Cuban youth build secret computer network despite Wi-Fi ban

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CB_CUBA_SECRET_NETWORK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

by markmassie • 11 years ago

161 46 11 years ago

hosted.ap.org

justizin3• 11 years ago

This is so completely out of Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother". Brilliant book, highly suggest reading.

Goes to show how accurate his estimation of what censored youth will do was.

orblivion• 11 years ago

Right down to the name, SNet (it was called Xnet in Little Brother).

zhemao2• 11 years ago

Except for the fact that it has the tacit approval of the authorities and is monitored by volunteers for pornography or political discussions. The Xnet system in "Little Brother" was feasible because it was working on top of a well-established existing infrastructure. A system like Snet could not operate in defiance of the authorities because it could easily be dismantled by taking down the key links and arresting the operators.

justizin3• 11 years ago

They're definitely different, I forget _all_ the technical details of Xnet, having last read the book a couple years ago, I was mostly talking about the show of human ingenuity.

Xnet was certainly "informally monitored", though.

researcher88• 11 years ago

In Citizenfour, Snowden had a copy of the sequel, Homeland, while he was in Hong Kong. Kind of a surreal moment.

teen• 11 years ago

I wonder if we can access it from outside Cuba? It would be cool to poke around.

zhemao2• 11 years ago

The article says it is not allowed to connect to the larger internet, so you can't access it from outside Cuba.

icebraining• 11 years ago

A quick Google search shows ads[1] advertising full Internet connection through SNet. They may be scams, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if people were setting up hidden gateways (using VPNs on the local network).

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3mFCdYr...

technomancy2• 11 years ago

It also says they're using it to play WoW, so I wouldn't trust the technical details.

secfirstmd• 11 years ago

Wonder are they using any of the open source tools for mesh networking like Commotion Wireless

hyperbovine• 11 years ago

Almost seven years ago, I opened up my MacBook in downtown Havana and was shocked to find dozens of wi-fi networks appearing up. This makes so much more sense now.

Nicholas_C• 11 years ago

Fantastic read.

I wonder how hard it is to acquire a computer in Cuba.

quickvi• 11 years ago

Extremely easy in the black market if you have the money. This is the cuban eBay: http://www.revolico.com. It is sometimes cheaper than in USA in absolute prices, but of course, this is a lot of money for most normal people.

dharma1• 11 years ago

what's the best hardware to go for an el cheapo mesh network with decent range these days? tp-link with openwrt? ubiquiti?

hultner• 11 years ago

Well I have no experience actually setting up this but some high power routers/access points with high gain antennas would probably be preferable (at least if both sides use comparable hardware). I don't know how well the software stands up from software such as Amped Wireless equipment but they'd probably be a good from an hardware standpoint. But it might be cheaper jam wifi-cards in the already available computers and running local software.

I once needed internet access from an server with no physical network access, however I had an friend living across the hall (quite thick concrete and brick walls but hardwood doors). That time I were rather successful running two cheapo PCI wifi-cards with external antennas I had laying around. Used lagg interfaces (link aggregation in failover mode) in FreeBSD and got a workable remote terminal session over mosh. It wasn't optimal but it certainly worked.

rcpt• 11 years ago

Getting openwrt on a tp-link router is real easy and there's cjdns builds available now.

cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/2lmpqg/running...

There's also the Serval app.

Turns out that none of my neighbors use cjdns but ymmv.

chris_overseas2• 11 years ago

I stayed in a casa particular in Baracoa, Cuba, a couple of years ago. The owner had an illegal Internet connection that was beamed down via a Pringles can style setup from a tourist hotel on top of a nearby hill (apparently fancy tourist hotels there often have unrestricted Internet). He would lose his connection for a day or two each month when the setup had to be removed and hidden from the local inspector. I can't remember exactly how much he said he was paying but it was a lot even by Western standards, something like US$200/month, and the performance was pretty awful.

mikeash• 11 years ago

Interesting story. Do you happen to know what he did with his internet access? Look at pictures of cats and argue with strangers like the rest of us?

chris_overseas2• 11 years ago

Heh... he was one of the many doctors in Cuba and had been fortunate enough to travel to a couple of countries to work, so he'd had a bit of a taste of the outside world. As far as I could tell he mostly used the Internet to keep informed on what was really going on in the world, without the censorship or propaganda that affected the local news sources. Based on some of the things he said I suspected he was very active politically though I didn't feel it was wise or fair to question him about that, as much as I wanted to.

beamform3e8cow• 11 years ago

not legal advice; no endorsement of any 'illegal activities' JUST TECHNICAL. the problem is running an ethernet cable over the roof of a bystander.

a.) spray open wifi all over could be a 'security risk' b.) WIFI beamforming or point to point and a directed beam. using also a potatato chip pringles can is a possible solution.

c,) for those engineers, for engineers are disappearing from the USA; why bother studying technical subjects?

lightning and electrical wires on top of the roof?

d.) it does not seem to BE SECRET SECRET

e.) air gaps may be ok. every two hours fast bicycle ride and the solid state drive. Obviously only transfer diffs via rsync or whatever protocol.

beamforming with central nodes?

c0decracker• 11 years ago

This reminds me of neighborhood networks of late 90s in post-Soviet era countries like Belarus and Ukraine that were created for somewhat different reasons but for pretty much exactly the same purpose. One time we used ancient ARCNet over the regular TV coax cable with whopping 2.5mbit throughput on a good day.

NovaS1X3• 11 years ago

I love reading these kinds of stories so much. To me, this is the essence of a hacker and the spirit of people who are simply passionate about technology and the belief of freedom of information.

It feels cyberpunk and innovative. I can just feel the character of this network and the interesting people who've built it. These are the technology types that I love talking with, these are the passionate ones who are passionate even when it's not convenient.

It takes an honest and faithful heart to do these things, and I find that beautiful.

irremediable4• 11 years ago

What a lovely tribute. I hesitate to bother you, but would you mind sharing some other examples of such "technology types" that you know about?

nsxwolf• 11 years ago

FYI: I downvoted you because your reply seemed to be a weirdly hostile response to an innocent comment.

NovaS1X3• 11 years ago

Yeah sure.

The most recent one I remember is a group of people in Red Hook building an open WiFi mesh network for free/low-cost to give internet access to people in poverty.

http://rhicenter.org/redhookwifi/

This isn't the article I remember reading. I can't find the one that I read, but this explains it well enough I think.

A few others were stories, which I can't find either, about networking schools in Africa to each other and building networking within them.

funkdobiest• 11 years ago

This is really cool, my home wifi network is called SNet.

yuhong• 11 years ago

I wonder if the recent changes in exporting from Cuba will change things.

hectorxp• 11 years ago

Some insights:

My guess is this network is something the government have under control, and they are just experimenting to see how people behave in a connected environment.

I worked as freelancer in Cuba for over 10 years, so having internet was top priority for me. I started while studying in the univ, stealing professor's accounts who had internet access, some friends were separated from the university when got caught, fortunately I made it through. After graduated the real "illegal activities" began, met a friend of a friend who was selling "legal" internet dialup connections (56bkit/s) 120 hours a month for $160 (yes! dollars), "legal" meaning: foreigners students in cuba are allowed to have internet from their rentals, so someone inside the telecommunication company (only one in cuba ETECSA) created one of these accounts for you. Eventually this guy was caught too, and my hunt for connectivity started once again. A bug on an government controlled intranet allowed you to navigate (only HTTP no HTTPS) if you happened to know a magic query string, hmmm need outside help, talked to a friend outside cuba who had a hosting to put a tunnel/proxy on port 80, this didn't last long either, next option, a guy in a government company was selling internet (illegal dialup, but only at 33kb/s for technical reasons), this was "technically" 24h, but you shouldn't used on working hours for obvious reasons, $250/month, for the first time I was able to download something greater than 50MB without resume. Oh!! HTTP 1.1 what a relief!! websites serving files without resume don't know the pain they cause to us. Well, all sorts of these stories happened until I found the "GUY", this guy had internet via satellite, he paid the subscription to HugeNET through a third party. He built a wifi network with APs and some handmade antennas, but to join to his network you needed to have an potent AP at least 50 ft from the ground and be located nearby one of his APs. After managing the infrastructure I finally had a decent internet connection, at a minimal cost $150. At some point HugeNET cancelled all the connections in cuba, and happiness ended. The bright side of the lack of internet in cuba is that you really need to focus and learn the hard way, there's no way you can see a youtube video, skype, play games, or load endless facebook pages; every time you have an error, the answer is not two google/stackoverflow clicks away. You need to learn about everything, from communication protocols, to how the browser's cache works, to repair your own computer. No technical support, no skype, no G3/4 on your phone, nothing, just 56kbit/s max 5~6h a day, and a hard drive full of pirated books.

There are a lot of people freelancing in cuba, so if at some point you had outsourced some work and your provider disappear for a couple of days, don't be so hard at them, they might be fighting harder than you think to deliver.

brianbreslin• 11 years ago

the chinese could have been selling the cubans Wuawei gear for YEARS. That stuff is comparable to US stuff from cisco or whomever. So the argument that US restrictions inhibited their net access is pure propaganda. Is there a fiber link to cuba from anywhere else in the Caribbean ? I know the NAP of Americas link in Miami goes around cuba.

so assuming the US eases restrictions, how fast could a true blanketing of the country or at least Havana occur with modern grade Wifi gear? Can solar be used to supplement the poor electrical infrastructure?

leke• 11 years ago

I think it's a case of the leaders restricting the web to its citizens. They have it, but you need to be special to get it.

pekk• 11 years ago

And what if it turned out that the State Dept. was helping to bankroll this? It would be consistent with things the US has been caught doing in Cuba just in the last few years.

Would this change our opinion of it?

nykwana2• 11 years ago

People here will just conveniently ignore that inconvenient detail.

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

I am fairly confident the State Dept is helping to bankroll it one way or another.

It still sounds like super neat tech. I wish we had more technical details. Presumably it's mesh networking of some kind?

grobinson• 11 years ago

Researchers at MIT built an 802.11 mesh network some years back. All it would take would be one or two gateway nodes in the middle of the mesh and you would have Internet at a tolerable speed. It would also save having to lay cables over your neighbours.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-744/papers/roofnet-mobicom05...

blueskin_2• 11 years ago

Why does Cuba still have oppressive policies such as banning internet access if they want the US to stop enforcing sanctions on them? Seems the change should be both ways to me. Such a shame that each seems to want the other to act first, when if we put them both in a room and told them they'd have to come to an agreement before they could be let out, the embargo and oppressive policies would both be over in hours.

nykwana2• 11 years ago

Why does Cuba still have oppressive policies

Oppressive policies like hosting America's 21st century concentration camps at Gitmo?

blueskin_2• 11 years ago

Also true, although Obama shares the blame for having promised to close it down and not doing so.

Cuban youth build secret computer network despite Wi-Fi ban

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