
The Cuban CDN - shdon
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/
======
tuna-piano
One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I
saw when I was there earlier this year.

You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government
offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and
inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules
about the cards you can buy.

Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business -
which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk
around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you
a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the
officially priced $2 card.

But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you
probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.

~~~
emilsedgh
That reminds me of a funny story.

I used to live on Tehran, Iran. All restaurants, stores and businesses must be
closed after 12:00 AM in Tehran.

So one night me and a friend were driving around the town in midnight and we
were quite hungry. So we found a nice guy selling tea in the winter and there
were other people around. We asked them if we can find food anywhere in town
in this hour.

One of them gave us an address and told us we should just go there and wait in
the car.

We didn't really believe, but we gave it a shot.

I kid you not. At 4:00 AM in the morning, in an alley, we stopped and a
sketchy man came over and handed us a menu!

It was fast food. Pizza, burgers and chicken strips. It wasn't really good.

It was a few years ago. Nowadays there are always a few people hanging around
and they sometimes open the doors and let people in.

~~~
StavrosK
Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night,
you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you
want a cold beer.

See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these
guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to
smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any
weed?"

The guy looked _horrified_ and quickly blurted out "No, no, only beer! You
can't get that stuff!" before moving along.

It just struck me as funny that they would dodgily sell you illegal beer but
that they would be righteously indignant at weed. "That, sir, is where I draw
the line of illegality!"

~~~
smallnamespace
Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't
an undercover cop.

~~~
1propionyl
Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem,
because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring
villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth.

Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in
more touristy and "Americanized" places.

~~~
themartorana
Is the illegalization (made up a word) of weed in Europe at all a USA export
as well? Or did they come to it on their own?

~~~
digi_owl
Hard to say. The history is murky and involve a whole mess of international
conventions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs)

Seems to be the convention that brought cannabis into the fold.

------
justratsinacoat
Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick
in my mind:

1\. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week to get the equivalent of El Paquete"

2\. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old

3\. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly
distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata

Thus: what the fuck!? It'd take me _weeks_ to assemble this kind of thing,
especially given point #1 above. Sure, a lot of this stuff could be farmed out
to scrapers/sickbeard/whatever, but this level of curation plus the quick
turnaround plus the distribution (how many portable 1TB drives are
circulating?!) plus the download speed requirements... Who is doing this, and
how? There's clearly _some_ really great high speed connections in Cuba. Are
these guys backed (or at least tolerated) by the state or something?

~~~
yandrypozo
"... at 851GB ... 11Mbps 24 hours a day" I'm from Cuba and I can say that
weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so
what's real new each week is up to 200 GB, those guy store all that
information in a lot of common hard drives and distribute the package just
coping from a portable hard drive to another one, that's the "cloud" for
Cubans :(

this article should be named as 'The Cuban CDN and the Cuban cloud'

~~~
justratsinacoat
>I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains
files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB

Right, thanks! I made the erroneous assumption that the bulk of the data
changed weekly (thanks to that "... 851GB ... at 11Mbps 24 hours a day"
thing). Keeping the AV updates/some text-heavy-craigslist-alike current is an
entirely different proposition.

Here I thought this was a revolutionary high-throughput sneakernet content
accretion system possibly operating under the government/telcos collective
nose, but as others point out it's probably more like the warez FTPs of the
90s. Here's hoping wider pipes, both technologically and ideologically, come
to Cuba soon.

------
oblio
I was expecting an announcement for a new Cloudflare CDN location in Cuba.

What I found instead was extremely interesting and funny.

I won't spoil it, so go read the article :)

~~~
jgrahamc
It's not out of the question that we'll have a PoP in Cuba.

~~~
eastdakota
In fact, it's quite probable. Doubt it'll happen in 2016, but bet it will by
the end of 2017.

~~~
Alupis
> we'll have a PoP in Cuba

Why though?

Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very
advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any
of the more connected Caribbean nations.

Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up
infrastructure in Cuba... ?

~~~
CompuHacker
Cubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.

~~~
Alupis
Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't
provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse
websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from
a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's
clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba).

It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.

~~~
Graphon1
It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international
people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether
for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a
benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and
within reach for everyone.

In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US
DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies.
Then everyone.

~~~
Alupis
> And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone

Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend
their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small
nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will
follow.

From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply
don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So
putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations
seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor,
etc).

They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's
generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen
first before Cubans will feel any benefits.

So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for
anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans
are minimal-to-none.

Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could
instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it
immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites,
protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve
performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.

~~~
skybrian
I haven't used Cloudflare, but aren't you paying to make your website globally
available? Good access from Cuba is one small part of that. Maybe not the part
you care about, but other people might - that's what happens with bundling.

~~~
Alupis
> aren't you paying to make your website globally available?

No, any website (unless blocked by a nation-state) is by default accessible
globally.

Yes, Cloudflare's CDN offers increased performance for global visitors, but
with so few people online in Cuba, there's very little sense in fronting the
cost of building all this infrastructure just to have a Cloudflare PoP there.
There's many other nations much larger and better connected that CloudFlare
does not have a PoP in, so why pick Cuba?

Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds
faster. Getting online in the first place might be a bigger concern for
starters...

~~~
skybrian
You pay a CDN to get better performance (globally) than you would get by
default. It's up to the provider to decide what "better performance" means and
build more infrastructure to support that.

As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about
how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new
endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries to
spend it on.

~~~
Alupis
> As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick
> about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved

This was a public discussion, and therefore I have every right to "chime in".

As a paying customer, I have even more of a right to "chime in", as Cloudflare
decisions may impact my business.

Putting a PoP in Cuba because "bleeding hearts from decades of terrible
government policy" isn't a sound business decision. Nobody has offered any
better explanation of advantages other than the novelty, and frankly, if
that's the core reason... that's a bad decision and a blatant waste of money.

------
roninb
I wonder what the future of _El Paquete Semanal_ will be once Cuba inevitably
gets less ridiculously priced and more available internet access. As it
stands, there could be a large percentage of users who don't even have NICs,
as all you'd need for _El Paquete Semanal_ is a USB port.

I'm also interested in whether it's more of a loan/library service where this
org has hundreds or thousands of hard drives that get loaned out once a week
and swapped out for new content or if someone has to physically sit and wait
for the subscribers to copy data over. The logistics of this are so
fascinating, I just want more!

~~~
dleslie
It will disappear.

El Paquete Semanal is not at all unlike the combination of sneakernet and
shareware CDs that I enjoyed in semi-rural western Canada, during the 80s and
early 90s. We were crippled by long-distance fees, and very few FidoNet BBS'
were available; IIRC, there was one in my local calling area, and it was
hideously expensive.

The local community bookstore started by selling shareware discs, in 5.25 and
3.5; and when it came available, in CDs. They were professionally packaged,
and they restocked every Tuesday. The demand for content was high enough that
restocking so frequently didn't mean throwing out old content. If 1tb USB
drives were available then we would have used those; but they weren't, and the
most economical way to deliver content was through CDs and discs. Since
burners were rare, and because disc and floppy medium aren't zero-cost, it
made sense for the local bookstore to sell the packaged content.

With the advent of high-speed internet to our homes, we were a test area for
the deployment of cable internet in around '96, the bookstore stopped selling
shareware altogether.

~~~
roninb
Thanks for your input, this is a really interesting parallel. Although, you
didn't have to worry about censorship and a repressive government in Canada,
you're probably right that it will disappear.

Do you remember what kinds of software was available at the bookstore? Was it
only media like games/simulations/etc or did they have business/productivity
software and operating systems?

~~~
dleslie
There was all manner of shareware; applications and games alike. There was
also your regular boxed software, where the likes of Microsoft Works and Turbo
C were available for purchase at obscene prices.

I picked up Linux at that same book store, it came on a CD with a book from
SAMS publishing called "Using Linux". It was Slackware, iirc, using a 1.x
kernel of some kind.

------
rezashirazian
I used to live in Iran when I was a child and we had the equivalent of this
but for VHS tapes. Once a week, a man with a large suitcase would come by our
house. He would set his suitcase on the table, open it up and show us his
collection of American and Europeans (and very illegal) movies.

My mom would pick 5-6 and return the tapes we borrowed from the week before. I
was very young back then but I remember it vividly. I'd always beg my mom to
pick at least one cartoon or a kids movie.

~~~
jakub_h
Very illegal in Europe or very illegal in Iran?

~~~
abricot
Take a wild guess...

------
PostOnce
> For 2 CUC a week Cubans have access to a huge repository of media while
> turning a blind eye to copyright.

I find this a very strange thing to say. Why would you even bother to write
that? It's not as though they could choose to import this stuff legally for
the past many decades, or export any of their own works (the whole reason they
would have any respect for some mutual copyright scheme, protecting their
exports...) That's not even considering the crappy infrastructure, low income,
and probably other issues I'm sure I'm overlooking.

Anywhere that's been sanctioned or embargoed for a long time has an insanely
high level of piracy, check Iran for another example.

------
jitix
Reminds me of my college days. I studied at a college in India that was
located in the mountains (in Sikkim). While there was decent Internet for all
academic work, access for fun stuff was very limited. So our solution was to
download as much stuff (games, movies, series, books, etc.) as we could during
vacations at home, bring them back and share them on a organically grown LAN.
The downloads were sometimes pre-planned: one person downloads this and the
other person downloads that.

The take is that people always find a way to access stuff from the Internet.

------
lllllll
Back when internet was _really_ slow here in Spain I used to send CD's and
DVD's filled with music, comics, films,etc to an internet friend I had from
Greece(can't remember now how we met, maybe soulseek?), and he'd send me back
his own curation of contents. This article reminded me a bit of those times.
Too bad we are not in contact, we could have a laugh about it :)

------
forinti
I was at the last FISL
([http://softwarelivre.org/fisl17?lang=en](http://softwarelivre.org/fisl17?lang=en))
in Porto Alegre and attended a session by Pablo Mestre
([https://twitter.com/elmor3no_](https://twitter.com/elmor3no_)) on the free
software movement in Cuba.

I was really impressed by what they achieved, given that they have little
internet access. He mentioned that the largest network was the one linking
health-related institutions and that many doctors had internet at home (even
if at slow speeds).

------
melvinmt
This brings back memories to the Twilight CD-ROMs [1] we had in the
Netherlands in the late nineties that came out every month and had all the
latest (cracked) games and applications on it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(CD-
ROM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_\(CD-ROM\))

~~~
mercer
Oh man, that's some nostalgia. I grew up without internet access, but every
once in a while a visitor would bring a bunch of computer magazines
(Computer!Totaal was my favorite) that usually came with CD-ROMs full of
stuff.

In fact, my first experience with porn was because of one of these CD's. One
day I found a hidden folder that wasn't accessible through the (godawful)
interface, and it was filled with high-res porn images and a few low-res GIFs.

------
shklnrj
This reminds of the LAN we had in college. We used to use the software DC++
and then students shared the files that they had downloaded. You could access
almost any file at 100MBPS.Someone was sure to download the latest episode of
what you wanted to watch. If someone did not, then you went on the internet.
Sometimes it was fast to download the file via LAN, than to transfer a file
from pen drive to the computer.

This entire thing was run by students.

~~~
NocturnalWaffle
Purdue? Purdue still has a strong community based of DC++. People have servers
sharing 50+ terabytes of data, with designated release managers and bots to
auto download new tv shows, etc.

~~~
shklnrj
I am from India, my college had decent internet speed but slower Internet
speeds(around 1MBPs when it was fast), hence the use of DC++. 100MBPS on lan
was pretty fun. This was in 2011. Its interesting to know that Purdue has
strong DC++ community, also auto bots is something that I did not know about
in college :) From what I have heard from my US friends is that the rules are
much more stringent in US about file sharing and colleges enforce it much more
strongly.

~~~
jevinskie
DCgate/Dtella, created by Purdue students, merged DC and IRC (not sure how
chat is handled by the newer Dtella).

Searches were broadcast over IRC. I set up a bot to scrape the searches and
display them in real time using a Comet (pre-WebSocket era!) powered website.
From the IP that requested the search, you could determine the dormitory they
were in. One IP kept searching for stuff like "clown porn". It was wonderfully
entertaining.

I forget what the monthly bandwidth quota for non-campus traffic was. Perhaps
50 or 100 GB? Traffic to other campus nodes was "free" and almost guaranteed
to speed along at 100 Mbps.

I implemented the Tiger hash (used by DC clients) in MMX/SSE2 assembly because
it begs for 64-bit integer types. SSE was able to provide a ~2x speedup over
regular code, even though I just used SSE for 64-bit types and didn't do any
real SIMD. Of course, simply building the DC client for x86_64 provided an
even greater speedup but I was stuck with a 32-bit machine at the time. :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dtella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dtella)

Some user experiences with Dtella:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still_using_dtella/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdues_secure_file_sharing_community_is/)

------
tscs37
11MBps for 8$ a month... My ISP is ripping me off!

In all seriousness, this is amazing. Once again it proves that nobody should
underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of harddrives speeding down the
highway... or in this case Cubans exchanging Harddrives.

~~~
greenshackle
Have you seen this?

FedEx Bandwidth: [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/)

~~~
zappo2938
Along the same thought is RFC 2549 and RFC 1149 for IPv6, IP over Avian
Carriers.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers)

------
NelsonMinar
What a fascinating curation problem! A collection of these would make a fine
addition to archive.org.

~~~
unimpressive
Nope. They all include (many, _many_ ) things which the copyright holders will
actively fight over.

------
placeybordeaux
I wonder if mesh networking could take off in Cuba, there is obviously a
desire strong enough that a strong sneakernet has evolved.

It'd also be interesting to try and create a better UI for distribution of
Internet content with latencies of up to 1 week.

~~~
dvndvn
We in the western world don't think about smaller limitations. In most
countries, all private radio communications are banned. In India, during even
first part of last decade, wifi frequencies are illegal for the people to use.
Those days, MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte made a special trip to India to
explain to the people who matter, that don't stupidly implement radio ban on
WiFi usage.

------
k__
Reminds me of the time, when CDs became mainstream and suddendly many of the
classic games fit on one of such CDs. There was one with Warcraft, CnC, Doom,
Quake, Monkey Island, One Must Fall, T.I.M., etc. pp.

Thousands of hours of fun on just one disk...

------
drcross
I'm disappointed by this article and I'm disliking the "noble savage"[1] tone
of the rest of the comments. Yes, you may like it for it's quaint feel but I
wanted the author to go into details of how the internet actually functions in
Cuba, what sort of restrictions are in place and whats happening to move away
from this regressive system.
[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage)

------
navs
We never had something nearly as elaborate as this but in Fiji, having
anything more than dial up was considered a luxury. Portable Hard Drives
weren't as common and USB sticks didn't store as much as they do now. It was
all about burning CDs and handing them to friends at school/work. I think this
might be the reason why most bus drivers in Fiji have the same damn songs
playing ad nauseam.

------
TwoFx
This has also been discussed on the podcast 'This Week in Google' by digital
nomad Mike Elgan: [https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-
google/episodes/349?autos...](https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-
google/episodes/349?autostart=false)

------
hidro
Remind me of a (sort of) similar story of how Iranians consume online content
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552423),
though for a different reason.

------
robryk
I wonder how much of that data is downloaded in digital form from somewhere
and how much is digitized specifically for this collection (e.g. movies
recorded in a cinema, magazines scanned from print, etc.).

~~~
jgrahamc
Watch the embedded Vox video.

------
newacct23
edit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just
seemed like it was removed because of some delay.

Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on
their blog I'll repost what I posted here

The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to
the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own
mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet.

~~~
jgrahamc
What are you talking about?

There's a moderation delay before comments are posted. I hadn't got around to
hitting Accept on yours yet.

~~~
newacct23
Im sorry for overreacting, it seemed like it was deleted because the comment
wasn't appearing even with the "awaiting for moderation" tag so it seemed like
it was removed. Things relating to Cuba are personal to me.

~~~
jgrahamc
The only comments we don't post on the blog are spam. You'll find plenty of
comments on there saying that CloudFlare sucks, etc.

------
kin
I wonder who it is that downloads a TB of data to distribute, and if they have
a special means they're able to do that.

------
tech-no-logical
so, when you did have access to the internet, did the cloudflare captchas
drive you as crazy as they do me ? how was the cpm (capthas per minute) ?

seriously : it seems cloudflare drives about 90% of the sites I visit, judging
from the "I'm not a robot" questions and captchas I get. congrats on the
market share.

------
calimac
might be a superior method of curation than streaming. I wouldn't mind
grabbing one every friday.

------
yandrypozo
They don't download 851GB each week, what's really new weekly is up 200 Gb

------
shahriar-alam
A whole different world! Unbelievable!!

