 Have any one of you ever been to Cuba? Oh. Yeah, I'm jealous. I haven't been there yet. But yeah, there are some debates in Cuba, or maybe also you question, what about the internet in Cuba? And maybe are there alternatives to the internet in Cuba? And that's what the next talk will be about, the internet in Cuba and alternatives to the internet in Cuba. Please, a warm, welcoming applause for Will and Eduardo. Thank you. Awesome, yeah. So thank you all for coming. This is going to be a brief introduction of the official state of what internet connectivity 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. I'm Will. I'm a postdoc at the University of Michigan. I'm Eduardo. I'm a college student finishing my engineering degree in Cuba. Great. So let's dive 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 Atexa, which is the national telecom telephony provider and also ISP. They've got a bunch of storefronts around major cities and around the country. And for short-term tourists, what this looks like is you're going to go buy these cards. They come in one, two, 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 sort of citizens of Cuba who are living there, they have something that feels somewhat similar. They'll have a longer-term username and password account with the service called Nauta. They load a balance, and they log in with 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 you may have heard in the open observatory talk yesterday, that there's this sense of the internet as a place. This is not an uncommon sight to see in evenings. There's a bunch of people going to their local park, which is where the Wi-Fi hotspot is, to get their internet fixed for the day. So this graph shows briefly how the internet and the local hotspots in Cuba are distributed. This one's lightly updated. The newest one says there are like 508 hotspots around the country right now. But with this graph, you can actually see what kind of the distribution they have. So for instance, in Havana, at the moment of this graph being made, there were 60. While in Santiago de Cuba, there were 27 of these. The numbers in each province augmented. To a point, I think Havana right now has like 200 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, once it takes out to brought the service out two years ago, the price was of two CUCs. Then after a while, they dropped the price to 150. And right now, the price is standing still at one CUC an hour. For some reference, let's say one CUC, it's equivalent to one American dollar or one euro. Just to put a sense on the amount of the price, it takes a hash plan as well to lower the price of these cards in some point in the future even more. 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. And those are quite expensive. So yeah. So what does mobile internet looks like then in Cuba? This is the login page for Nauta webmail. So this is a service that takes a brought out roughly at the same time as the Nauta connectivity hotspot things came out. It worked originally 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 CUC 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. You can't just load a foreign site on your phone. What you get on your phone's data plan is access to email at $1 per megabyte of email transfer. So how does this compare to foreigners who visit? Well, you may have seen that there's roaming agreements. Those typically have been about $2 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 $2 per megabyte to get access to external internet there. If you plan ahead, there are ways to get a little bit better. This thing called DigiCell 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 $0.25 per meg or $0.20 per meg even when you buy these bulk roaming prepaid plans. You find a secondary market for these cards in Cuba 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 getting this external card thing ends up, I guess, being one of the more efficient ways to have cell-based internet. So this card is sort of like the official way of connecting Cuba. But there are alternatives. The three most common ones are El Paquete with Wi-Fi sharing and some isolated networks like it's in the island right now. So let's see what each of these things is. So El Paquete Semanal is basically a collection of 1 terabyte. It's used a hard drive with 1 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 a hard drive, and then resold the information to people around the city for prices that range between 1 and 5 CUCs. Then you have Wi-Fi sharing. The most common map for that is called Connectify. I will get to that in a little later. And then it's SNet, which is a massive mesh network completely offline from the internet. I will get to that later as well. So talking about El Paquete, this is how El Paquete 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 Paquete in Havana. And I think you can download the media as well, right? No, it's just seeing what's on El Paquete next week. So we highly encourage you to go visit that site and see what kind of multimedia is consumed by people. Also something that it's needed to say, there's not only one person that assembles El Paquete. There are several. So information may change from one to another to some extent. Right, so there's not a single Paquete 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 bulk 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 all is one so that everyone gets their quota of media for a week. So where to find El Paquete 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 USB sticks. There's probably a place where El Paquete is sold for whatever amount of money they want. There's actually a really nice YouTube video. We have the link down here. It talks about El Paquete in a most year away. They go a bit deeper. So if you want, you can see that in the URL below. So yeah, unsanctioned 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 Texas Wi-Fi and this is not good. Like you may be able to pull boy IP, maybe not really good video. If you were going to YouTube streaming is a possibility but not really great. So people even though the speeds are not great, people use this software called Connectify which will connect a laptop to the Wi-Fi and then create an app and log into 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 just because it's cheaper, people use that option. And yeah, there's also fewer things going on. So can anyone tell me what's wrong with that login page? Not secure, precisely. So for a long time, I think I did not have HTTPS. They had HTTP, period. And about a beginning of this year, I think, they had HTTP to their login website for the laptop but they forgot to add that to the login page for the user panel for some reason. And that's always fun. So people keep on putting routers out there, broadcasting with the same SSID, making perfect clones of these pages and 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 there also that while there is HTTPS now, there's still heterogeneity here, there are still plenty of hotels where you end up with what is actually a legitimate Atexa connection and yet still the login page is HTTP, it's not actually fully rolled out, unfortunately. Yeah, so Atexa tried to tackle this problem one way. So this week they recently released a news article in Grammar, one of their most important newspapers in the country, which explains basically, I know most of you probably don't speak Spanish, so I'll try to translate, there's some problems with the certificate for this site and it's telling you the user must not hit continue. And they are trying to show the people how to identify where a site is secure. So that's a plus, but it's not enough yet, not good enough yet. So one diversion of like yet another sort of part of this whole picture that we sort of realized when I went to Cuba to investigate is that there's also this whole scope of institutional internet. So if you are associated with a university or you've got your company, you may well find that that entity has some sort of larger pipe that as a state entity it has agreed with the telecom to have that bandwidth as sort of a larger tunnel. So for instance at the University of Havana, there's a general pipe of internet access 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 800 megs a month, 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 wifi. If you want to be on IRC 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 that game ends up getting played a lot. Another example of that happening is this info med 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 sort of and professional educational material and also some limited access to the internet over that dial up call. So 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 sort of add to that, what we found at the University of Havana is that it was connected to this larger system called Red Universitaria that we don't hear very much about. This is the university network. And so what that means in practice or what that translates to is that you're on, so at the University of Havana, we were getting 10.6.something.something internal IP addresses on the land that was the university and that was part of a larger land that connected a bunch of different universities. And so if you go to the Red Universitaria page, they say they have 26 member entities. You find that that network in practice, the routers are all in a 172.30 slash 16 but you can talk directly to these other 10.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 inter-country land where that bandwidth is not going through an ATEXA 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 paquete 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 the street network or S-Net. So what street network, how did it came to be? 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 land parties and it was kind of awkward to go to a land party with a massive CRT monitor and your PC tower and the rest of the stuff. And so people decided to make something kind of more permanent for these land parties. People decided to throw UTP wires to their friends' houses by routers, switches, sorry, and then have small lands in their neighborhoods. And that worked great for a while, but you know, after a few months of meeting the same person over and over, you might become tired. And all of a sudden people started to find out, oh, there's another similar network, just three kilometers away, how can we connect to that? And people started to buy routers and started to connect all of 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 SNET right now is up to 100,000 users in Havana alone. And yeah, it's up to 100,000 users in Havana alone and it's fully disconnected from the internet. So no bridges, no nothing. It's an internet of its own. And we want to show you guys some stuff we find it inside the network. So this is a fairly old map. For those who have been to Cuba, may recognize this is Havana City, my hometown. And that's the old spread map of SNET coverage. So you will have the pilars, which at the moment of making this graph, we're only five, there are nine pilars. And that's the approximate coverage right now at that point in time, sorry. And right now it's slightly bigger. So for instance, that area of Pedado, it's fully covered and Lujano, which is between the purple and the black spot, it's fully covered as well. And most of the highly densely populated areas are covered by this network, giving it quite the reach without using, you know, optic fibers or anything like that. So it's used Wi-Fi and run on the middle, UTP cut C cable, basically holding it together. So SNET is not only in Havana. It's, you can find SNET in Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Santa Espiritus, Santiago de Cuba, Isla de la Juventud, and Pino de Río. Let it be said, these cities are not connected between them. They're not connected to the internet in any way. And they are not necessarily known as SNET. I'm just using SNET right now as a generical term to refer to these off-the-grid networks. And you will see a link down there that link will explain what happened to the version of SNET in Pino de Río. It's in Spanish. Do I think the author would translate it to English happily if you will see the link and submit that request to that blog? So yeah, in terms of like what we're looking at when we think about SNET, we have these neighborhoods that sort of evolved and they sort of end up with these central points 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 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 as like the block level where it's someone who's got a switch and is running that ethernet the last street or like over to the next house, over to the next couple 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 onto the SNET for a little while. Yeah, so something that's worth to say about this organization, SNET has no like one real central figure behind it. SNET, 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 the network 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 cannot build an hardware with a hardware even if you want to. So we have Rebolico which is the Cuban knockoff of Craigslist and we have Amazon, we have the same piece of gear. You will be quitting on station M5. I chose this one because this is considered like the top of the line in SNET. 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? Was this Amazon US? Yeah. So in the US the price will be something like $81.63 while in Cuba you can find it for $170. 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 microtik routers that we use which are not that expensive and in Cuba there are like $120 or something like that. Cool. So my involvement of this I guess began after 2016. We had Obama visit Cuba and then there became easier for US citizens to go. In late 2016 there was a conference called Cuba Conf 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 SNAP. And so I went back a couple times in 2017 along with academic colleagues so Alex Halderman, Eric Wistrow 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 it seems like it's been very quiet. 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 how did we do this? So from initial points of contact that we'd made at Cuba Conf 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 SNAP is in the physical world, these wifi routers and antennas. And then we got to connect into it and try and do 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 is 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, they're sort of a partial name system where depending on how you're connected you may get a DNS auto 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 we did sort of W get crawling so just grabbing sort of as much web content as we could out of it to get a sense of what are the services, what is it being used for? And this sort of ended up, there's a short paper that was at the Internet Measurement Conference in London 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 Tracerout looks like 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 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 natting 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 server infrastructure of what sort of the permanent 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 it look like to leave something perfectly clear, the number we said 100,000 users, it's used what we think we have because that's the amount of IP addresses we find it. So we're assuming at least one user per IP address but it could be significantly bigger for SNET 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 our WoW community or our Dota 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, Stack Exchange, as you move over to the technical side because this is a community that's created its own network. You get a bunch of open-source software repository mirrors so that you can have your local NPM mirror or your local set of Python packages. There's some file sharing. Some commerce. There's some commerce. There's a bunch of stuff. I guess this is also looking at the web part of this network. What we found from talking with administrators is a lot of the underlying communication for like how this thing gets managed was still not over these web forums per se, but within TeamSpeak. Or Java. Or Java. Or IRC or something like that. So there's a bunch of other stuff going on here. This is one slice of it. You know, we see 3,000 active web posts as well. So there's a significant number of web servers that are part of this network. Oh, also mentioning the thing in the other side, that scope, that's one of the many pages that exist to find when a site is active or not within the network. So let's give you some more screenshots as like some sense of what's going on here. This is HabanaNet, 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 servers, sort of its 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 something that looks a lot like handles. There's a very common use of pseudonyms on the network as opposed to 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 what one of those mirror sites looks like. This one's like a Wikipedia mirror along with several other sort of slices of things that you can get access to that's just being hosted on one of these. Yeah, those actually are the mirror's different stuff that they hold in HabanaNet, let's say. Here's some gaming sites representing sort of new things you can play. Here's a dating app. And then one of the sub-communities that we found most exciting is that there's this sub-community called NetLab which is sort of focused on open-source software and technology. It's centered around a forum. There's this very active NetLab forum for technical discussion, but they run their own GitLab instance so they've got sort of a set of community coding that's happening and going on. This search engine, Corolla, is a search engine within the net of content in that network that they've customized and built themselves so it's got its own open-source Git repository of the code behind the search engine that they've built for themselves. Yeah, they also hold books and other stuff people do a lot from the regular 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 Android phones that have been customized for Cuba and this NetLab forum 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 exported back to the real network as well. So rules. Every community has to abide some rules and in the case of SNET, this is not different because of familiar things. So the first thing you will find is this is from one of the pillars. This is the Avanadele State Pillar. In this case, the rules are fairly... It's a fairly common set of rules throughout the whole network. So it's forbidden to attempt against the security of the country. It's forbidden to provide internet services, radio or TV services and stuff like that, which are in accordance to the rules of the country because we need to remember something. Rules cannot be broken inside any country or else you go to Yale. If SNET will break these rules, it will never have gotten this big. So this subset of rules are tweaked within the community and adjusted to what is needed and you can actually see that 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 SNET and this is decided not only by the admin but by the fellow node users in this network. The other thing worth saying here is that so there's some collection 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 TEXA and so you've got rules like don't bridge to the internet because then you become a telecom and suddenly you're competing with the TEXA and you don't want that. Other 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, this 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 to Facebook if I had to pick an inner work in SNET. It's called Wefinet. It's quite a big community. They do like photo posting, stories, whatever you may think. So the amount of user users in this website is 56,000. This is a fairly big amount of users. At the moment we took these measurements anyway, 30% of those users were women and at that time which was on May the 1st, 2017 at 4 p.m., if I don't recall badly, there were 500 plus active users and it's kind of an off day for that time because it's May the 1st, there's a big parade in Havana so a lot of people are just tired and sleeping probably at that time. The activity in this site can be in a normal day at that time of the day, maybe 30,000 people at any given moment use posting stuff and the server crashes. Oh my God, those shit crashes. 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 $100 if you were to buy it in the U.S., right? So there's no, that limits how much you're gonna scale up, right? You can't have this central point with a really big Cisco router that's gonna be able to get gigs of traffic through it per second and so 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 routing between pillars is an OSPF and so you end up with loops quite a bit even in the current fairly limited number of subnetworks that compose it. Identity is an issue, right? So we saw- Or not, maybe it's my 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 what you're using is a site that has 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 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 another problem. Some of the 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 between updates. We are hoping to bring some stuff up today but these are mainly sites that were like not really that used and just kept on going. But anyway, that's one of the things that, that's the effect of being away from the internet that software updates can be tricky sometimes for some technologies. So interpersonal conflicts and community organization, that's another pain point. Like two months ago, two of the two pillar admins had a small argument and that bring the network to a standstill and it got to the point where it was just one pillar holding two sites of the network together and people having to reroute their traffic to reach stuff in the other side. So that was a hard time. People like eventually got to talk it and for two months, some people were like Esne is going to stop existing today or tomorrow but luckily that did not happen and people were able to use talk it out. And, yeah. Right, and this is, I think there is this hopeful and cautious optimism that the network's still doing well after the hurricanes that happened over the summer and it 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 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 find a way to get through. There's a lot of hustle and a lot of ability to find out ways to make things work. Okay, so one of our takeaways is Esne is probably the world's like this isolated community network. And for sure it's one of the world biggest mesh networks right now. And I don't think what we did not add it is that don't use telecom structure, please try from people, create your own infrastructure, please. Yeah, so yeah, I mean that's 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 becomes seen as valuable to our more traditional connectivity. And one of the things that's really fascinating in the case of Esnet 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 more regulated way. And so that's led to these sort of new solutions. I guess the final point here is sort of moving to the meta 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 thank. Yeah, we have. So I'd like to say some people. First, the people from Cal's Communication Congress, you guys really help it out with the business stuff. Like, thanks a lot. Also, Fortnite, Amplitron, Rovden India, Reality Gaps, you guys rock. Raven, wherever you are. Thanks, man. You picked 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 is like we can champion this sort of thing and get these underserved voices here. And it's really great. This is clearly a place that Eduardo is thriving and like is home in a way that's really exciting. And that's really part of the ethos. And getting him here was there's an IRC 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 solve that for the next time several days later when he gets internet again to solve this. And I think that's really reflective of the spirit here at CCC 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 two watt motto that we can hope for. And I encourage everyone to do that and like find the people who need to be here and help them get here because they'll give back so much more. I think it's also, yeah. So I think it's also the way 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 actually get here more easily. So how do we lower barriers to access? So 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 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 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 someone who's an academic in the US, I understand this and like the university that I'm 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 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 message is one that also reflects to some extent on some of the tensions we've seen at Congress this year. I think that we've had failures that we should be recognizing. And we need to think about how do we address these? How do we build some place that is more welcoming that is safe? And so I guess for me that's the spirit 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 this space that is good for us and at the same time is safe for victims. So before we leave we will do a Q&A and if you were to ask us something, yell at us or whatever. These are our Twitter handles. Feel free to ping us whenever. We don't guarantee we will respond. Talk, thanks a lot for this awesome talk. Please give a big round of applause and we have plenty of time for questions. So if you'd like to queue up with the microphones so we can do this orderly. Please remember to really ask a short and concise questions. We would like to hear questions and not comments. And now 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, as setting hardware to Cuba? So I guess you first need to take into account customs regulations, which I'm not that current with because I think they were recently changed. But once that's solved 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 DHL if you're going to do something like that. Because the post service is not that reliable. It takes a long time. 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 in the yes net. 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? Okay, so. Some of all of that, right? Some of all of that. So first, talking about encryption. In Cuba 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 two hashes. And that's so it doesn't really cost that lot as well but SNET needs to be compliant with it. So encrypting over there 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 some of the ones they have there. People get drunk, sorry. But yeah, malware is a problem but these software repositories we have will give you solutions for like Microsoft Windows, iOS and Linux with like Karpesky or Abbas or like a whole bunch of, a whole collection of antivirus that will be updated weekly. That usually comes in El Paquete. But yeah, 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 saving grace right is you're offline and so what is it that 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 don't 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 also some from the internet, from our viewers on the stream. Please signal Angel, give me a question. Thank you. A couple of brief questions around SNET. What was SNET like before the embargo got lifted? And you said that the city SNETs are not connected to each other. Have you discussed possible solutions to connect them? Thanks, thanks. How many new routers would that take and how much would that cost? So I guess I'm going back to this photo first. So give me a sec. Okay, 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 Pinal de Río, that place has mountains, big, big mountains. And it's quite complex to route stuff through there. But in the case of CM4, Santa Clara, Santa Espíritus, it may be easier if some SDR radio stuff were done. And there's something that people are being considering, but haven't gone through, do yet quite well. And yeah, but the basic solution will be SDR for this long of an uplink. If you have any. And before the embargo? Oh, before the embargo, it looked pretty much the same. I mean, the embargo hasn't been lifted. The US tried to re-establish relationships and then they back it up and yeah. But yeah, the SNET was pretty much the same. Nothing really changed yet. It keeps growing. It keeps growing. Yeah, I mean, but it's been growing since 2008. So there's not real, not a real difference. Thanks, great. Now, microphone number three, please. Two questions. One, please. How does the network and those services fund themselves? Is there someone going around collecting a fee or just doing it out of ideology? Yeah. Do you see the internet slowly coming to Cuba? And do you think it will eventually replace it because of better connectivity and service? Okay, so. That's a great example of not adhering by the rules, microphone number one. One question. Okay, actually I want to answer his first question. Okay, then answer one of the four. Yeah. So I will answer your first question and we can talk about the second later if you want. So how does SNET finances itself? So people usually give once you see a month to the nodes and to the pillars. I mean, the nodes give a share of these to the pillars. In order to have money in case some equipment gets busted or breaks or whatever happens with it or the node wants to upgrade the gear it has. Users give once you see a month, which is not that much compared with like once you see an hour for the text. So that's kind of the way SNET funds itself. It's basically, this doesn't happen everywhere. In some places the price is my very or in some other places there's no need at all because it's a pile and they're like sitting on top of a really strong structure already. So that may vary. We saw a lot of scraping together. So for instance, Netlab had a crowdfunding thing for an additional disk for themselves where they found users throughout of their services to help improve 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. Okay, microphone number one and remember one question. A lot of those things remind me to the VBSs from the 90s. Are there connections to the VBSs or something like this? I run at a VBS for a while. 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 page you want because that might have changed overnight. And forwarding is not working and stuff are breaking down and people are calling in four in the morning trying to figure out why they cannot access a service. But yes, basically it's kind of like the VBSs in the 90s. Kind of, yeah. Okay, cool. Thanks for the answer. Microphone number four. How does the different cities communicate with each other so this software gets on the same state? So right now I said this in the beginning of the talk. Right now, all of these cities are talking with each other on SNET. That's not something we are being able to because the distance between Havana and Matanzas, which is the nearest province you will find, it's like 200 kilometers. I'm yet to see a Wi-Fi router that can do 200 kilometers. If you know of one, please let me know of the random model. I will try to buy it. 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. Okay, wow. Microphone number three, please. Okay, thank you. Muchas gracias. Is it building some kind of pressure on the actual telephone company and so that their internet becomes cheaper or whatever? Not really. I mean, we try to keep away from Etexa. Like, we don't try to get to the internet. We don't try to... We try to parlay with them whenever they want to parlay with us. 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 is people doing as it. Okay, and we have one more question from the internet. Dear signal angel, please give us this one question. Yes, thank you. And what about satellite internet or telephone lines to connect the cities? Okay, so those are two really hot spots. So I'm going to... I mean, so I think again, you're now at the point of... Quite a bit of cost, right, where both what is the motivation to connect these two city networks because that sounds like a high ping, especially satellite, so you're not doing your land gaming anymore. Also satellite, you need a special license to have satellite dishes in Cuba. She's 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 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 the purpose of these cross-country links that are real-time is often going to be much more about commerce and sorts of things that a Texas 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 networks like this, 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 uplink to exist anymore, they will use separate and you will be stranded. So it's not a good idea to ever use telecom infrastructure, so don't. Please. That was clear. Okay. Is there some of that microphone? Six, I'm not sure whether I can see it. Yes, please go ahead with the question. Thank you. I'm wondering if there's a really low-latency interconnection called SneakerNet 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 El Paquete is. Yeah. El Paquete is basically SneakerNet. If you look at what is this Wikipedia mirror, this is someone either went to their institutional connection or had a friend who was traveling internationally to get a large stack overflow dump or Wikipedia dump and then connected to a computer that's on the S-net and now you've got a mirror that people internally can use. So a lot of how these resources end up there is through the SneakerNet mechanisms. Okay, 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 this might not be a short question? Well, that's a fairly short question, but I can give you two short answers. The first one is it takes a two quite a while to have access to any underwater fiber cable. That was quite a while, I think it was 2012 when it got connected with Venezuela. I might be wrong, around that year, 2012, 2011, maybe, but around that age. And the connection from the cable is actually in Santiago de Cuba. So they had to roam throughout the whole freaking country, which may not be as big as Germany, but that happened in the past five years. I understand that they are struggling with that because it's quite the 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 it takes a things that Wi-Fi is the solution, like you spot your way around. That's not the solution. That's never going to be the solution space, especially if you don't want a high latency ping, 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. Great. The second part you're not saying is that she's not as polite. 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. Oh, microphone six. Okay, microphone six. Please go ahead. You mentioned that you have forums on the SNET. Do dissenting opinions appear there or are they immediately moderated out? I don't visit the forums that much. I mean, the forum that I 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 this to an admin, but I don't think it's automatic. Something that happens in a split second. I think it may take some time for the admins to remove that kind of content. Thanks a lot for this amazing talk and some insights on how the internet works in Cuba. Thank you.