Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “There’s A Secret, Illegal Internet”.
Compared to the Golden Age of piracy, online bootlegging is pretty tame your average modern pirate has never had to fear the rope and, if they’ve got scurvy, it’s probably unrelated to the nine seasons of illicit Seinfeld sitting on their hard drive. There are, however, places around the globe where the internet is heavily restricted and uncensored. Access to all that the digital world has to offer is provided by hidden networks of Smugglers, risking imprisonment or Worse, to bring their clientele. The dankest memes and latest Hollywood Blockbusters on discs and flash drives effectively creating an underground offline internet. This is partly because adoption of the internet has been incredibly uneven by the year 2000.
Only 5.8 percent of the global population was connected to the World Wide Web, which included 43 percent of U.S residents even two decades later. In 2020, only 60 percent of the world was online compared to 91 of the United States, but that’s not because people in those places don’t want the internet. These gaps on the map are typically due to some combination of poverty, remoteness, corruption and the intentional suppression of information by local authorities, but the development of dense, durable and, most importantly, portable storage options like flash drives, means that digital media can go anywhere. That people can.
I don’t know what kind of download speeds people are getting in downtown Pyongyang, but a small backpack has a theoretical carrying capacity of thousands and thousands of terabytes of Highly illegal k-dramas and American sitcoms. Now details are scarce due to the danger involved, but many North Korean defectors report, having watched pirated Western content before leaving the country films like James Bond Titanic or Pretty Woman, the definition of decadent Western media getting caught with Russian or Bollywood films could result in three Years in a labor camp, but getting caught with Contraband from America or South Korea could mean a far longer sentence or even execution, but impressive policies like these haven’t stopped people from getting a hold of the content. They want. One of the best documented data smuggling networks is Cuba’s packite, say manal or the weekly package.
Cuba got its first internet connection in September 1996, a 64 kilobit per second link to the U.S Mainland, courtesy of Sprint. After that, however, efforts to connect Cuban’s languished for years in part, this was due to the weak state of the Cuban economy. The fall of the Soviet Union had left them with few International allies and the U.S embargo made infrastructure and even Basic Hardware, very expensive. The Cuban government was leery of both foreign investment and the possibility that advanced telecommunications might be used to turn the population against them.
In a country where all magazines, newspapers, radio stations and television channels are state-owned, if the government doesn’t invest in a big telecommunications project, it’s probably not getting done so by 2012, only 21 of Cubans were using the internet compared to 43 percent of Dominicans who were connected To the internet in the same year, and it wasn’t great internet either relying on telephone lines and Soviet Satellites until the first fiber optic cable was finally activated in 2013.. Even then bandwidth for personal use was rationed and fairly expensive. So you had to go to the government-run Internet cafe if you wanted to read dujinshi and the download speeds were terrible, but did everyday Cubans just accept the shoddy infrastructure provided them or did they take matters into their own hands? We’Ll tell you, but first, our officially mandated sponsor this video is sponsored by delete me a solution to the increasing issue of personal information being easily shared online without consent. You can find hundreds of online profiles that are sharing your personal information with a simple Google search which can lead to annoying robocalls and scam emails.
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Digital storage was also now cheap, durable and compact, making dissemination of uncensored media from the United States and other nations. A simple matter of flash drives trading hands. Since then, the weekly package has circulated throughout Cuba featuring a constantly updated roster of movies, music software news, internet videos and even ads for local businesses. The notable exceptions are politics and pornography. That’S because, though, there are severe penalties for selling smuggled material at all, it’s easier to avoid becoming a law enforcement priority.
If you stick to Illegal copies of Die Hard and leave The Manchurian Candidate and Girls Gone Wild out of it by at least 2017. This system was so sophisticated that a film could debut in the United States on a Friday and be watched in Havana. The following Monday. The vast majority of Cubans are aware of this system and in fact have used it themselves.
Some show up to Distributors with flash drives for the newest episodes of their favorite shows, While others bring terabyte hard drives and transfer. The entire package of new material for that week concerned about the effect that mindless and violent American content was having on the general public. In 2014, the Cuban government actually tried to set up their own competing package of pirated media called mochila or backpack filled with government-approved movies, music and educational material. It was extremely unpopular. What? What isn’t that everyone’s favorite pastime, pirating, Spanish translations of Crash Course, and The Iliad with a seal of approval from Castro in this era? It wasn’t unusual for small groups of tech, savvy Cubans to create isolated local networks by running cables from roof to roof in their neighborhoods and repurposing consumer-grade routers and personal computers to act as nodes in a mesh network with no Central server. The largest such network was the Havana Street Network or s net, created in 2011 by the fusion of several of these smaller networks.
At its peak, estenet was estimated to have around a hundred thousand individual IP addresses, despite having no direct connection to the outside world. What did they use it for? Well, the same thing that the rest of us were using the internet for in 2012 they had forums, blogs social media, video, streaming, restaurant reviews and locally hosted copies of external sites like Wikipedia some even used it to play. Hacked versions of online games like World of Warcraft or DOTA really pushing the definition of LAN party on the one side, but not quite doing MMO Justice on the other being part of s net meant strict self-enforced rules; no politics, no pornography, no controversy, not if they Wanted to keep their Network free from government interference, but it wasn’t to last. The Cuban government has been expanding officially sanctioned internet access as part of its development strategy and in 2019, The Havana Street Network and its infrastructure were absorbed into the state system. As of 2021, 71 percent of Cubans had some kind of internet access. It’S becoming both cheaper and easier to connect to the outside world, and sooner or later, this will be the standard way that they get movies and music from abroad, rather than buying a burnt CD off a teenager on a street corner. Still as long as there are some blank patches in the world wide web in some places, the internet will look more like this. If you guys enjoyed this video, you can leave a like. If you didn’t, you can leave a dislike. If you want to see a future episode of tech quickie, you can leave a comment suggesting it and don’t forget to subscribe.
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