Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/928 Thanks!
Any one of you ever been to
Cuba?
Oh, yeah, I'm jealous.
I haven't been there.
But, yeah, there are some
debates in Cuba.
Well, maybe also your question of
what about the Internet and Cuba and
maybe other alternatives to
the Internet in Cuba.
And that's what for next talk
will be about the Internet and Cuba
and alternatives to the Internet and
Cuba, please.
A warm, welcoming applause
for Will and Eduardo.
Don't forget to.
Awesome. Yeah, so
this is going to be
a big construction of the official
state of what it actually looks like
and then hopefully a little bit more
about what's actually going on and
how people are getting access and what
access looks like in Cuba.
Yeah, I'm well, I'm a
postdoc at the University of Michigan and
I'm a college student finishing my
engineering degree in Cuba.
Yeah, great.
So let's let's dove in.
So when
you look at what sort of official
Internet looks like in Cuba,
the sort of place we are going to have to
start is a tax, which
is the national
telecom telephony provider
and also ISP.
They've got a bunch of storefronts
around around major cities and around the
country.
And for for sort of
short term tourists.
What this looks like is you're going to
go buy these cards.
They come in one to five hour
denominations.
You scratch off the pin, you find a
Wi-Fi hotspot, you enter this username
and password and it gives you
some access for a little bit
for for sort of citizens of Cuba
who who are living there.
They have something that feels somewhat
similar. They'll have a longer term
username and password account
with with the service called now to
they load a balance and they walk in with
their their sort of long term ID
whenever they go to get Internet.
And the Internet is a place
you go to. And I think this maybe sort of
reflects again on what we
what you may have heard in the
open observatory talk yesterday, that
there's this the sense of the Internet as
a place this is not an uncommon
sight to see in the evenings is a bunch
of people going to their local park,
which is where the Wi-Fi hotspot is to
to get their Internet fixed for for the
day.
Yeah.
So this graph shows briefly
how the Internet, the local
hotspots in Cuba are these two with this
one slightly off dated the newest one.
So it's they are like five hundred and
eight hotspots around the country
right now. But with these graphs, you can
actually see what's kind of the
distribution there have.
So, for instance, in Havana, there's
at the moment of this graph being made,
there were 60 while in Santiago de Cuba.
There were twenty seven of these.
These are the numbers in each province
augmented to a point, I think about
it right now, has like two hundred
hotspots or something like that.
You can check for more information in the
Texas website on this
particular bit.
So the prices of the Internet
at the beginning wants to take to
the service. About two years ago, the
price was of two six.
Then after a while, the drop in the
price to 150.
And right now the price is standing
still one S.P.C.A.
where for some reference, let's say once
you see it's one, it's
the equivalent to one American dollar or
one euro, just four
cents on the amount of the price
it takes a has plans of well, to lower
the price of these of these
cards in some point in the future, even
more so.
But the point here, right, is this is
still more expensive than you might pay
on an airplane flight,
just as another point of reference.
Yeah, and those are quite expensive.
So, yeah.
So what does mobile Internet looks like
then in Cuba? This is a page for
Notar webmail.
So these are services.
It takes out roughly at the same
time as the connectivity
hotspot. Things came out, it
quirked or in 2G.
Right now they move it to 3G for most
of the country and that's going
well. The price of downloading one of
these emails is of one
per megabyte of data you
get from your email, which is
a lot once again.
Right. And so the point here is that for
most Cubans
on your phone, the data you get is not
out to the Internet even.
Right. You can't just, like, load a
foreign site on your phone.
What you get on your phone's data plan
is access to email at a dollar
per megabyte of email transfer.
So so how does this compare to foreigners
who visit? Well, you may have seen
that there's roaming agreements.
Those typically have been about two
dollars per megabyte of Internet.
But if you go with your T-Mobile SIM
or another international SIM,
it often will roam onto a Texas
data network, but it will charge
you about two dollars per megabyte to
to get access to external Internet there.
If you plan ahead, there are ways to get
a little bit better.
This thing called Digicel came out.
You buy it through Amazon as the
distributor that will give you a SIM card
that is a prepaid.
You can get 100 megs
or up to a little bit more.
And this brings the cost down to about
twenty five cents per bag or 20 cents per
meg.
Even when you buy sort of these bulk
roaming prepaid plans,
you find a secondary market
for these cards in Cuba where where
people in Cuba who want to get
mobile data will find these cards
imported. You can keep recharging them
once you have a card.
So so getting this sort of external card
thing ends up, I guess, being one
of the more efficient ways to have cell
based Internet.
So this is sort of
like the official way of connecting
Cuba. But there are alternatives.
The three most common ones are
a Wi-Fi and some
isolated networks I could see in the
island right now.
So sorry.
Let's give let's see
what each of these things
is. So I get this one at least basically
a collection of one terabyte.
It feels it's just a hard drive, one
terabyte of information.
It can be multimedia series, TV shows,
whatever you may see on the regular
Internet. It gets collected during
a week, stored in the hard drive, and
then resold the information to
people around the city.
For one for breakfast originates within
one in five six.
Then you have Wi-Fi sharing.
The most common type for that is
called Connect. If I will get to back
to that in a little later.
And then it's Ethernet, which is a
massive mesh network completely offline
from the Internet.
I will get to that later as well.
So talking about this is
how they may look.
So right now, if you go to the URL that
you can see down there, you can see
what's going to be next week's Balcatta
in Havana.
And I think you can download the media as
well right now to see
what's on the packet the next week.
So we highly encourage you to go visit
the site and see what kind of multimedia
is consumed by people.
Also something that it's
needed to say. Like there's not only one
person that assembles, there are several.
So information may change
from one to another to some extent.
Right. So there's not a single packet
that that sort of arrives into
the country each week.
And it's not like the entire disk
is new content each week, but rather
there's some delta of the new TV shows
and movies that have come out that
replace old ones.
But there is this sort of continually
circulating set of disks
that people use for both media transfer
instead of each person individually,
like paying the amount of money that it
would take to download that from the
external Internet.
What you see, right, is
that there's this sort of nominal prices
that you can get if you go to a store,
but then also within groups, someone,
a friend will get one of these disks and
then share it with their friends sort of
as one so that everyone gets their quota
of media for a week.
So where to find up in Havana?
It's fairly easy if you go to a cell
repair shop or if you go
to a place that looks like the second
photo where there's a person with a
laptop and a bunch of mistakes,
there's probably a place where they sold
for whatever amount of money they
want. There's actually a really nice
YouTube video.
We have the link down here.
It's it talks about marketing
a more general way.
They go a bit deeper.
So if you want, you can see that
in the URL below.
So, yeah, I'm saying that wi
fi. So the price
of the Internet connection is high and
the speed is not great either.
So you will get up to one megabyte
per second when you go to the source wi
fi and this is not good, like
you may be able to pull VoIP
may be not really good video
if you are going to go to streaming
is a possibility, but not
really great.
So people, even though the speed
sort of great people use these software
called connectivity, which would connect
a laptop to the Wi-Fi and then create an
app and log to the
page and sell this connection to several
users for a fraction of the price.
So you will basically end up having one
megabit being distributed between six
or seven people at one point,
but. Because it's cheaper, people use
that option and,
yeah, there's also or things
going on, so they won't tell me
what's wrong with that login page
secure precisely.
So for a long time, I've not had
a IDP's.
They had to be period.
And about the
beginning of the year, I think
they are HDB to their logging
website for the Delta, but they forgot
to add that to the logging page
for the user panel
for some reason.
And that's always fun.
So people keep putting
routers out there broadcasting with the
same Assadi, making perfect clones
of these pages and, you
know, stealing people's accounts.
And that's not a nice
thing to do. If you see anyone do it,
please report it to authorities.
Now, it's worth saying they're also that
while there is a GPS now
in there, there's still heterogeneity
here. There are still plenty of hotels
where you end up with what is actually a
legitimate ataxic connection.
And yet still the login page is HDP.
It's not actually fully rolled out,
unfortunately.
Yeah. So, ah, well, it takes
a try to tackle this problem one way.
So this week they recently
released a new article
in Granma, one of their most important
newspapers in the country, which explains
basically, I know most of you probably
don't speak Spanish, so I try to
translate some problems with the
certificate for this site.
And it's telling you the user
must not continue.
And they are trying to show the people
how to identify when a site is
secure. So that's a plus.
But it's not enough yet.
Not good enough yet.
So one one diversion
of like yet another sort of part of this
whole picture
that we sort of realized when we went
there to when
when I went to Cuba to investigate,
is that there's also this
whole scope of institutional Internet.
So if you are associated with the
university or you've got your company,
you may well find that that entity has
some sort of larger pipe that
that has a state entity.
It has agreed with with the telecom
to have that bandwidth as sort of a
larger tunnel.
So, for instance, at the University of
Havana, there's there's a general
type of Internet access that that is
available. And the university itself then
provides a quota system where all of the
various students and faculty get some
access to that.
It seemed like for the educational
institutions, how they were doing that is
that students get some quota over each
week or month. So maybe you can imagine
eight hundred megs a month the
faculty would get a bit more.
It's not a huge amount in general
in order to sort of split the load
of not a super big pipe over quite
a few users, but it provides
this alternative where
you'd see people strategizing a lot,
where if you need a short term, high
bandwidth thing, you would go to one
of the parks and pay for your hour of
Wi-Fi.
If you want to be on I.R.S.
over a longer time or something low
bandwidth, you would use your
university connection, which is metered
in terms of how much rather than how long
you're connected.
So so that that game ends up getting
played a lot. Another example of
that happening is this information
system, which is a dial up connection
that's available to doctors and sort of
medical professionals
for the cost of a phone call, which is
cheaper. You get access to a
bunch of educational and professional
educational material and also some
limited access to the Internet over that
dial up call.
So there's there's these other systems
that are both available to some fraction
of individuals or to
some locations that
sort of help
provide more of this picture.
I guess, to to sort of add to that what
we found at the University of Havana is
that it was connected to this larger
system called red university area that we
don't hear very much about.
This is the university network.
And so what what that means in practice
or what that translates to is that
you're on.
So at the University of Havana, we were
getting ten, not six, not something that
something internal IP addresses on the
LAN that was the university
and that was part of a larger LAN
that connected a bunch of different
universities.
And so if you go to the right university
area, they they say they have twenty six
member entities.
You find that that that network in
practice, the routers are all in a one
seven to thirty sixteen.
But you can talk directly to these other
10 dot something, 16 prefixes
and so you can send your traffic to other
universities around the country without
ever going out to the public internet.
So there's this intercountry lan
where that bandwidth is not going through
in a text connection, but you're able to
send much higher bandwidth traffic
to other parts of the country
without going against your quota.
So. Right, if I've got some scientific
data to transfer to another university,
but also you can start to imagine that
this is how things like getting
data might transfer to another city
so that that city starts to get the media
content, that there are these places
where these larger lines exist that
aren't under this totally
exorbitant price system.
So let's talk about
street, the street network or Ethernet.
So what street network, how did
it came to be?
Who we are, who runs the network?
We are going to try to answer all of
these questions.
So to give you a little bit of
background, back in 2008,
a lot of gaming communities were starting
to appear in Havana and people
started to do, you know, LAN parties.
And it was kind of awkward to go
to a party with a massive CRT
monitor and, you know, your P.C.
tower and their stuff.
And so people decided to make something
kind of more permanent for these parties.
People decided to throw
Euterpe wires to their friends houses,
buy routers, switches, sorry,
and then have smaller ones in their
neighborhood. And that worked great for a
while. But, you know, after a few months
of being the same person over and over,
you might become tired.
And all of a sudden people started to
find out, oh, there's a similar network
just three kilometers away.
How can we connect to that?
And people started to buy routers
and started to connect all these really
small networks into something that became
massive.
And trust me, when I say massive, I think
massive would be the proper word to
describe it.
So is that right now is up to a
hundred thousand users
in Havana alone.
And yeah.
Is up to a hundred thousand users
in heaven alone, and it's fully
disconnected from the Internet, so
no, no religious, no nothing.
It's an Internet of its own
and we want to show you guys some stuff.
We find that inside the network.
So this is this is a fairly
old map for those who have
been to Cuba, may recognize this is
having a city, my hometown, and
that's the old spread mob of Internet
commerce. So you will have the pilots,
which at the moment of making this graph,
we're only five now.
There are nine pilots.
And that's the approximate cause right
now at that point in time, sorry.
And right now it's slightly bigger.
So, for instance, that area of Mirador,
it's fully covered in Lugano,
which is between the blue, the purple
and the black spot is fully covered as
well. And most of the highly
dense density populated
areas are covered by this network,
given it quite the reach without using,
you know, fiber optic fibers or anything
like that. So you use Wi-Fi and
run of the mill. You can see cable
basically holding it together.
So it's only in Havana, it's
you can find it.
It's not in Santa Clara for
something to Santiago de Cuba, etc..
Went to the south and the real
let let it be say these cities are
not connected between them.
They're not connected to the Internet in
any way and they're not necessarily
known as Ethernet.
I'm just using that right now.
So you nautical term to refer to these
off the grid networks and
you will see a down there that will
explain what happened to the virtual
Fastnet, the real.
It's in Spanish, though.
I think the outer world translated to
English. Hopley if you read the link
and put into that request to that block.
So yeah.
In terms of like what we're looking
at when we think about ASP.NET,
we have these neighborhoods that sort of
evolved and
they they sort of end up with these
central points that are that are called
pillars in the community.
And so a pillar is
generally both a person who's the
person responsible for that neighborhood
and also a place which is often their
apartment or some other specific
location that's got several computers,
a bunch of wireless antennas,
some routers.
Each of these pillars is connected to at
least two other pillars.
And that and that forms the backbone of
the network and then connects to
nodes which are sort of in
that neighborhood and often are
either a direct wireless
thing or maybe in some cases an Ethernet.
The nodes are sort of
you can think of is like the block level
where it's someone who's got a switch
and is running that Ethernet the last
street or over to the next house over
the next couple of houses often is going
to run a local Wi-Fi hotspot
so that people who are more transient as
users can sort of stop by and connect
and sort of get on to the net for a
little while.
Yeah. So something that's worth to say
about this organization.
And it has no like one real central
figure behind the Internet.
It's run by the admins mainly.
But users decisions
carry a large weight into the community.
So even though the admins have the
technical capabilities to keep
dinner, were running and to keep
everything up to point,
to some extent, the actions
of the users really matter within the
network and they really, truly
have a voice within everything
that's done inside.
So let's talk about the whole nail
in the room, which is hardware.
You can be on everywhere with hardware
even if you want to.
So we have to keep one
knock off of Craigslist and we have
Amazon. We have the same piece of gear
ubiquity in our station.
And five, I chose this one because
it is considered like the top of the line
in Ethernet.
Like if you will have one of these, you
can basically connect to whoever you
want. These ones are fairly good for what
we do, and that's what we are sticking
with for now.
So you can see the price in the US,
right? WDR, Amazon, US.
Yeah. So in the US, the price will be
something like eighty one dollars and
sixty three cents, while in Cuba you
can find it for one hundred and seventy
dollars.
It's double the price
and a bit more.
But it's not that bad.
I mean it's still something
reachable, it's still decent hardware.
And the same happens for the MicroTech
routers that we use which are not
that expensive and in like
120 or something like that.
Cool. So my involvement of
this, I guess, began after
twenty sixteen, we had Obama
visit Cuba and then
it became easier for U.S.
citizens to go in
late. Twenty sixteen, there was
a conference called Cuba,
which is a great conference around
sort of open source software in Havana
that's successfully run again this year.
And that's where we
sort of ran into Eduardo and a bunch of
sort of the open source community in
Havana and heard about.
And so I went back a couple of
times in twenty seventeen
along with
academic colleagues.
So so Alex Halderman, Eric
Questro and David Robinson
to
try and document this thing.
Right. Like there's this fascinating
network out there that we've heard very
little about and that we sort
of don't have any real technical
sense of does this actually exist?
Like we've heard rumors.
But but it seems like it's been very
quiet. It's a it's a thing that just
hasn't gotten the attention it deserves
or then allowing us to understand
what support we can provide back to it.
So so how did we do this
so from from initial point of contact
that we'd made at Cuba, we
sort of snowball sampled a bunch of the
people involved to try and talk to them
about what this thing actually was and
understand it. We got to go to a couple
of different places and see a bunch of
the physical gear.
Yeah, parts of what else that is in
the physical world, these Wi-Fi routers
and antennas.
And then we got to connect into it and
try and do some some technical sort of
analysis of how big is this thing, really
what's actually running on it?
What is this thing from a technical
perspective and what that
looked like as first figuring out, well,
what are the prefixes, what actually is
this local network?
And then can we understand how many
servers are up there, what types of
servers they are?
Luckily, there's sort of a partial name
system where where
depending on how you're connected, you
may get a DNS order provided to you,
but you can do DNS name transfers to
sort of get the full set of named
services that are there.
And that gives you a start to understand
what's going on.
And then and then we did sort of get
crawling. So just grabbing sort of as
much Web content as we could out of it to
get a sense of, you know, what are the
services, what is being what is it being
used for?
And this this sort of ended up
there's a there's a short paper that was
at the Internet measurement conference in
London at the end of November or at the
beginning of November that you can look
for for a bunch more, sort of like
technical details about
what this network looks like
in terms of topology.
This is sort of what Traceroute looks
like from from that vantage point.
You see these red nodes near the center.
Those are the different pillars that are
sort of tightly connected and spanning
off of them. You see nodes.
A lot of times you've got
this variable firewall policy where
sometimes either a pillar or
individual nodes will nat'l themselves
again. So you can't look really back
behind them easily.
So this is a core view out
to the point where that first level of
mapping happens.
There's many clients beyond this.
There's also a lot of wi fi clients that
you're not actually seeing those end
users. But this is sort of the,
you know, the server infrastructure of
what sort of
the permanent sort of set of services
that is running as opposed to the end
users, which is where you get that much
more massive number.
So to make to
leave something perfectly clear, the
number we said 100000
users, it's just what we think we
have because that's the amount of IP
addresses we find.
And so we're assuming at least one
user IP address, but it
could be significantly, significantly
bigger for Ethernet right now.
Here's an example of one of the sort of
initial pages that often people end up
at. It seemed it's called the scope
directory. So this is sort of a user
moderated listing of
popular services.
And then on the side, what we've got is
sort of that coming out of that study
characterizing the different services,
relative popularity of sort of different
things on this network.
So this started as gaming.
And so gaming is still sort of the most
popular set of sites that you're seeing.
There's a lot of
ah, wow. Community or Agota community
downloading that software, finding
different clans or groups to play with.
There's also, I think, sort of the
emergent property that was
exciting to see is that there's now a ton
of forum activity, a lot of sort of
active Real-Time chat that's going on.
People are using this for sort of daily
communication.
And then you've also got it as a
reference thing. So there's a lot of
mirrors. There's Wikipedia stock exchange
as you move over to the technical side,
because this is a community that's
created its own network, you you get
a bunch of open source software
repository mirrors so that you can have
your local NPM mirror or your local and
local set of python packages.
There's some file sharing, some Colma,
there's some commerce.
There's a bunch of stuff.
I guess this is also looking at
the the web part of this network.
What we found from talking with
administrators is a lot of the underlying
communication for like how how this thing
gets managed was still
not over these web forums per say, but
within teams speak or Yavor or Yapper
or something like that.
So there's a bunch of other stuff going
on here. This is one one slice of
it.
You know, we see three thousand active
Web hosts as well. So there's a
significant number of Web servers that
are that are part of this network.
Also mentioning the thing in the other
side, the scope.
That's one of the many pages that exist
to find when I say this, active or
not within the network.
So so let's give you some some more
screenshots as like some sense
of what's going on here. This is Habana
Net, which is one of the pillar
homepages.
So for one of the neighborhoods, this is
sort of the that pillar has
as one of its server service intro point,
you see.
Some common links at the top, like
they've got their Wikipedia clone or
mirror, you see that people identify
themselves by by something that looks a
lot like handles.
There's a very common use of pseudonyms
on the network as opposed to the sort of
real identity.
And then it's got sort of active things
going on in that neighborhood and sort
of what's up with this pillar and sort
of how we're doing.
Here's here's one of those mirror sites.
Looks like this one's like a Wikipedia
mirror, along with with several other
sort of slices of things that
you can get access to that's just being
hosted on one of these those highclere
the mirrors and stuff that they hold
on to list
some gaming sites representing
sort of new things you can play.
Here's a dating app.
And then one of the subcommunities that
we found most exciting is
that there's this sub
community called Net Lab, which is sort
of focused on open source software and
technology.
It's centered around a forum.
There's this very active net lab forum
for technical discussion,
but they run their own get lab instance.
So they've got sort of a set of community
coding that's happening and going on
this search engine.
Khairullah is a search engine within
the next set of content in that network
that they've customized and built
themselves. So it's got its own open
source get repository of, you know,
the code behind the search engine that
they've built for themselves.
So they also hold like books and
or stuff. People do a lot from the
Internet and bring back to the network
for be reused.
Yeah. And so that's really exciting.
One of the administrators
who was involved in this that we talked
to was saying it's gotten to a point
where there are times when he has
questions about like Android phones
that have been customized for Cuba and
this net lab for them is often more
useful in solving those problems than the
external Internet.
And so now they're having to think about
how do we take this content we've got on
our network and bring it back to
the real network as well.
So rules every community
has to abide some rules, and in
the case of that, this is not different
because of a myriad of things.
So the first thing you will find is
this is from one of the pillars, these
the pillar.
In this case, the rules are fairly
it's a fairly common set of rules
throughout of rules throughout the whole
network. So it's a reason to
attempt against the security of the
country, is forbidden to
provide Internet services, radio
or TV services and stuff like
that, which are in accordance with the
rules of the country.
Because we have to remember something.
Rules cannot be broken inside any country
or else you go to jail.
If they will break these rules, it
will never have gotten this big.
So this set of rules are tweaked
within the community and adjusted to what
is needed. And you can actually see that
it's something that this community
decided, which is how bad
is what you did.
So it can go from suspending
a service to being kicked out permanently
from Ethernet.
And this is decided not only by the
admin, but by the fellow
users in this network.
The other thing worth saying here is that
so there's some collection that is of
rules that are based around
long term sustainability of the network.
Right. So the network wants to keep
existing. It doesn't want to
have itself seen as competing with the
text. And so you've got rules like don't
bridge to the Internet because then you
become a telecom and that suddenly you're
competing with a text and you don't want
that.
Other of rules end up being
a reflection of things that might be
solved technically.
So, for instance, there's a tension
between the gamers who want to be playing
games with low latency and the people who
want to be doing file transfers, which
would use up the network.
And so some of these rules are things
like you can only file transfer in off
hours and if we catch you
file transferring during peak gaming
time, you'll be disconnected for a while.
Yeah, and we might solve
that with routers. But this also
the social pressure also is a very
effective way to solve that in a more
easy way.
So, yeah, we have here one of the most
popular forum.
This would be like the equivalent of
Facebook if I had to pick a network
in it's called within it.
It's quite a big community.
They do like photo posting
stories, whatever you may think.
So the amount of registered users
in this Web site is
fifty six thousand.
This is a fairly big amount of users
at the moment.
We took these measurements anyway,
30 percent of those users were woman.
And at that time, which was also made
the first twenty seventeen at 4pm,
if I don't recall badly, there
were five hundred plus active
users.
And this is kind of an off day for
that time because it's made the first is
a big parade in Havana.
So a lot of people are just tired and
sleeping probably at that time.
The activity on this site
can be seen in a normal day
that time of the day, maybe
thirty thousand people at any given
moment just posting stuff
in December crashes.
Oh, my God. This is
so. Yeah.
So there's a bunch of pain points here,
right.
In terms of how is this network evolving.
Right. This is not a walk in the park.
One of the things that's really
noticeable is
this is a community network and
infrastructure cost has been a
limiting factor. At some point.
All of the network here we see is under
one hundred dollars if you were to buy it
in the US. Right. So there's no
that limits how much you're going to
scale up. Right. You can't have this
central point with a really big Cisco
router that's going to be able to get
gigs of traffic through it per second.
And so you have to you've got this mesh
and if you're trying to get all the way
to the other side, you may end up with
pretty high latency.
The the routing between pillars is
and and
so you end up with loops quite a bit,
even in the current sort of fairly
limited number of of sort of
sub networks that compose it.
Identity is an issue.
Right. So we thought this might be
the design, but there's
no email service.
So when you register, you register
with whatever you want in that email
field, if it still exists or it doesn't,
depending on if they've if what you're
using is a site that has sort of taken
code from the Internet to set up or if
it's been coded and just doesn't even
need verification.
But this also means that if you forget
your password, you're sort of out of
luck.
Like there's there's not really a
recovery process or something beyond
finding the administrator of that
specific site and saying, I
forgot my user, my password, can you
reset it?
That doesn't always work. So software
dates are not a problem.
Software software that's running inside
of the network is up to eight years
out of date and this comes.
Yeah, it's
a long time up between
updates. We are hoping to
bring some stuff up today, but
these are mainly sites that were like not
really that deals and just kept on going.
But anyway, that's one of the things
that one of the effect of
being away from the from the Internet
that software dates can be tricky
sometimes for some technologies.
So interpersonal conflicts and community
organization, that's another
point. Like two months ago, two of the
two pilot admins had a small,
small argument and that bring
the network to a standstill in.
And it got to the point where it was just
one pilot holding two sides of the
network together and people
having to reroute their traffic to stuff
in the other side.
So that was a hard time.
People eventually got to target.
And for two months, some people
were like, NSA is going to stop existing
today or tomorrow.
But luckily that did not happen and
people were able to just talk it out.
And, you know.
Right, and this is this is
I think there is this hopeful
and cautious optimism, the network's
still doing well after
the hurricanes that that happened
over the summer and
it's solved this last mile problem
in the way that the telecom hasn't.
Right. There's all of these Ethernet
drops around street level that's doing
this aggregation around the metro
area that has this huge potential.
And so there's this question of how does
this thing keep existing and going
forward, keep playing a role
in people's lives.
And so what does this regulation look
like? How does this thing end up
thriving?
So I guess I guess
we have some takeaways.
Cuba is networking, so even as
we've got this sort of crazy view of what
official Internet might look like,
there's much more to the story.
And it's something that when you actually
live there, you you find a way to get
through. There's there's a lot of
hustle and a lot of, like, ability to
to find out ways to make
things work.
So I would take
away is Internet is probably the worst,
like this isolated community
network. And for sure, it's one of the
world's biggest mistake works right
now.
And I don't think we did know that
it is that don't use telecom
structure. Please try some
people. Create your own infrastructure,
please.
Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, that's that's
this this fascinating thing, I
think it can benefit a lot from our
knowledge here and I think we
can learn a lot from how this
sort of phenomenon
keeps growing, because I think what we
see a lot of times is that you get
this movement of we need more
connectivity, we need some sort of
community network, and that then spurs
some sort of larger infrastructural
development. Right. Some ISP will come in
or we'll get some backbone and we'll
connect this community network as
it emerges and become seen as valuable
to to our more traditional connectivity.
And one of the things that's really
fascinating in the case of ASP.NET is
that hasn't happened. There hasn't been
an official ISP that's come and said, oh,
well, there's clearly demand, let's go in
and solve this in a in a more
regulated way.
And so that's led to these sort of new
solutions.
I guess the final the final point here
is sort of moving to the meta
like talk that
this sort of underserved community
and hearing about this is super valuable.
And also a lot of work.
We've got a lot of people to think, yeah,
we have.
So I like to think some people first
that people from communicate from
Congress, you guys really help it out
with the visa stuff.
They face a lot also for
and I I'm Lutron rather
than into reality.
Gob's you guys rock Ravon wherever
you are.
Thanks. When you pick me up in my
first day in Germany, I really appreciate
that.
And in Cuba. Oh, yeah, I have some
friends in Cuba, they probably know who
they are.
I owe you some beers, that's all
I'm saying.
So I think that
what we see right is like we can
champion this sort of thing and get these
these underserved voices here, and it's
really great.
This is clearly a place that
Eduardo's thriving and like his home
in a way that's really exciting.
And that's really part of the ethos.
And getting getting him here was there's
an I.R.S. channel that's been going on
for months where the occasional spotty
connection of what the latest problem
is and then a bunch of people in Germany
and elsewhere are sort of going and
finding the next documentation that we
need to to to solve that for
the next time, several days later, when
he gets Internet again to solve this.
And I
think that's that's really reflective of
the spirit here at C.C.C.
in a way that I'm really excited
about. Right. That this is sort of this
like personal
autonomy that is part of our ethos of
going and doing things.
This to what motto that that we that
we can hope for.
And I encourage everyone to to
do that and find the people who need to
be here and help them get here, because
they'll they'll give back so much more.
I think it's also.
Yeah, so.
I think it's also the way to to think
about how do we build
a Congress and a community where
we don't need those champions in the
future and people who need to be
here and want to be here can
can actually get here more easily.
So how do we lower barriers to
access? So one one anecdote
that I think is worth having is so we had
a talk at the Internet measurement
conference and we're looking into how do
we get someone from Cuba to get to London
for this event?
And there's travel grants, but you have
to have a full application a few months
in advance.
And then the the way that the money would
happen is you have to know what your
costs are months in advance
and then it will show up as a check
to your institution a couple of months
later. And that just is not
a thing that really coincides well
with the system that you find
when you're not in Western Europe and the
US.
And so thinking about how these things
that maybe are they work within
our system.
Right. As as someone who's an academic in
the US, I understand this.
And like the university that I work with
would front the money for me and then
expect to get renumerated, but
it doesn't scale. And so figuring out
where these barriers are that we don't
notice and how we break them down, I
think is is one of the things that is
a continuing struggle that we should
have.
And then I guess sort of on a more
serious note, I think that that message
is one that also reflects to some extent
on the some
of the tensions we've seen at Congress
this year.
I think that, you know,
we've had failures that we should
be recognizing.
And yeah,
and we need to think about how do we
address these? How do we build someplace
that is more welcoming?
That is that is safe.
And so I guess for
me, that's the spirit of of how do
we come together, how do we build what we
want Congress to be
and think about this in the collaborative
way of making the space that is that is
good for us and
and at the same time is safe for victims.
So.
So before we leave, we we will
do a Q&A, and if you were to ask us
something, Galeras or whatever,
these are our Twitter handles, feel free
to Bingo's whenever we don't
guarantee we will respond.
Paul, thanks a lot for this awesome
talk.
Please give a big round of applause and
are we have plenty of time for questions,
so if you like to queue up at the
microphones so we can do this
orally, please remember to
really ask a short and concise questions
we would like to hear. Questions are not
common. And I'm going to start with
microphone number one.
Hi, thank you for the great talk.
Would there be any legal or political
hurdles to us or, you know,
for example, us setting Hardway to Cuba?
Uh, so I guess
you first need to take into account
customs regulations, which
I'm not agreeing with because I think
there were recently change.
But ones that solve it,
I guess shouldn't be a problem.
But really, I don't know.
I'm just guessing at this point.
But yeah, it should not be impossible
to do. But I recommend you use the AKL if
you're going to do something like that,
because the Postal Service is not that
reliable. It takes a long time.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Question from microphone number two,
please.
Hello.
Thanks a lot for the great talk.
I am curious about whether
or not malware is a problem.
And yes, since you
run such a huge amount
of outdated clients, I would assume
it's a huge problem.
Or is there any security built
within the network or is it
simply not an issue because
the clients are not connected directly to
the Internet? OK, so some of all of
that. Right. I'm afraid that first talk
about encryption in encryption
is regulated by this silly law from
2002, which implies
you need a permission to use any form
of cryptography.
And that's not really applicable because
whenever you log into a computer, you're
basically comparing to hash to hashes.
And that's so it doesn't really scale
that well, but it's nothing to be
complying with it.
So encrypting our is
not really something we can do
if we want to keep on going.
So malware.
Yes, there's a lot of malware
I wrote so that once they
have their
people get drunk.
Sorry, but there
is a problem about these software
repositories we have.
We'll give you solutions for like when
Microsoft Windows, iOS and
Linux, we like Karpinsky
or Abath or like a whole bunch
of a whole collection of antivirus
that will be updated weekly that usually
comes in.
But yet there are viruses.
People don't like to update their
antivirus, so they don't really know how
to. And that sucks.
I mean, I guess the the saving
grace, right. Is your offline.
And so what is it
the malware is going to do?
It can't exfiltrate your data.
It can't show you ads.
So a lot of times this ends up being
fairly harmless. Well, it can corrupt
your hard drive, and that sucks if you
have a cloud.
I'm just saying, I don't know a few
times, but a lot of times it is not
quite as severe just because it is
an environment that the malware also is
not expecting to find itself.
Thanks for this answer.
We have some more questions and there are
also some from the Internet, from our
viewers on the stream.
Please give me a question.
Thank you.
A couple of brief questions around
ASP.NET.
What was it like before the embargo
got lifted?
You said that the city estimates are not
connected to each other.
Have you discussed possible solutions to
connect them?
Thank you.
How many new routers would that to take
and how much would that cost?
So I guess I'm going back
to this for the first.
So give me a sec.
OK, great.
So let's take into account the map of
Cuba. So the part of Cuba where
Havana is is fairly flat.
It's fairly easy.
But once you move to the real that
place has mountains,
big, big mountains, and it's
quite complex to route stuff
through there. But in the case of tiem,
for something like 20, this may be
easier if Saudi Arabia
is some Saudi Arabia stuff.
We're done and there's
something that people are being
considering, but having gone through
to quite well.
And yeah, but the basic solution will
be SDR for this long
of an uplink.
If you have before the embargo, well
before the embargo, it look pretty much
the same. I mean, the embargo hasn't been
lifted.
The U.S. tried to reestablish
relationships and they back it up and.
Yeah, but yeah, the
incident was pretty much the same.
Nothing really change it.
It keeps growing. It keeps growing.
Yeah. I mean, but it's been growing since
2008, so there's not real
little real difference.
Things are great now.
Looking for number three, please.
Two questions.
What are these others.
Network and those services fund
themselves. Is there someone going around
collecting information or just doing an
out of. Ideology, yeah, and the second
one. Do you see the Internet slowly
coming to Cuba and do you think it
will eventually replace it because of
better connectivity and service?
OK, so that's a great example of not
adhering bathrooms, microphone number
one. One question, actually, I want
to answer his first question and answer
one of the four.
So I will answer your first question and
we can talk about the second later if you
want. So how does
the finance itself so people
usually give one second
to the notes and to the pilots or I mean,
the don't give these to the pilots
in order to have money in case some
equipment gets busted or breaks
or whatever happens with it, or
they want to upgrade the gear.
It has to sort of give once
you see amont, which is not that much
compared with like once you
see an hour for a fix.
So that's kind of the way around that
finds itself.
It's basically this doesn't happen
everywhere. In some places the prices may
vary or in some other places.
There's no need at all because it's a
pilot in there, like sitting on top
of a really strong structure already
so that maybe we saw
a lot of scraping together.
So, for instance, Net Lab had a crowd
funding thing for an additional disc for
themselves where they found users
throughout of their services to helping
prove that you can imagine that they're
sort of in kind and scraping together,
but it is sort of a ground
up community funding.
Thanks a lot. OK, microphone number one.
And remember, one question,
a lot of toasting.
Send it to the BBC
from the 90s. Are there connections to
Tom VSS or something like that?
Well, I run the website for a while.
I don't I'm not sure if that exists
still. But I mean, it's similar to
that in the sense that you are basically
sometimes trying to find a proper
route to get to the place you want
because they may have changed overnight
and forwarding it's not working
and stuff are breaking out and people
are calling in for in the morning trying
to figure out whether they cannot access
a service.
But, yes, basically, it's kind of like
the BBC in the 90s.
Kind of, yeah.
OK, cool. Thanks for the answer.
Microphone number four,
how does the different
cities communicate with each
other? So the software
gets on the same state.
So right now, I said this in the
beginning of talk.
Right now, more of these cities are
talking with each other on that.
That's not something we are being able to
because there is something between of
us, which is the nearest province you
will find. It's like two hundred
kilometers.
I haven't get to see a Wi-Fi for a Wi-Fi
relative that can do two hundred
kilometers. If you don't have one, please
let me know if they were on the model.
I would try to buy it.
But but the answer is these are each
their own organic community that are
totally separate.
They don't necessarily even have the same
brand or branding.
It's just there are these LAN networks
that exist in at least this many cities.
OK. Wow.
Microphone number three, please.
OK, thank you.
Is it building some kind of pressure
on the actual telephone telephone
company and so their internet becomes
cheaper or whatever?
Not really.
I mean, we try to keep away from it hexa
like we use, not like
we don't try to get to the Internet.
We don't try to we try
to play with them whenever they what they
want to parlay. We do so.
But for the meantime, we don't mind them.
We just keep on doing our own thing,
which is trying to get people
decent service and trying to get people
a place to game chat and do whatever
people it's people doing.
I said,
OK, and we have one more question from
the Internet.
Do you signal Angel, please give us this
one question. Yes, thank you.
And what about satellite Internet or
telephone lines to connect the cities?
OK, so those are two really hotspots.
So I'm going to I mean, so
I think I think, again, you're now at the
point of quite
a bit of cost, right.
Where both what is the
motivation to to connect these
two city networks?
Because that sounds like a high paying,
especially satellite.
So you're not doing your land gaming
anymore satellite.
You need a special license to have
satellite dishes in Cuba, which is quite,
quite hard to get. And the constant phone
connection is either going to be pretty
low bandwidth or is going to be pretty
expensive.
And again, why why are you doing that
cost
by doing it? The other thing you're doing
is you're exposing yourself to a bunch of
risk that that the purpose of these
cross country links that are so real time
is often going to be much more about
commerce and sorts of things that A is
going to feel like are eating into its
business and potentially
get you in more trouble as opposed to the
community nature, which is often
inherently local.
Also for negative ads running
on the infrastructure that's owned by
telecom companies, it's quite dangerous
because at the moment they decide they
don't want your problem to exist anymore.
They will use it and you will be
stranded.
So it's not a good idea to ever
use telecom infrastructure.
So don't place
that was clear, OK?
Is there someone that microphone six, I'm
not sure whether I can see it.
Yes. Please go ahead with your question.
Thank you. And I'm wondering
if there's a really low latency
interconnection kolesnikov
net between the networks and with
the outside world, for instance, to share
files or updates to the six year old
software.
Yes. I mean, and this is also what LPT
is. Yeah, right.
Exactly.
If you look at what is this Wikipedia,
Mirah, this is someone either went to
their institutional connection or had a
friend who was traveling internationally,
get a large stack
overflow dump or Wikipedia dump and then
connected to a computer that's on the
Internet. Now you've got a mirror that
people internally can use.
So so a lot of how these resources end up
there is through the sneaker net
mechanisms.
OK, we have not much time left.
Microphone number one, please make a
short question.
So why is the official
Internet so crappy and expensive?
Is it political reasons or technical
reasons or is might not
be a short question?
Well, that's a fair question,
but I can give you two short answers.
The first one is a take that took quite a
while to have access to the
Internet, to any underwater fiber
cable.
That was quite a while, I think was 2012
when it got connected with Venezuela.
I may be wrong around that year,
2012, 2011 maybe, but around
that age.
And they the connection from the cable
news cycle in Santiago to Cuba.
So they had to roll through the whole
freaking country, which may not be
as big as Germany, but that happened in
the past five years.
I understand that they're struggling with
that because it's quite investment
for a developing country.
And that's one of the reasons.
The other reason is because they
truly believe this is something.
I think I think FXI thinks that
Wi-Fi is the solution, like you
fought your way around.
That's not the solution.
That's never going to be the solution.
If you want a high lot shipping,
which is something you definitely don't
want for whatever you're doing online.
So it's kind of a hard question to answer
because I don't really have enough data
to give you a proper response.
Thanks.
Was that the one part or both parts
of your answer?
That's my answer.
The second part, the train station.
Some of us like we we might have
left some time for a question
that gets a short answer.
Is there anyone at the microphones that
has such a thing prepared?
No. One on microphone.
Six microphones, please.
Go ahead.
Uh, you mentioned that
you have forums on the Internet.
Do dissenting opinions appear
there or are they immediately
moderated that?
Uh, I don't see
the forums that much.
I mean, the forum they usually visit is
the developer forums.
And people there usually stay apolitical
for whatever reason.
But I'm not sure actually.
I think at some point it might be edited
out if someone brings these to an admin.
But I don't think it's like automatic
something that happens like in a split
second. They think it may take
some time to for the admins
to remove that kind of content.
Thanks a lot for this amazing talk and
some insights and how it works in Cuba.