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 delete me software and team of experts can remove this information in minutes compared to the hours it would take to do it manually on average delete me removes over 2 000 pieces of data for our customer in their first two years so if you want to get your purse personal information removed from search results on the web go to join deleteme.com techwiki and use code techwiki for twenty percent off after it became legal for Cubans to buy a personal computer without a permit in 2008 the market for international media boomed infrastructure like satellite issues became easier to get a hold of and some Cubans installed them on roofs hidden inside fake water tanks 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 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Channel: Techquickie

Views: 679,283

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Id: G1Duspzmudk

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023