There's A Secret, Illegal Internet
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- Опубликовано: 25 май 2023
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In repressive countries, resourceful citizens have found ways to smuggle online content and effectively create an underground "offline" Internet.
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I'm Cuban and this video is 100% correct. For a short video, Linus did a great job summarizing our "underground internet" situation. I would love to see a longer and more in-depth video about Cubans' struggle with internet.
i would love to learn more about it! cuba is such a beautiful country, and after the fall of the ussr, that it managed to survive and continue on says so much about the spirit of cubans in general
I remember a left leaning media company doing a report on this several years ago. I want to say it was Vox or Vice.
I thought I wouldn’t see this comment until Monday!
I saw a documentary about the Snet setup in Cuba and I am a little sad that it is gone.
I mean the joy of traveling there to see it would have been a network enthusiast's dream, at least that documentary showed parts of it in great detail.
Asere, que bola!
Here in Germany downloading copyrighted media/software is strictly forbidden. So my university network which ran not only in the university but also on the student accomodations had its own "secret" intranet portal where the students shared all the media they had. One could find pretty much anything there and download it super fast. Was a pretty clever workaround and I guess is still in use.
We have a similar thing for course literature at my university in Sweden. You need the password and username and you're good to go
Thankfully, that isn't a situation in Croatia, police doesn't even raise an eyebrow when it comes to internet piracy.
👍
@@filiphabek271 Same in Macedonia. I've pirated so many movies, tv shows, anime (hentai), programs and other stuff to the point that if I lived in Germany, they'll probably brought back the death penalty just for me. I mean I have over 1TB of pirated anime on my hdd.
In my school in sweden we would just use the school internet to pirate because it was really fast. Sometimes the network guy would track you down and ask whats up, but was cool with it so long as you dont tank the internet for long.
As a cuban this is a very good summary of the situation. The one thing you didn't take into account is that most cubans can't even with internet subscribe to services since cuban banks because of the embargo are restricted. So even with internet access they will still need to watch pirated content.
Is it really piracy if you live someplace the digital product is not being sold in? They don't lose anything physically if a copy is downloaded so theft of property is a stretch and then they don't lose any money from sales if they were never going to sell to you. They don't even lose money hosting the content all the way from uploading to download data costs and everything in between that invloves the servers. For it to be piracy there needs to be a victim of piracy, there is no physical loss so that's out, and they were not selling to you as well as they had nothing to do with the servers the content was on they cannot claim a monetary loss from sales or just the server costs. Piracy? Nope, just downloading content that someone uploaded to a server so Cubans can have a clean conscience when they download the latest blockbuster movie that was not in local theaters nor ever will be.
And that's the thing about pirated copy counts and their claims of monetary loss. Every download to a region or country that it is not officially available in for sale is not a monetary loss because there was no sales involved and therefor the MPAA can go suck an eggplant when they say anything about the download counts.
@JETWTF i agree that there is no loss and it may not be technically piracy, my comments where more along the lines of even with access to internet the cubans will still not have easy access to the content, even if they most of the time would just like you rather pay for a streaming service.
This is an interesting scenario where centralized finance can gatekeep a large group of people from engaging with a foreign market
Bitcoin fixes this.
@Visstnok Not exactly, in cuba, the access to computers or even parts is very difficult. Youcan'tt go to any stores to buy any of this. The only way is for the people that can travel to sell them, and there are regulations for the amount you can bring with you. As you can imagine, the market price of everything is 3 to 4 times the price as in the rest of the world. For example, im a programmer, i wanted to buy a computer and the prices for second hand laptops with celerons, 8 gb of ram and 500gb hard drives was about 800 dollars. Take into account as well, cubans dont receive a salary in dollars but in cuban pesos and the conversion is about 200 pesos for dollar nowadays. So setting up a farm is discarded for 99% of the population. And the ones that can probably don't need to. But even if this wasn't the case a vast percentage of the population that is not technically savy are not going to go this route and will stick to what is easier for them, someone brings them a terabite or 2 every week of shows and movies...
We never called it offline internet, we called it sneakernet. It started with taking a floppy out of your computer and putting on your shoes and walking over to your friend's house.😂
You took the words out of my mouth. :)
High latency, significantly higher bandwidth.
Not one mention of sneakernet in the video, son I am disappoint ;-)
@@EikoandMog never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes going down the highway
@@zyeborm Or the amount of data a messenger pigeon can carry on micro-SD cards (RFC 1149, Internet Protocol over Avian Carriers).
Can you make more videos like this about recent tech history, and maybe make them a bit longer? I tire of the usual CPU reviews, but I love this kind of thought provoking content that provides a larger context about the digital world and how other people experience it.
dude do yourself a favor and go find someone who actually knows what they're talking about and researches History instead of this Think Tank shit show Linus shamelessly published
I second this! I thoroughly enjoyed this video and would love to see more like it learning history about how certain countries handled varying technologies differently
Seriously. This is the best content LMG had made in a while. And there's probably tons of unique interesting stuff like this they could get into
Never thought I'd ever hear Linus utter the word "doujinshi"
Also never thought he'd butcher it completely.
I wasn't the only person thinking this then 😅
i thought i heard it but it didn't sound right so i assumed i misheard lol
thats what he says at 3:17 ?!
damn
doujinshi itself is basically self-published magazine, there are a lot of safe or original doujinshi sold on event across Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, etc.
I bet a lot of people outside Japan are thinking something else 👀👀
My man really said "doo-jin-chi" 💀💀💀
the Havana Street Network part of the video really showed how modular and decentralized the internet is. along with what they mean by "anyone can add to the internet". I've connected routers before between rooms and buildings, but I've never considered that if you were to continue that process you'd be pretty much building out another internet.
also find it fascinating to see how that isolated internet began to develope its own web
hmm remind me of a nation, oh yea the mainland china which fundamentally operate another internet or intranet depend on viewpoint
Not pretty much. Literally. That network fits the description of an internet. It does not fit the description of the world wide web. But how world wide is the world wode web if doesn't reach some places haha
I see. that's fascinating. so they literally built another internet, as well as another web. just one that wasn't world wide.
Technically it's not the internet but an intranet.
@@FlyboyHelosim so instead of international network, it's intRanation nAtwork?
Piracy used to be huge in India, I leave for a couple of years and come back - atleast among those I hang out with, there's no piracy anymore
Cheaper internet, rise of streaming, and this one is really important - region specific pricing on Steam have all contributed to this
India just moved to online piracy. It is still one of the top pirated countries because of censorship and bad streaming services
And what do they use all that higher bandwidth for? Larger and larger scam call centers.
Gabe mentioned piracy was a service-problem. Once the consumer is respected and the product has a fair price and few bugs, piracy ceases to exist.
@@NorseGraphicyep ❤️
And yet, people are still hating Steam.🤷♂️
Cuban viewer (who moved to the US): thanks for covering this subject :)
Never thought I'd see Linus discuss the shady methods that get used over there to keep up with US shows and movies. One thing that also gets spread around is bootleg videogames. I fondly remember being in elementary school and trading burnt DVDs and flash drives with friends and getting to experience games like the older GTAs or Serious Sam.
i think el paquete semanal is super cool, and would love to hear more about it from a cuban!
@@ExperimentIV Years ago (circa 2015-2017) I was watching videos from a Mexican youtuber, a travel vlogger called Alan Estrada to improve my Spanish. In one of his travels to Cuba he was stunned to realize that people there knew of him and he had many fans who followed his every videos. Videos brought on external HDD from el paquete semanal! That was quite the shock for him. It was the first time I ever heard of this way of exchanging content. Reminded me of the late 90s early 00s and exchanging burnt CDs and DVDs of music, divxs and cracked video games. Oh these were the days
But how do you guys play all the latest live service games!!?? I'm only kidding of course.
@@CasepbXeven we should pirate live service games until the day they stop making them live service
Ftfy: the shady methods that get used over there by the government to people from US shows and movies.
I am from Cuba and I approve this message. (90% of the information is correct, some small details that a non-native could not understand)
I have memories of the Weekly Pack since 2007, but it was monthly at first, and only up to 256gb, which was the normal size of removable hard drives of the time.
😂😂😂 I laughed for 5 minutes when I heard the pronunciation of Linus for Paquete Semanal
I was a ¨Paquetero¨ for a while (the people that build the Weekly Package), and if anyone would like specific details on how it works, I can provide them.
How was it distributed? Did people go to some location with their own drives and download stuff, or was it hand delivered?
@@MrFastFox666 Few people had fast Internet access, and they downloaded as much content as possible, which they put together in a parent company. From there there was a huge courier system, including the national bus system that delivered hard drives all over the country. It arrived at Headquarters in the Provinces, which once again had their own messengers (on foot or by bicycle). that they then took it to houses that then sold the content to people. It's a huge system involving thousands of people and all this happened every week in a 48 hour window!
Con gusto quisiera saber, caballero!
The main thing I'm interested in knowing is how they'd try to bypass the low bandwidth of cuban Internet to get gigabytes of stuff downloaded in time.
I came here to look for the comment laughing at that pronunciation. I actually laughed out loud. Poor Linus. He tried.
I'm Dominican and it is crazy to think that there only is a 9% difference of Internet Access to Cuba! My Cuban friend had told me the hoops he had to take in order to get a connection (this was around 2019-2021). That 9% really seems to be significant since it is SO easy to get a connection in the DR!
Dominican 🇩🇲 Dominica, or Dominican 🇩🇴 Dominican Republic?
Dominican republic
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 You can't see the "R" ?
I'm curious, what kind of hoops did they have to jump through to get a connection? Was this a connection to the state internet? This is so interesting!
@@herpderp5222 If I remember correctly, he had to buy a sim card that then he could reload data on (kinda like prepaid I guess). Then he had to go to this specific park and where he was able to get internet signal. Lots of websites/apps were blocked, I remember his mom (in the US) texting me a link to a vpn so that I could send it to him through Discord (since the app wasn't blocked at that time). He also told me how his grandma asked him once to go to the next town over to get the weekly package, I believe he just went to a random guy's house and he put the files in his drive. Also, there is a limit (at least for Cubans, idk about tourist) on how many tech items they take into the island. My friend had to sometimes leave his stuff in the US so that he could take as much stuff as he could for his family members.
As a cuban, you have no idea how proud it makes me hearing you talking about this situation...unfortunately I no longer live in the island and now that I have a fully unrestricted connection (with a good enough speed) I can tell you I do miss "el paquete" as the whole (first world) problem of selecting what to watch or what content to consume was taken out of the equation......I can even remember watching your videos from as far back as 2013 downloaded from RUclips and directly to my PC thanks to the weekly package.
You don’t have to demonise Cuba because for it’s political past.
@@NativeVsColonial Thanks NativeVsColonial
@@eX1st4132 np bro, I know how Americans demonise countries just because of their political ideologies and cultural differences.
I love that Linus changes his shirt when talking about the sponsor, so we can easily skip it
Use sponsor block
with revanced
You really think he changes shirts for that?!
@@theALTERRA i use the extended version and it works amazingly really, would recommend
The adds on this channel are usually 3 skips anyway so pretty easy
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurdling down the highway" - Andrew S. Tennanbaum
How many current viewers know what “tapes” are?
I just posted that, but you beat me to it!
I really thought this would be yet another video about dark web and piracy but I was way off. This video was great and highly educational for me. Thank you.
Yeah, it was a nice change. The topic of the dark web has been flogged to death now.
@@FlyboyHelosim agreed
As a kid, I lived in a very rural town in upstate NY. We had satelite internet but it was super expensive and super slow. Had to beg my parents to drive 20-30 minutes to a family members house to do anything online.
This reminds me of other "resistance" style communication networks, like pirate radio and "secret" numbers stations, some of which are still on the air if you know where to look. Think you'll ever do a video about the various forms and uses of amateur radio and how it can also be used as a slow internet with things like "sail mail" for boaters out at sea? With a laptop, a little bit of pre-downloaded software, a HakRF One, and a wire to use as an antenna (or just a wire to connect the RF1 to the mast's backstay lol), and bam, you got some signal and possibly some weak @$$ internet with a little work lol.
There is this thing called HAM Radio that has connections to the common internet from the very beginnings.
@@HTMLbrowser Yep. I just sometimes call it "amateur radio" because it sounds more professional because that's how the FCC refers to it lol. That and HAM has a bit of a negative connotation if you learn where it comes from. It comes from all the way back in the Telegraph days when some telegraph operators would get a bit sloppy, they would be referred to as "ham handed" lol.
0:23 never thought I would see "its morbin time" and Linus say "dankest memes"
Be real and touch grass, instead of writing comments everywhere to get likes ("worthless pixels") 🤓.
Whoever did the graphics for this one, I applaud your sense of humour.
Sputnik for satellite communications, Death of Stalin as Russian media, and The Wire as a comedy and so many nore. You’re doing great work!
And showing Teletubbies when talking of violent content... 😂😂
I feel "The Death of Stalin" was a mistake (happens when you work with a bunch of zoomers, who wouldn't tell Steve Buscemi from Victor Sukhorukov even if they saw them both in person - cause they don't care :) ) - they paired it with a legit example of a Bollywood blockbuster.
And "The Death of Stalin" was even banned in Russia. Haven't heard of the Indian Terminator getting banned in India, tho.
As a Latinoamerican, Linus struggling to say "Paquete Semanal" fills my soul with joy lmao
Hahhahaha, yeah
"Páquetei semánal"
Would have been so easy to google the words and click the speech button, but nope. Linus decided to rawdog it!
In Poland where I live up until 1996 or so there was no copyright laws so there have been perfectly legal market squares for pirated content like games and programs as well as computer hardware and knockoff Nintendo NES hardware with pirated cartridges. They were advertised on television when I was a kid. With piracy been outlawed those hot spots of nerd culture sadly died off shortly after but not because of copyright but mostly due to better and better Internet adoption.
I'm Puerto Rican, but have a LOT of Cuban family and friends. I've heard tons of stories about SNET and the weekly package. Seeing Canadian RUclipsrs dedicate entire videos to this topic was not on my 2023 bingo card. Lol. I'm happy this is being spoken about, though. A lot of people, especially Americans, are woefully unaware of what measures people have to take to be able to use less-than-basic internet in remote and/or oppressive countries. Internet may no longer be a luxury to us here in the first-world. But people in other countries struggle, even risk their lives, to have even a fraction of the data accessibility that we have. Excellent video. Thank you for spreading awareness.
This reminds me of that time when the Zetas Cartel secretly built a whole entire cellular network without the Mexican government noticing anything. It was eventually discovered and destroyed, but the network was incredibly extensive and complex for what it was.
80's internet in Australia for me was downloading a text file, reading it off line, then posting a back cheque with a list of games across country, and a week later several 5 1/4inch discs would show up with Duke Nukem and Commander Keen
I used to buy shareware like that too!
I started watching the LTT videos in the weekly package, many moons ago. I am glad that LMG has dedicated this video to telling a fragment of our history in ICTs; only Cubans will understand the full story, sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, 😉.
2:06 That was so horribly butchered it caused me physical pain
0:50 TIL that at 2000, and apparently even 2020, only USA nd Cuba had Internet. I could've sworn I were surfing around for as long as I can remember, but turns out that must have been an odd case of amnesia speaking.
Please more dense content like this. I love the concise approach to this kind of stuff
Hugesnet sucks, and getting the ISP to run you your own copper lines is cheaper over a decade
This was genuinely fascinating, it is refreshing.
1:50 FYI, that's not Bollywood film. That's a Kollywood film from Tamil Nadu, India. Yeah, india has many film industries based on languages.
Reminds me of Thailand in the mid to late 2000s, before fast home internet was available, some datacenters would have a "colo" service, where an individual could rent a virtual machine on a server/PC connected to a removable HDD dock, then go to the datacenter and ask the staff to swap out the HDDs. So you would remote desktop into the VM, download all the Linux ISOs (cough cough) to your HDD, then drive over and pick up the HDD, leaving another one in its place...
Then cheap fast ADSL and FTTH became a thing, and this practice is largely abandoned
Absolutely spot on! Im Cuban and American. Born and raised in Cuba until I was 20. Now living in the US for 6 years and I can tell you one thing about "el paquete". It is in some ways better than what we have in here. I would watch really good titles right after thay aired in 4k for dirty cheap.5 Cuban pesos wbich is like $1 here in the US, no streaming service does this AFAIK
That thing about execution in north korea is a myth. I hope you didn't get that info from Yeonmi Park.
"In one of her accounts, Park has claimed that when she was 9, she had witnessed her best friend's mother being executed in a stadium at Hyesan, for simply watching a foreign film. However several North Korean defectors from Hyesan had disputed its plausibility and said that public executions don't ever occur in stadiums. Additionally Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University, who had interviewed hundreds of defectors from North Korea, said that he was "skeptical whether watching a Western movie would lead to an execution", and that he felt it wouldn't even be likely for one to be arrested for it."
Yeonmi Park was exposed as a right wing grifter. A lot of other NK defectors in South Korea and elsewhere say life there is harsh, but not that harsh
@@LouisSubearth Go outside. Get some hobbies.
No, it's all true, I was there, I was the movie!
Exactly, nothing in this video makes sense either, he first presents Cuban government as scary gov who hates internet, makes everything illegal and doesn't want the internet and then he says the street network got absorbed by the gov and moves on without explanation, he also selectively only selectively picks one country to compare cuba's internet population while Cuba is more online than other neighboring countries, stupid video overall
@@Dr.Mohandes It's because if they compared it to Haiti it would make Cuba look good, that's a no-no. Gotta skip over it and pick the next one...
Back in the modem and pre flatrate days we even did that here in Germany.
Around 1994 for example our little group had gotten hold of a bunch of QIC80 streamers for free and the medium was large and robust enough to share the latest stuff with your friends.
In the mid to late 90s in college, all the dorms (dozens of dorms - thousands of students) were on a single large network. Most people at the college turned on file sharing and made for a giant collection of whatever you wanted. That being said it was incredibly insecure, and it was vital you marked your shared content as "Read Only" otherwise someone would absolutely screw it up.
When you said violent and teletubbies popped I busted out laughing.
Ah yes, who could forget beloved American sitcom The Wire.
I'm Canadian and there's a not insignificant portion of this country that is still serviced by dial up or nothing at all
This video honestly gives me hope for the internet in places like the US if companies get a bit too much control. Building a parallel internet doesn't seem so farfetched after seeing this.
LOL
Elon Musk's starlink basically makes this obsolete in any country where importation is possible
@@My_Old_YT_Account Not really a good horse to bet on given the fundamental flaws in that system's design
Ignoring Elon Musk's well-documented personal eccentricities, it's a system that's designed around having 40,000 satellites with an official lifespan of 5 years, which is dependent on a company that destroyed its own launch site in a completely avoidable accident.
That plus the current issues with throttling, coverage area, and receiver availability, it's hard to have confidence in the long-term viability of Starlink.
It's a shame, really, because there are a many parts of the world in desperate need of satellite internet that doesn't suck
While not terribly common, there are wireless community networks in existence.
I love the way you referenced the internet as information sharing. Many online see the word internet as wired wireless and cloud connection
My interactions with Cubans was in 1994 - 1996. I was in GTMO when there was a flood of immigrants leaving Cuba. Those people were some of the greatest personalities I had ever met. Most were highly educated, and some spoke English. I heard so many terrible stories of hardship and witnessed the loss of life for some of them fleeing Cuba. It was a pivotal time for those seeking admission into the US and I'm glad to have been part of there journey. They were beautiful people and I'm glad to see Cuba opening up.
Wake up the worst place ever is a neighborhood in North America
The hardships are caused by the united States. I don't blame them for wanting a better life for themselves and family but we have to recognize why they are like that. It isn't because the country is mismanaged but rather the US physically denies any ships and trade to this country because they are a leftist country.
It's no longer about punishing them for aligning themselves with Russia. Modern Cuban politics are far removed from Russia. The US under Trump has been friendlier with Russia than Cuba.
Don't get me wrong Cuba isn't perfect, but we need to start putting things in context and stop romanticizing people fleeing.
Ah a guy who worked at the illegal torture base the US runs out of Cuba against their wishes to circumvent domestic laws against cruel and unusual punishment. I'm sure this is a very trustworthy individual
Yeah, I've loved all the Cubans I've met; I'm more than happy to have them here
Cuba was never closed, dude. It's isolated by an illegal blockade.
Honestly, the old smuggled USB underground Cuban internet sounds much better that our internet in some ways.
it was more "filtered" only quality shows, movies apps and games etc bc you had to preserve space, a lil bit later when external HHDs got cheaper we got our dose of indian, turkish and korean content too haha
@@AlexLay Did hacking/malware etc ever become an issue?
Fascinating. These are some of my favorite videos you make--learning about what people around the world go through or have gone through to access computers and the internet. It's important to learn this history so we can protect our access in the future.
never thought i'd hear linus (briefly) talk about cold war politics and i love it
As someone who was part of the network themselves, i could say that the biggest slowdown to this approach is the lack of appropriate servers and some massive lack in organization to host files, we need to setup like a torrenting tool to speed up downloads, instead of all of us getting the same file from the same host multiple times, specially when its all mechanical drives 😹 other than that its okish i would say.
By having a local torrenting like solution we could save more money to spend on hardware and preserve more the content. Also faster downloads. Like 100mb/s cable is barely half of what a mechanical drive can take.
This is super interesting to me.
Are you not able to share files via torrents on a LAN/intranet? Or am I misundstanding you and you are saying it never was tried or organized enough to be popular/the normal standard?
Are you saying the network was slow, file downloads slow, websites slow because everyone was overloading the single or few servers and there was not proper equipment also?
The network was just neighbor to neighbor running Ethernet cables/wireless links into one big mesh network, correct? Did people have the state internet and then the local intranet as like a 2nd connection? Did people have uncensored/hidden/non-state internet?
Did you navigate on the intranet network with IP addresses or domain names? Was there search engines that would find websites/or a website that listed all the other sites?
Did you guys have issues with hacking/malware etc?
@@herpderp5222 the torrenting was never popularized enough, since most hosts wanted to profit from it, thru the weekly package or selling each program and cracks separately, we used ftp, ftps, smb, Mozilla fileshare etc, you need username and pass, and yes you do get an ip address, but it's not really important, unless you are playing wow dota or cod in lan.
Even though the network looks pretty big, its splitted into smaller sectors, each with different services and operating hours.
oh proper equipment there was, yet still slow due to it being all used during peak hours, each host sets the package delivery at their own time, mostly Saturday, Sunday or Monday, something after that is late or a reseller. some areas dont have cables set so they bring 1 or 2 tb hard drives and they copy the data to your pc.
the greater issue is latency and the mixing of high quality 1gb cable with 100 mbs cable and even telephone cable 🤯, ping, speed on what is basically daisy chained connections, signal integrity they all take a dunk and is a hot mess if you are not tech savy, did i forget to mention about US TV signals also getting sent over the same cable? well yeah, that cable its like a swiss knife.
you could have both networks running internet and intranet, but the internet is so slow and restricted and expensive that its basically a no brainer to get locally connected only.
hacking thru network, not really, There is alot of old hardware yet relatively safe, except viruses on files from the weekly package, those are made by external sources.
What was the main pro to this local solution? the fact that you can get tons of movies, games and programs relatively cheap.
cons, its literally pirating and making profit from it. and no real internet, yet slow grow.
This one hits a spot similar to learning about underground esports and fandoms also hits. I love it
1:07 uuuuuuuh i think you may have screwed up the map lol its all grey lol
Reminds me of the old tech comme4ent "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with floppy disks"
Reminds me of the guy in HL2 where someone asks him how he knows something and he's like "I downloaded most of the internet before the fall"
that's russell from hl alyx, not hl2
Sadly the internet has become a carefully crafted propaganda machine. Just like the MSM the MSM is not to be trusted for content that is controlled
When I started working offshore in 2010, most of the oil rigs had satellite internet but you were lucky if you could load Facebook. Most did have local servers that the electronics technicians would setup that you could grab and put whatever shows you had on your portable harddrive. Almost like Little Free Libraries but for bootleg movies and shows.
1:50 The Death of Stalin is not a Russian film, it's a British one.
Moreover, it was actually banned in Russia.
Is that the internet where search engines still answer questions?
Remember that?
oh next one like this you should do, one of my favorite stories is about how this guy in China created a standardized keyboard that allowed them to keep up with the rise of the personal computer. Unlike the US which has 26 letters the Chinese language has tens of thousands of characters. Which in the 70s and 80s wouldn't even fit onto the largest hard drives they had at the time. This man Chu Bong-Foo saved China from being left behind the tech boom. its kind of a fantastic story.
That does sound interesting!
I saw a quite interesting video on this underground network a while ago here on RUclips. Highly worth the watch for anyone interested in more info on this topic. I would've found this super cool as a kid, and the geek in me still finds it cool now. The ingenuity of some people never ceases to amaze.
Please make more of these geopolitical centered tech episodes, it was a really interesting take!
I was hoping Linus know or mentioned how there is RUclips on the Weekly Package and how his channel has a folder with each daily video of the past week on it. Even Wan Show. I watched Linus for two years before I even got to enter to RUclips myself for the first time
Unexpectedly interesting video.
100k users on a network not connected to the rest of the world sounds insane. That has to be a record, isn't it?
I think North Korea also has an expansive statewide intranet.
right?? thanks to the Embargo to those countries which is also a record!!🎉🎉🎉 the same one Linus mentions as if it was just a smaller nuisance
Being a Pakistani I confirm this flash drive sharing of movies and other stuff in Pakistan as well. In Pakistan we had shopes with computer where we took our pen drives and get them filled with everything we wanted like literally everything. And every week new contents would be advertised in the shopes for the sale.
Been online since the AOL days and even up until the early 2000s i was still using burned media to move content around. It was just faster than waiting days or even weeks at dial up speeds and even at moderate dsl speeds.
This new "Linus" guy you hired is a great host, hope to see more of him!
There's one thing about my country is that internet data is quite cheap, even so cheaper than food ration for two days.
Jessica Pigeau you've really outdone yourself. Amazing content
Fantastic editor work - Obama popping up for politics and "naked" Obama up for pornography, and then the Teletubbies for violent content had me in stitches, nice work!
1:27 “American Sit-Coms” = Image of The Wire
Shieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
since I saw some others from germany talking about this I wanted to add some further information about it. from what I know streaming and even downloading content you haven't bought isn't really much of an issue her what is considered illegal though is "distribution" of media. I put that in quotes because they really stretch the definition of that as much as possible. it doesn't just mean someone uploading a movie onto youtube without permission or someone offering to download a new album from a website no it also includes the seeding of torrents like any amount of it. even if you seed a torrent for half a second and some downloads 1KB of data that already completely fulfills the violation.
the way they find out about this is that there is a dedicated company which only has one product and one purpose. they have invented a tool to spy on peer to peer connections in germany which checks the hashes of what is being send so if they find a hash that is in the list of hashes of rightholders involved with this they request the userdata of that IP address from the ISP it belongs to. so they get peoples name and address and other details which then is sold to the specific law firm which represents the rights holder of this piece of media in germany. these law firms only exist to send out letters to people telling them they are doomed basically because of what they did and typically demand at least 700-1000€ for one piece of media seeded once even if it was just a second. legally you can't really do anything about this besides wait until they take it to court which takes years and hope they make an error filing it to court since they copy and past thousands of letters and stuff liket that in those law firms every day. the first letter also includes something they want you to sign but they don't tell it's not legally required to do so but if you do you are liable for any further distribution so if you seed 1KB to one user and that user ends up seeding the file to 100 users you'll have to pay the fine 100 times more and if those 100 users seed that file again you are liable for each new one that receives it.
so all in all you get spied on and if they find out your actual IP address you get fucked over.
This video is actually very informative, would definitely like to see follow ups on sensored nations in the near future!!
I remember using CDs to browse "internet" sites. They would often come with magazines or you could order them. I remember in 1995, looking at a universities website on a CD rom before I had internet.
This is one of the best Techquickie episodes I think I’ve ever seen
Quite possibly the most interesting Techquickie of them all. Thanks Linus & team.
Man looking at that map at 0:50 and remembering my dad and I were one of the first in the Chicago/Wisconsin area to connect to the internet in the 1990’s and use it almost every day since then.
Not much has changed for us but the rest of the world has changed and finally started using the internet too.
Well in the early 00s in my city we used to have a big outdoor book marketplace that also hosted catalogs of illicit CDs and DVDs that you could see copies of their covers in binders, order them and get them 15 minutes later two blocks away. This included software, games, audio CDs and ripped DivX movies. Back then 56k modems were the fastest means of accessing the web. After that we had private FTP servers from the neighborhood ISPs that hosted such content and this didn't count against the data or time cap at the time.
In Sicily we too had places like this
This is so cool to hear about. As an American, we just have no idea about stuff like this. I’m glad the good people of these countries can figure out how to “stick it to the man”
The Cuba government turned a blind eye. They wanted their citizens to have entertainment but they have to constantly fight back against US propaganda.
Don't get me wrong Cuba isn't perfect but what they are doing is generally working which is very impressive since the US doesn't allow any other nations to trade with them.
The US til this day is constantly trying to overthrow their government. The vast majority of Cuban love their government they understand the hardships is from the US and not from their government.
When it comes to happiness and healthcare they have the US beat.
Although things are tough for them, it's actually worse in the rest of Latin America where US interests dominates. Corruption,murder and 12 inequality is so bad in places like El Salvador in Honduras. Although they have amazing resources and wealth. That all goes to the very top in their country and the rest leave and goes to the US.
Cuban citizens understand this.
[Sorry for the rant just wanted to put everything in context]
A lot of the software used for bypassing censorship is made by Chinese people trying to bypass the CCPs Great Firewall of China.
What? Literally RUclips and twitter and fb were ALL ENAGGED in state run censorship during 2020 elections. All 3 banned a sitting a USA president illegally. Then RUclips banned channels which were streaming trump events. And then if they did allow streaming…they turned off comments across any channel which was streaming rallys and such.
That's because as Americans we are the people who are the man, blockade sanctions and other forms of economic warfare are why other countries get put into precarious situations
and you still have no idea. even Trump might have a better take on Cuban and Korean History than Linus with this Think Tank bullshit
As a Cuban, the nostalgia of seeing some of our old websites on a Linus video hit hard 🥲
Those times were amazing.
Speaking of doujinshi i would love to hear what the fanfiction climate was like on those networks. Theres no way it didnt exist in some form even with all the restrictions.
Love the idea, here we use software over the internet to create a lan with friends to play some "offline" games that have no servers left and only offer local play . Over there they create a lan to get an "online" Experiance.
This was actually amazing! SO MUCH that I'd LOVE to see a TechLonger video on this! Or even a series of them. This is SO interesting.
damnn that’s crazy bro
Love love LOVE content like this, dense, concise and factual; not to mention really interesting and cool ✨😊
Known for a long time as *Sneakernet*
Because you walk around in sneakers carrying data. There's a Wikipedia page for it.
*EDIT* When we had dial-up modems, it was quicker to pass someone a CD.
I hear that in the days before we had fast internet, there was a market in Scotland called "The Barras"
A stall would appear with big ring-bound books of software titles.
If a visitor indicated interest in one or more titles, word would be sent to the guy holding the media, and a kid would appear with an appropriate number of CD-R disks.
Occasionally, the police would appear and investigate, grabbing the stack of illicit media.
They would count up the number of copies of Autocad, Lightwave, F1-GP2 etc, multiply it by the MRP and then the papers would report that police had seized over 15 million pounds worth of stolen goods!
I love seeing seeing Linus in more videos.
yeah...!!!🙂
I like this video, I hope there are more like this that branch out a bit more.
Man, I would play on a server only with my local people. That was actually probably better than the standard WoW 😂
Even though I come from Colombia, It never crossed my mind that so many people were still without reliable, uncensored internet. I'm thankful that I do now
I really liked the more video essay-y vibe to this video!
As a Cuban, seeing a Canadian completely botch the pronunciation of "paquete semanal" was weirdly wholesome lol
Linus talking about cuba is the last thing I expected today hehe.
I remember showing this to my AP computer science teacher in high school and he was really excited about learning about it. Good times
Very interesting, didn't know about that. One of my favorite Techquickie so far.
Huh. Sounds a lot like my (hopefully) former country. Which is getting worse and worse in terms of uncensored access to the internet :(
Which one?
The sneakernet is still faster than the internet, in terms of bandwidth delivery, still. We'll see if the internet beats sneakernet by 2040 as predicted.
Even better: sneakernet is curated. Minimal ads, less scams, and a collection that was worth the time and effort to store.
Especially that signal to noise is becoming more of a problem for the webz, sneakernet bypasses all that and is often quicker to find exactly what you want when you discover the right node.
Best sponsor yet. I haven't used this specific service but I've signed up for another and it's rediculous how many places have your info and are selling it. Those deletion services that send take down requests for you are invaluable.
growing up in Eastern Europe in the 90s it was the same situation but not because of restrictions, because of extreme poverty :(
I'd like to see a Techquickie on alternate OS to Windows to revive XP - 8.1 PCs. People need to stop binning old tech that still works.
lmao just say you want another Linux video no need to make it complicated
This video was awesome. We sometimes take for granted some things we have and forget that out world still has some stuff like that. Would be great to have more videos like this both historical and current occurrences 🤯
As a venezuelan who left the country. I can confirm this is how things go in totalitarian states. We used to be well connected but the regime started isolating everyone. But now you can go to your local mochilero and get any season of anime in a flash drive..come back tomorrow and have that and whatever goodies he could fit as well for low prices. X3
My mother's side of the family resides in Havana Cuba, I visited when I was much younger and the "Offline internet" was how my Uncle got access to CoD Black Ops 1 on his PC which I had tons of fun playing right after it's release. As you can imagine, the game was banned in Cuba (If you played the beginning of the game you can imagine why lmao) so playing it IN Cuba definitely added to the experience for sure. 😂 Too bad it was Castro's body double. 🤷♂
death of stalin is not a russian movie
Nice to see this dudes getting back to what he enjoys doing
As a sidenote, I read that no network has larger bandwidth than the physical transport of drives. Amazon even offers that service. They have this van with a massive amount of tape drives that can carry petabytes at a time. It's used for data migration between data centers, since moving that amount of data through networks would be too slow. I find it mindblowing, to be honest
I visited Cuba a few years back & there were tonnes of locals sitting in the park where there was WiFi. Nobody kicking a ball around or having picnics, all just staring at their phones. I had no idea about the local wired internet though. I guess these people didn't either.
Cuba is great btw. A little expensive when you're on the tourist peso, but lovely people & a really unique place to visit.