” are?
I just posted that, but you beat me to it!
Piracy used to be huge in India, I leave for a couple of years and come back - atleast among those I hang out with, there's no piracy anymore
Cheaper internet, rise of streaming, and this one is really important - region specific pricing on Steam have all contributed to this
India just moved to online piracy. It is still one of the top pirated countries because of censorship and bad streaming services
And what do they use all that higher bandwidth for? Larger and larger scam call centers.
Gabe mentioned piracy was a service-problem. Once the consumer is respected and the product has a fair price and few bugs, piracy ceases to exist.
@@NorseGraphicyep ❤️
And yet, people are still hating Steam.🤷♂️
As a Latinoamerican, Linus struggling to say "Paquete Semanal" fills my soul with joy lmao
Hahhahaha, yeah
"Páquetei semánal"
Would have been so easy to google the words and click the speech button, but nope. Linus decided to rawdog it!
I love that Linus changes his shirt when talking about the sponsor, so we can easily skip it
Use sponsor block
with revanced
You really think he changes shirts for that?!
@@theALTERRA i use the extended version and it works amazingly really, would recommend
The adds on this channel are usually 3 skips anyway so pretty easy
I'm Dominican and it is crazy to think that there only is a 9% difference of Internet Access to Cuba! My Cuban friend had told me the hoops he had to take in order to get a connection (this was around 2019-2021). That 9% really seems to be significant since it is SO easy to get a connection in the DR!
Dominican 🇩🇲 Dominica, or Dominican 🇩🇴 Dominican Republic?
Dominican republic
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 You can't see the "R" ?
I'm curious, what kind of hoops did they have to jump through to get a connection? Was this a connection to the state internet? This is so interesting!
@@herpderp5222 If I remember correctly, he had to buy a sim card that then he could reload data on (kinda like prepaid I guess). Then he had to go to this specific park and where he was able to get internet signal. Lots of websites/apps were blocked, I remember his mom (in the US) texting me a link to a vpn so that I could send it to him through Discord (since the app wasn't blocked at that time). He also told me how his grandma asked him once to go to the next town over to get the weekly package, I believe he just went to a random guy's house and he put the files in his drive. Also, there is a limit (at least for Cubans, idk about tourist) on how many tech items they take into the island. My friend had to sometimes leave his stuff in the US so that he could take as much stuff as he could for his family members.
This reminds me of that time when the Zetas Cartel secretly built a whole entire cellular network without the Mexican government noticing anything. It was eventually discovered and destroyed, but the network was incredibly extensive and complex for what it was.
As a kid, I lived in a very rural town in upstate NY. We had satelite internet but it was super expensive and super slow. Had to beg my parents to drive 20-30 minutes to a family members house to do anything online.
0:23 never thought I would see "its morbin time" and Linus say "dankest memes"
Be real and touch grass, instead of writing comments everywhere to get likes ("worthless pixels") 🤓.
As a cuban, you have no idea how proud it makes me hearing you talking about this situation...unfortunately I no longer live in the island and now that I have a fully unrestricted connection (with a good enough speed) I can tell you I do miss "el paquete" as the whole (first world) problem of selecting what to watch or what content to consume was taken out of the equation......I can even remember watching your videos from as far back as 2013 downloaded from UA-cam and directly to my PC thanks to the weekly package.
You don’t have to demonise Cuba because for it’s political past.
@@NativeVsColonial Thanks NativeVsColonial
@@eX1st4132 np bro, I know how Americans demonise countries just because of their political ideologies and cultural differences.
Whoever did the graphics for this one, I applaud your sense of humour.
Sputnik for satellite communications, Death of Stalin as Russian media, and The Wire as a comedy and so many nore. You’re doing great work!
And showing Teletubbies when talking of violent content... 😂😂
I feel "The Death of Stalin" was a mistake (happens when you work with a bunch of zoomers, who wouldn't tell Steve Buscemi from Victor Sukhorukov even if they saw them both in person - cause they don't care :) ) - they paired it with a legit example of a Bollywood blockbuster.
And "The Death of Stalin" was even banned in Russia. Haven't heard of the Indian Terminator getting banned in India, tho.
I'm Puerto Rican, but have a LOT of Cuban family and friends. I've heard tons of stories about SNET and the weekly package. Seeing Canadian UA-camrs dedicate entire videos to this topic was not on my 2023 bingo card. Lol. I'm happy this is being spoken about, though. A lot of people, especially Americans, are woefully unaware of what measures people have to take to be able to use less-than-basic internet in remote and/or oppressive countries. Internet may no longer be a luxury to us here in the first-world. But people in other countries struggle, even risk their lives, to have even a fraction of the data accessibility that we have. Excellent video. Thank you for spreading awareness.
I really thought this would be yet another video about dark web and piracy but I was way off. This video was great and highly educational for me. Thank you.
Yeah, it was a nice change. The topic of the dark web has been flogged to death now.
@@FlyboyHelosim agreed
In Poland where I live up until 1996 or so there was no copyright laws so there have been perfectly legal market squares for pirated content like games and programs as well as computer hardware and knockoff Nintendo NES hardware with pirated cartridges. They were advertised on television when I was a kid. With piracy been outlawed those hot spots of nerd culture sadly died off shortly after but not because of copyright but mostly due to better and better Internet adoption.
Ah yes, who could forget beloved American sitcom The Wire.
2:06 That was so horribly butchered it caused me physical pain
This reminds me of other "resistance" style communication networks, like pirate radio and "secret" numbers stations, some of which are still on the air if you know where to look. Think you'll ever do a video about the various forms and uses of amateur radio and how it can also be used as a slow internet with things like "sail mail" for boaters out at sea? With a laptop, a little bit of pre-downloaded software, a HakRF One, and a wire to use as an antenna (or just a wire to connect the RF1 to the mast's backstay lol), and bam, you got some signal and possibly some weak @$$ internet with a little work lol.
There is this thing called HAM Radio that has connections to the common internet from the very beginnings.
@@HTMLbrowser Yep. I just sometimes call it "amateur radio" because it sounds more professional because that's how the FCC refers to it lol. That and HAM has a bit of a negative connotation if you learn where it comes from. It comes from all the way back in the Telegraph days when some telegraph operators would get a bit sloppy, they would be referred to as "ham handed" lol.
I started watching the LTT videos in the weekly package, many moons ago. I am glad that LMG has dedicated this video to telling a fragment of our history in ICTs; only Cubans will understand the full story, sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, 😉.
When you said violent and teletubbies popped I busted out laughing.
80's internet in Australia for me was downloading a text file, reading it off line, then posting a back cheque with a list of games across country, and a week later several 5 1/4inch discs would show up with Duke Nukem and Commander Keen
I used to buy shareware like that too!
1:50 FYI, that's not Bollywood film. That's a Kollywood film from Tamil Nadu, India. Yeah, india has many film industries based on languages.
In the mid to late 90s in college, all the dorms (dozens of dorms - thousands of students) were on a single large network. Most people at the college turned on file sharing and made for a giant collection of whatever you wanted. That being said it was incredibly insecure, and it was vital you marked your shared content as "Read Only" otherwise someone would absolutely screw it up.
Fantastic editor work - Obama popping up for politics and "naked" Obama up for pornography, and then the Teletubbies for violent content had me in stitches, nice work!
0:50 TIL that at 2000, and apparently even 2020, only USA nd Cuba had Internet. I could've sworn I were surfing around for as long as I can remember, but turns out that must have been an odd case of amnesia speaking.
This was genuinely fascinating, it is refreshing.
Honestly, the old smuggled USB underground Cuban internet sounds much better that our internet in some ways.
it was more "filtered" only quality shows, movies apps and games etc bc you had to preserve space, a lil bit later when external HHDs got cheaper we got our dose of indian, turkish and korean content too haha
@@AlexLay Did hacking/malware etc ever become an issue?
Please more dense content like this. I love the concise approach to this kind of stuff
Hugesnet sucks, and getting the ISP to run you your own copper lines is cheaper over a decade
Absolutely spot on! Im Cuban and American. Born and raised in Cuba until I was 20. Now living in the US for 6 years and I can tell you one thing about "el paquete". It is in some ways better than what we have in here. I would watch really good titles right after thay aired in 4k for dirty cheap.5 Cuban pesos wbich is like $1 here in the US, no streaming service does this AFAIK
Is that the internet where search engines still answer questions?
Remember that?
As a Cuban, seeing a Canadian completely botch the pronunciation of "paquete semanal" was weirdly wholesome lol
oh next one like this you should do, one of my favorite stories is about how this guy in China created a standardized keyboard that allowed them to keep up with the rise of the personal computer. Unlike the US which has 26 letters the Chinese language has tens of thousands of characters. Which in the 70s and 80s wouldn't even fit onto the largest hard drives they had at the time. This man Chu Bong-Foo saved China from being left behind the tech boom. its kind of a fantastic story.
That does sound interesting!
never thought i'd hear linus (briefly) talk about cold war politics and i love it
This new "Linus" guy you hired is a great host, hope to see more of him!
“Who cares if tons of money is lost! How bad… how bad can this possibly be!” -The Pirater
Reminds me of Thailand in the mid to late 2000s, before fast home internet was available, some datacenters would have a "colo" service, where an individual could rent a virtual machine on a server/PC connected to a removable HDD dock, then go to the datacenter and ask the staff to swap out the HDDs. So you would remote desktop into the VM, download all the Linux ISOs (cough cough) to your HDD, then drive over and pick up the HDD, leaving another one in its place...
Then cheap fast ADSL and FTTH became a thing, and this practice is largely abandoned
This video honestly gives me hope for the internet in places like the US if companies get a bit too much control. Building a parallel internet doesn't seem so farfetched after seeing this.
LOL
Elon Musk's starlink basically makes this obsolete in any country where importation is possible
@@My_Old_YT_Account Not really a good horse to bet on given the fundamental flaws in that system's design
Ignoring Elon Musk's well-documented personal eccentricities, it's a system that's designed around having 40,000 satellites with an official lifespan of 5 years, which is dependent on a company that destroyed its own launch site in a completely avoidable accident.
That plus the current issues with throttling, coverage area, and receiver availability, it's hard to have confidence in the long-term viability of Starlink.
It's a shame, really, because there are a many parts of the world in desperate need of satellite internet that doesn't suck
While not terribly common, there are wireless community networks in existence.
Unexpectedly interesting video.
100k users on a network not connected to the rest of the world sounds insane. That has to be a record, isn't it?
I think North Korea also has an expansive statewide intranet.
right?? thanks to the Embargo to those countries which is also a record!!🎉🎉🎉 the same one Linus mentions as if it was just a smaller nuisance
1:50 The Death of Stalin is not a Russian film, it's a British one.
Moreover, it was actually banned in Russia.
Being a Pakistani I confirm this flash drive sharing of movies and other stuff in Pakistan as well. In Pakistan we had shopes with computer where we took our pen drives and get them filled with everything we wanted like literally everything. And every week new contents would be advertised in the shopes for the sale.
I love the way you referenced the internet as information sharing. Many online see the word internet as wired wireless and cloud connection
There's one thing about my country is that internet data is quite cheap, even so cheaper than food ration for two days.
Fascinating. These are some of my favorite videos you make--learning about what people around the world go through or have gone through to access computers and the internet. It's important to learn this history so we can protect our access in the future.
Known for a long time as *Sneakernet*
Because you walk around in sneakers carrying data. There's a Wikipedia page for it.
*EDIT* When we had dial-up modems, it was quicker to pass someone a CD.
As someone who was part of the network themselves, i could say that the biggest slowdown to this approach is the lack of appropriate servers and some massive lack in organization to host files, we need to setup like a torrenting tool to speed up downloads, instead of all of us getting the same file from the same host multiple times, specially when its all mechanical drives 😹 other than that its okish i would say.
By having a local torrenting like solution we could save more money to spend on hardware and preserve more the content. Also faster downloads. Like 100mb/s cable is barely half of what a mechanical drive can take.
This is super interesting to me.
Are you not able to share files via torrents on a LAN/intranet? Or am I misundstanding you and you are saying it never was tried or organized enough to be popular/the normal standard?
Are you saying the network was slow, file downloads slow, websites slow because everyone was overloading the single or few servers and there was not proper equipment also?
The network was just neighbor to neighbor running Ethernet cables/wireless links into one big mesh network, correct? Did people have the state internet and then the local intranet as like a 2nd connection? Did people have uncensored/hidden/non-state internet?
Did you navigate on the intranet network with IP addresses or domain names? Was there search engines that would find websites/or a website that listed all the other sites?
Did you guys have issues with hacking/malware etc?
@@herpderp5222 the torrenting was never popularized enough, since most hosts wanted to profit from it, thru the weekly package or selling each program and cracks separately, we used ftp, ftps, smb, Mozilla fileshare etc, you need username and pass, and yes you do get an ip address, but it's not really important, unless you are playing wow dota or cod in lan.
Even though the network looks pretty big, its splitted into smaller sectors, each with different services and operating hours.
oh proper equipment there was, yet still slow due to it being all used during peak hours, each host sets the package delivery at their own time, mostly Saturday, Sunday or Monday, something after that is late or a reseller. some areas dont have cables set so they bring 1 or 2 tb hard drives and they copy the data to your pc.
the greater issue is latency and the mixing of high quality 1gb cable with 100 mbs cable and even telephone cable 🤯, ping, speed on what is basically daisy chained connections, signal integrity they all take a dunk and is a hot mess if you are not tech savy, did i forget to mention about US TV signals also getting sent over the same cable? well yeah, that cable its like a swiss knife.
you could have both networks running internet and intranet, but the internet is so slow and restricted and expensive that its basically a no brainer to get locally connected only.
hacking thru network, not really, There is alot of old hardware yet relatively safe, except viruses on files from the weekly package, those are made by external sources.
What was the main pro to this local solution? the fact that you can get tons of movies, games and programs relatively cheap.
cons, its literally pirating and making profit from it. and no real internet, yet slow grow.
Reminds me of the guy in HL2 where someone asks him how he knows something and he's like "I downloaded most of the internet before the fall"
that's russell from hl alyx, not hl2
Sadly the internet has become a carefully crafted propaganda machine. Just like the MSM the MSM is not to be trusted for content that is controlled
As a venezuelan who left the country. I can confirm this is how things go in totalitarian states. We used to be well connected but the regime started isolating everyone. But now you can go to your local mochilero and get any season of anime in a flash drive..come back tomorrow and have that and whatever goodies he could fit as well for low prices. X3
Back in the modem and pre flatrate days we even did that here in Germany.
Around 1994 for example our little group had gotten hold of a bunch of QIC80 streamers for free and the medium was large and robust enough to share the latest stuff with your friends.
3:17 Linus pretending to not be reading doujinshi by absolutely butchering the pronunciation... we know what you do mr secret culture enjoyer
Jessica Pigeau you've really outdone yourself. Amazing content
I'm Canadian and there's a not insignificant portion of this country that is still serviced by dial up or nothing at all
I saw a quite interesting video on this underground network a while ago here on UA-cam. Highly worth the watch for anyone interested in more info on this topic. I would've found this super cool as a kid, and the geek in me still finds it cool now. The ingenuity of some people never ceases to amaze.
1:27 “American Sit-Coms” = Image of The Wire
Shieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
1:07 uuuuuuuh i think you may have screwed up the map lol its all grey lol
I remember using CDs to browse "internet" sites. They would often come with magazines or you could order them. I remember in 1995, looking at a universities website on a CD rom before I had internet.
This one hits a spot similar to learning about underground esports and fandoms also hits. I love it
My interactions with Cubans was in 1994 - 1996. I was in GTMO when there was a flood of immigrants leaving Cuba. Those people were some of the greatest personalities I had ever met. Most were highly educated, and some spoke English. I heard so many terrible stories of hardship and witnessed the loss of life for some of them fleeing Cuba. It was a pivotal time for those seeking admission into the US and I'm glad to have been part of there journey. They were beautiful people and I'm glad to see Cuba opening up.
Wake up the worst place ever is a neighborhood in North America
The hardships are caused by the united States. I don't blame them for wanting a better life for themselves and family but we have to recognize why they are like that. It isn't because the country is mismanaged but rather the US physically denies any ships and trade to this country because they are a leftist country.
It's no longer about punishing them for aligning themselves with Russia. Modern Cuban politics are far removed from Russia. The US under Trump has been friendlier with Russia than Cuba.
Don't get me wrong Cuba isn't perfect, but we need to start putting things in context and stop romanticizing people fleeing.
Ah a guy who worked at the illegal torture base the US runs out of Cuba against their wishes to circumvent domestic laws against cruel and unusual punishment. I'm sure this is a very trustworthy individual
Yeah, I've loved all the Cubans I've met; I'm more than happy to have them here
Cuba was never closed, dude. It's isolated by an illegal blockade.
Reminds me of the old tech comme4ent "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with floppy disks"
As a sidenote, I read that no network has larger bandwidth than the physical transport of drives. Amazon even offers that service. They have this van with a massive amount of tape drives that can carry petabytes at a time. It's used for data migration between data centers, since moving that amount of data through networks would be too slow. I find it mindblowing, to be honest
Even though I come from Colombia, It never crossed my mind that so many people were still without reliable, uncensored internet. I'm thankful that I do now
I was hoping Linus know or mentioned how there is UA-cam on the Weekly Package and how his channel has a folder with each daily video of the past week on it. Even Wan Show. I watched Linus for two years before I even got to enter to UA-cam myself for the first time
That thing about execution in north korea is a myth. I hope you didn't get that info from Yeonmi Park.
"In one of her accounts, Park has claimed that when she was 9, she had witnessed her best friend's mother being executed in a stadium at Hyesan, for simply watching a foreign film. However several North Korean defectors from Hyesan had disputed its plausibility and said that public executions don't ever occur in stadiums. Additionally Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University, who had interviewed hundreds of defectors from North Korea, said that he was "skeptical whether watching a Western movie would lead to an execution", and that he felt it wouldn't even be likely for one to be arrested for it."
Yeonmi Park was exposed as a right wing grifter. A lot of other NK defectors in South Korea and elsewhere say life there is harsh, but not that harsh
@@LouisSubearth Go outside. Get some hobbies.
No, it's all true, I was there, I was the movie!
Exactly, nothing in this video makes sense either, he first presents Cuban government as scary gov who hates internet, makes everything illegal and doesn't want the internet and then he says the street network got absorbed by the gov and moves on without explanation, he also selectively only selectively picks one country to compare cuba's internet population while Cuba is more online than other neighboring countries, stupid video overall
@@Dr.Mohandes It's because if they compared it to Haiti it would make Cuba look good, that's a no-no. Gotta skip over it and pick the next one...
Imagine watching James bond movie while the government is trying to kill you.
I'm from Honduras. I didn't have permanent internet access in my house until like 6 years ago, so what I did was everyday after school went to my grandmother's house and downloaded youtube videos with an extremely slow internet into my pen drive to watch later at home. I think I may have some lost media UA-cam videos somewhere in my drive. It took me a few years to get used to not to downloading every video I liked.
Please make more of these geopolitical centered tech episodes, it was a really interesting take!
Speaking of doujinshi i would love to hear what the fanfiction climate was like on those networks. Theres no way it didnt exist in some form even with all the restrictions.
When I started working offshore in 2010, most of the oil rigs had satellite internet but you were lucky if you could load Facebook. Most did have local servers that the electronics technicians would setup that you could grab and put whatever shows you had on your portable harddrive. Almost like Little Free Libraries but for bootleg movies and shows.
Man looking at that map at 0:50 and remembering my dad and I were one of the first in the Chicago/Wisconsin area to connect to the internet in the 1990’s and use it almost every day since then.
Not much has changed for us but the rest of the world has changed and finally started using the internet too.
Quite possibly the most interesting Techquickie of them all. Thanks Linus & team.
I'd like to see a Techquickie on alternate OS to Windows to revive XP - 8.1 PCs. People need to stop binning old tech that still works.
lmao just say you want another Linux video no need to make it complicated
Best sponsor yet. I haven't used this specific service but I've signed up for another and it's rediculous how many places have your info and are selling it. Those deletion services that send take down requests for you are invaluable.
It's horrific that people have to risk imprisonment and execution to share not just factual information, but entertainment, in so much of the world. Education and art are human rights. Fight on, you brave bastards.
This is so cool to hear about. As an American, we just have no idea about stuff like this. I’m glad the good people of these countries can figure out how to “stick it to the man”
The Cuba government turned a blind eye. They wanted their citizens to have entertainment but they have to constantly fight back against US propaganda.
Don't get me wrong Cuba isn't perfect but what they are doing is generally working which is very impressive since the US doesn't allow any other nations to trade with them.
The US til this day is constantly trying to overthrow their government. The vast majority of Cuban love their government they understand the hardships is from the US and not from their government.
When it comes to happiness and healthcare they have the US beat.
Although things are tough for them, it's actually worse in the rest of Latin America where US interests dominates. Corruption,murder and 12 inequality is so bad in places like El Salvador in Honduras. Although they have amazing resources and wealth. That all goes to the very top in their country and the rest leave and goes to the US.
Cuban citizens understand this.
[Sorry for the rant just wanted to put everything in context]
A lot of the software used for bypassing censorship is made by Chinese people trying to bypass the CCPs Great Firewall of China.
What? Literally UA-cam and twitter and fb were ALL ENAGGED in state run censorship during 2020 elections. All 3 banned a sitting a USA president illegally. Then UA-cam banned channels which were streaming trump events. And then if they did allow streaming…they turned off comments across any channel which was streaming rallys and such.
That's because as Americans we are the people who are the man, blockade sanctions and other forms of economic warfare are why other countries get put into precarious situations
and you still have no idea. even Trump might have a better take on Cuban and Korean History than Linus with this Think Tank bullshit
damnn that’s crazy bro
As a Cuban, the nostalgia of seeing some of our old websites on a Linus video hit hard 🥲
Those times were amazing.
This was actually amazing! SO MUCH that I'd LOVE to see a TechLonger video on this! Or even a series of them. This is SO interesting.
As an Indian who moved to North America, I was surprised to see how much more expensive internet here is compared to India. The ISPs are lousy as hell and could take days to restore a fiber cut incident. I still remember this one time when it took a record 17 minutes for a guy to arrive, fix the fiber cut on the side of the road and restore connectivity.
4g data plans in India are $6 a month where you get 4gb PER DAY with throttled speeds (unlimited) for the rest of the day if you exhaust the 4 gigs.
Here the best 4g plan I found was for $12 where I get 10gigs for the entire month. Fiber-connection are way way worse and astronomical in comparison. In India, you can get 300mbps (uploads and downloads, unlimited) for $7 for a combo that also gives you access to 5 other streaming services for the month. While I pay $70 (after the 50% student discount) here for the exactly same speeds (less consistent)
I don't quite understand how can purchasing power parity not work in the favour of NA in these cases since Internet seemed to be born here!
Competition watchdogs are pretty toothless in the USA.
This is one of the best Techquickie episodes I think I’ve ever seen
The sneakernet is still faster than the internet, in terms of bandwidth delivery, still. We'll see if the internet beats sneakernet by 2040 as predicted.
Even better: sneakernet is curated. Minimal ads, less scams, and a collection that was worth the time and effort to store.
Especially that signal to noise is becoming more of a problem for the webz, sneakernet bypasses all that and is often quicker to find exactly what you want when you discover the right node.
Eastern Europe, Romania, we had insanely giant "Lan" networks even before internet was a thing.
Those networks and all those people and knowhow made us an internet powerhouse in no time. And from a "poor backwater communist country" we reached top 3 world internet speeds for almost a decade (4th in the world now).
All because those "illegal" local networks and a ton of computer and network engineers that made it possible.
I helped a coworker setup a PC to send to her relatives in Cuba. Besides having to install a 56k modem in 2012, I loaded the Spanish language Wikipedia database, productivity software, and a bunch of video games with no cd cracks. I also left installers for a few encryption/ data destruction programs incase anyone wanted to start a revolution.
death of stalin is not a russian movie
Linus talking about cuba is the last thing I expected today hehe.
Imagine getting executed in NK for having 1TB flash drives full of big chungus memes
I hear that in the days before we had fast internet, there was a market in Scotland called "The Barras"
A stall would appear with big ring-bound books of software titles.
If a visitor indicated interest in one or more titles, word would be sent to the guy holding the media, and a kid would appear with an appropriate number of CD-R disks.
Occasionally, the police would appear and investigate, grabbing the stack of illicit media.
They would count up the number of copies of Autocad, Lightwave, F1-GP2 etc, multiply it by the MRP and then the papers would report that police had seized over 15 million pounds worth of stolen goods!
Love love LOVE content like this, dense, concise and factual; not to mention really interesting and cool ✨😊
Huh. Sounds a lot like my (hopefully) former country. Which is getting worse and worse in terms of uncensored access to the internet :(
Which one?
100% accurate for foreign research. There are some points I’d improve upon, such as the government’s constant pressure to suffocate S-Net, or how the disconnection is not because of the embargo, but because the Castro regime never wanted people to get a glimpse of how people lived their lives overseas so they can keep their Marxist illusions alive as much as possible. The weekly package tho, damn, even tho I now live overseas and have unrestricted access to the internet, never have I ever been able to get ahold of such a volume of information the way it was categorized and organized by the “paqueteros”. Even now, respect and kudos to the initiators!
This video is actually very informative, would definitely like to see follow ups on sensored nations in the near future!!
since I saw some others from germany talking about this I wanted to add some further information about it. from what I know streaming and even downloading content you haven't bought isn't really much of an issue her what is considered illegal though is "distribution" of media. I put that in quotes because they really stretch the definition of that as much as possible. it doesn't just mean someone uploading a movie onto youtube without permission or someone offering to download a new album from a website no it also includes the seeding of torrents like any amount of it. even if you seed a torrent for half a second and some downloads 1KB of data that already completely fulfills the violation.
the way they find out about this is that there is a dedicated company which only has one product and one purpose. they have invented a tool to spy on peer to peer connections in germany which checks the hashes of what is being send so if they find a hash that is in the list of hashes of rightholders involved with this they request the userdata of that IP address from the ISP it belongs to. so they get peoples name and address and other details which then is sold to the specific law firm which represents the rights holder of this piece of media in germany. these law firms only exist to send out letters to people telling them they are doomed basically because of what they did and typically demand at least 700-1000€ for one piece of media seeded once even if it was just a second. legally you can't really do anything about this besides wait until they take it to court which takes years and hope they make an error filing it to court since they copy and past thousands of letters and stuff liket that in those law firms every day. the first letter also includes something they want you to sign but they don't tell it's not legally required to do so but if you do you are liable for any further distribution so if you seed 1KB to one user and that user ends up seeding the file to 100 users you'll have to pay the fine 100 times more and if those 100 users seed that file again you are liable for each new one that receives it.
so all in all you get spied on and if they find out your actual IP address you get fucked over.
Nice to see this dudes getting back to what he enjoys doing
Large chunks of Australia are so remote that people in these areas still have to rely on patchy satellite internet. We also don't have a lot of competition in the area of communications so companies don't really have to try too hard.
My mother's side of the family resides in Havana Cuba, I visited when I was much younger and the "Offline internet" was how my Uncle got access to CoD Black Ops 1 on his PC which I had tons of fun playing right after it's release. As you can imagine, the game was banned in Cuba (If you played the beginning of the game you can imagine why lmao) so playing it IN Cuba definitely added to the experience for sure. 😂 Too bad it was Castro's body double. 🤷♂