CIS 471: Why I have not been posting on this blog lately: too busy with events in Cuba

Cuba has been in the news since President Obama announced changes in our Cuba policy and agreed to the prisoner exchange that freed Alan Gross, who was serving a 15 year sentence for bringing tech equipment into Cuba.

I've not posted anything on this blog for several weeks because I have been busy with recent events on another blog I maintain on the Internet in Cuba. The following are my recent posts concerning Alan Gross and the future of the Internet in Cuba. They are in chronological order, beginning with a November 11 post asking whether Gross was about to be freed:

• Where there is smoke, there is fire -- will Alan Gross be released soon?
• An Alan Gross suggestion from an amateur
• Officials say Cuba is not afraid of new technology -- they just lack the funds
• Granma says IT is now a priority -- is this true change?
• The Cuban Internet in context
• Welcome home Alan Gross!
• Is the Internet a priority for Cuba? The ball is in their court.
• A joke and some cool images on US-Cuba relations
• Who owns ETECSA and who runs the show?
• Can there be a uniquely Cuban Internet?
• Interviews of ETECSA officials
• Cuban government support of the weekly "packages"

(for background on the case -- what Gross brought into Cuba, its technical and propaganda importance, his incarceration, court cases, and negotiations for his release, click here.)

Alan Gross brought three of these kits into Cuba.

Alan Gross and his wife Judy just after his release from prison

Welcome home Alan Gross!

By now you must have heard about the release of Alan Gross after five years in prison for bringing several satellite receivers, computers and WiFi access points into Cuba.

I've been quite busy since his release, so have not had the time to comment on it on this blog. I've another blog on the Internet in Cuba and have been following Alan Gross's story -- both the technology and the politics -- for several years.

I am very happy to end that thread!

I'm also happy that his release has removed an obstacle to the normalization of relations between the US and Cuba -- that will benefit the Cuban people and the Cuban Internet.

This may or may not be the end of Alan Gross's involvement with the Internet in Cuba -- he is clearly an advocate of Internet freedom and a friend of the Cuban people.

I hope he adjusts quickly to his freedom and am looking forward to hearing more from him if he cares to share his experience.

Crooked Media -- my new favorite podcast emporium

If you are a Republican Trump supporter and listen to a full Crooked Media episode, I will listen to a podcast episode of your choice.

Crooked Media, which produces several political podcasts, was started by Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s head speechwriter from 2005–2013, Jon Lovett, previously a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and President Obama and Tommy Vietor, who spent nearly a decade as a spokesman for President Obama, specializing in foreign policy and national security issues. They are highly qualified and well connected so are able to attract high-ranking interview guests from government and academia.

They started Crooked Media because they "couldn’t find a place to talk about politics the way actual human beings talk" and are unabashed, but critical, Democrats. Their motto is "Do Something -- Tweets are not The Resistance" and they have plans to go beyond podcasting.

This might sound kind of wonky and dull, but it is actually wonky and funny and relaxed -- you really need to check them out. Not convinced? Check out the following excerpts from two interviews conducted by Tommy Vietor on his foreign policy podcast, PodSavetheWorld.

To whet your appetite, I created two excerpts dealing with US-Cuba policy. (I chose these excerpts because they are typical of Crooked Media interviews and I have an interest in Cuba).

One excerpt is from an interview of Dan Restrepo, who served as a top Latin America advisor to President Obama. Restrepo had written a Cuban-rapprochement roadmap for candidate Obama during his first campaign and he returned to the topic in 2013. He says Obama was playing a "long game," knowing that his executive authority was limited and he could not move faster than US public opinion. Restrepo characterizes Obama's strategy as a bet that by creating a degree of freedom among the Cuban people, for example by expanding reparations and undermining Castro's excuse of blaming all problems on the Evil Empire, the Cuban government would be forced to change. He noted that the blame-US game was a hard sell after the Cuban people saw the Evil Emperor, who looked more like them than the current Cuban leaders, giving a speech on TV or at a baseball game with Raúl Castro.

The excerpt (14:20) is here and the full podcast (48:37) here.

The second excerpt is from an interview of Ben Rhodes, who served as a speechwriter and emissary for President Obama and was one of two White House staff members handling the negotiations leading up to our opening with Cuba. Rhodes and his colleague Ricardo Zuniga traveled to Canada for 12-15 secret meetings with Cuban representatives while working out the rapprochement details. At the start, they were only negotiating for the release of Alan Gross because Obama reasoned that rapprochement would be politically unacceptable if Gross remained in a Cuban prison. Early in the negotiation for Gross, they realized more was possible and the scope of the discussion broadened. Only a few people in the White House knew of these negotiations, but the Vatican was informed early and played a key role. (If you are unfamiliar with the Alan Gross case, click here).

The excerpt (11:30) is here and the full podcast (1:00:48) is here.

Even if you are a Republican Trump supporter, check out Crooked Media's podcasts. (If you are a Republican Trump supporter and listen to a full Crooked Media episode, I will listen to a podcast episode of your choice).

Why contribute content and what is the Gross Contributed Product?

I recently learned about Levelator, a new program for audio processing. I tried it and found it to be effective and easy to use -- a terrific addition to my audio tool kit.

Levelator was written by Bruce Sharpe and his son Malcom, and, like much Internet content, it is free. What motivated the Sharpes to spend the time to develop Levelator and why did they contribute it to the community? I don't know, but one clue is the fact that they are distributing it through the Gigavox network, which grew out of IT Conversations, a volunteer organization for podcasting IT-related conferences. IT Conversations editors and audio engineers were all volunteers, so it may have seemed natural for the Sharpe's to contribute their software.

My personal reaction to Levelator may also help with the "why" question. I spent about two hours testing Levelator and creating a teaching note -- an example of its use. I will use the note in teaching, and I also posted it on the Levelator Forum so others could use it. What did I gain from that effort?

The teaching note has no monetary value (the program surely does), but it is "capital" since I can use it on my job. Someone else using it would make me happy -- I would get a kick out of that at no additional cost. Creating the note was also fun. Even small creative acts are enjoyable, although there is usually some tedium in the execution. Reputation building provided another motivation -- in a small way, I am now a contributor to the community of Levelator users.

The bottom line is that the payoff was sufficient that I contributed two hours of my time. In return for creating and contributing the teaching note:

• I had it for my own use.
  
• I had the pleasure of knowing some members of the community might use it.
  
• I had the fun of creating it.
  
• My reputation was slightly enhanced.

But, I am not unique. The Internet is a platform for millions of small contributions like mine as well as large ones like that of the Sharpes. At the low-effort end of the scale, people click "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on a video or song, forward an interesting email to a person or list, or vote in an online poll.

More effort is required of those who post millions of reviews of books, restaurants, movies, videos, and other products every day. Others, like the Sharpes or the Wikipedians or the Linux and Apache developers, contribute much more. These large and small contributions add up. How many millions of hours did Internet users contribute to the online community yesterday? What is the economic value of those millions of hours -- how does the Gross Contributed Product compare to the Gross National Product? What will it be in ten years? Might this non-market economy one day rival the market economy in importance? (Stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers might ask the same thing). If so, what are the implications for organizations or management or the entertainment industry? (Writing a new teaching note is more fun than watching most TV programs).

This is reminiscent of the Wikipedia. Neither the government nor the market economy could create and maintain the Wikipedia, it could only be done for free -- a cool paradox. If this sort of thing seems interesting, check out The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler or listen to his talk on IT Conversations or at UC Berkeley. Of course you can read about him and his ideas on Wikipedia too. Going further back, I talked about incentives to cooperate in a 1992 academic journal article called Systems for Finding People.

Gross contributed product -- the value of Linux

We discuss people's motivation to contribute time and content, and speculate on the total value of contributed content, the "gross contributed product."

In a recent report, the Linux Foundation, estimates that it would cost approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs. The market research firm IDC reports that hardware and software spending related to Linux hit $21 billion during 2007, and predicts that it will rise to $48 billion by 2011.

To put the size of the Linux market in perspective, we note that in the year 2007, the GDP of the State of Maine was $48.1 billion, and the GDP of 7 states was less.

How many people would you estimate are employed in Linux-related industries?

Recommended podcast: Interpreting the Constitution in the digital era

Jeffrey Rosen asks "Can the police, without a warrant, put a secret GPS device on the bottom of someone's car and track him 24/7 for a month?"

If you are interested in legal and moral issues of privacy and autonomy, you will like Terry Gross' interview of George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, who is co-editor of a new book called Constitution 3.0 Freedom and Technological Change.

In this NPR interview, Rosen says that information technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways" and that "none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." He discusses both current cases with today's technology and speculates on information and biological technology that may become available in the future and raise even thorniner problems.

The interview is 36 minutes 33 seconds, and you can stream or download it or read the transcript here.

You could have made a lot of money in one second yesterday if ...

Michael Lewis has written a book entitled the eFlash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt in which he describes the efforts of high speed traders to gain an advantage by saving a few milliseconds in making a trade. Terry Gross also interviewed Lewis on Fresh Air, and you can listen to the interview (37m 25s) here or read the transcript here.

In addition to talking about the advantage that super fast access and trading algorithms confers, Lewis talks of the complexity of computer trading and the possibility of instability.

We saw a small example yesterday, when, as Bloomberg columist Matt Levine put it, the stock market went WOOSH for a second.

As you see here, you could have made a lot of money in one second if you had a super fast computer with a super fast connection to a stock exchange:

Does this sort of thing undermine our belief in the impartiality of capital markets?

Recommended podcast: State for Sale

I just listened to a Terry Gross interview of Jane Mayer on her New Yorker article "State for Sale," in which she describes project Red Map, which has the goal of winning control of state legislatures by conservative Republicans. Mayer's article and the interview focus on one state, North Carolina, because it is an important swing state and provides an example of Red Map in action.

She reports that foundations controlled by Art Pope, a discount-store multimillionaire, have spent $35 million pushing a far-right political agenda in North Carolina during the last decade. In 2010, they spent $2.2 million on state legislature elections, defeating 18 of 22 targeted democrats. Republicans now control both both North Carolina legislative houses for the first time since 1870.

There is a lot more in the podcast. For example, Mayer discusses the collaboration between Pope and the Koch brothers, backers of the Tea Party movement, the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling on large, tax-decutible political contributions, and the critical role of state legislatures in Congressional re-districting.

The interview reminded me of an earlier post on James Allworth's Harvard Business Review post suggesting that we may have to choose choose between democracy and captialism and a quote by Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis, who stated that "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

It is also noteworthy that Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig, who has shifted his interest from Internet copyright reform to campaign finance reform, offers an antidote to concentrated political influence in his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It, which is reviewed here.

I feel a little guilty about recommending an explicitly political podcast, but there is a connection between Red Map and the anti-competitive political efforts by large Internet service providers. For example, I doubt that new North Carolina legislature will be supportive of efforts at municipal ownership of local backbones.

The best video ever on network neutrality and the state of the Internet in the US

As long as analysts, geeks and lobbyists are the only folks who care about Internet infrastructure and policy, we can be pretty sure that nothing will improve, but what if the general public becomes interested?

Last night I watched episode five of the HBO comedy news cast "Last Week Tonight" in which host John Oliver narrated a 13 minute segment on network neutrality and the sorry state of the Internet in the United States.



I may be a biased geek and disgruntled consumer, but the segment was right on and, more important, extremely funny.

Is the Internet finally becoming a politically important issue? (Be sure to listen to the audience reaction at the end of the clip before you answer).

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Update 6/26/2014

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler responded to the video and Oliver followed up with another very funny segment.

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Update 6/28/2014

Terry Gross interviewed John Oliver about his new HBO show -- the first 7 minutes are devoted to Oliver's Internet piece -- funny and informative.

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Consumer groups and big corporations like Google and Facebook agreeing on net neutrality is like Lex Luther agreeing with Superman.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts explained that there is no competition between Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Picking Tom Wheeler to head the FCC is like hiring a dingo as your baby sitter.

President Obama golfing with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

The spotlight on Jeff Bezos and Amazon

I surveyed my freshmen students this term, asking if they knew who Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were.

They all knew who Gates and Jobs were, but had never heard of any of the others.

It seems that some tech entrepreneurs are public figures and others are not and it looks like Jeff Bezos has decided to go public.

A book on Amazon was recently published and Terry Gross interviewed the author, Jeff Stone, on Fresh Air. The interview covers Bezos' intention to make Amazon an "everything store" from the very start, his foregoing of quick profit to build customer loyalty and long-run profit, working conditions in Amazon warehouses, Bezos' management style and his purchase of The Washington Post.

Last night, Sixty Minutes also did a segment on Bezos and Amazon. You get to know Bezos and get a good look at the operation of the fullfilment centers they are building all around the country. The highlight is video of a research prototype -- autonomous drones delivering packages to homes. Bezos warned that this was early research, but expects that his drones will by flying in four or five years.

Links to some Sixty Minute videos on Amazon (with commercials):

• Drone delivery
• Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post
• Bezos looks to the future
• Difficulty raising capital at the start
• Last night's full show (Amazon is the first segment)
• Overtime video from last night -- background on the drone coverage

If you only watch one video, make it this one from 1999 when Amazon was just a book and music store:



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Update 12/2/2013

I've selected 11 still images from these videos, creating. They illustrate Amazon's policy of investing only in things that enhance the customer experience and create loyalty, the improved density and efficiency of their warehouse/fulfillment centers and experiments with 30-minute delivery of orders by autonomous drones.

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Update 8/31/2014

Google has had a delivery drone project for two years according to the Atlantic Monthly. Drones from either company will face many non-technical challenges.

The value of Internet services

Every post on this blog is a testimony to the leveraging of Internet services. I am able to create the posts in a few minutes using the Blogger editor, and creating and configuring the blog took only a few hours. Furthermore, the footer of each post has a link to a text-to-speech service at Talkr.com which can read the post aloud. Again, creating this composite application or "mashup" took only a short time.

Writing a program to create a blog with text and optional speech would have been impossible when I first started out as an assembly language programmer. A few years ago, it might have taken years to create a site with the features of this blog -- designing and creating Web pages, writing server-side code, acquiring and integrating a text-to-speech package, etc. Today it takes a few hours. As levels of abstraction rise, infrastructure improves, and the Internet "ecosystem" proliferates, programmer productivity will increase still faster.

Public and private infrastructure has clear value. The US Interstate Highway System is a valuable asset that increases economic productivity. Equipment, buildings, and other assets owned by organizations also make them more productive. We have also spoken of the value of open source contributions, the gross contributed product, to the world economy.

What is the value of an Internet service? What is the value and economic contribution of, say, Google Maps? Is there a line on the Google balance sheet that states a value for Google Maps? What is the value to the world economy of all the Web sites that leverage Google Maps?

Individual firms could begin to answer such questions today -- how do they show Internet services on their books? How much revenue do those services generate? We will have to leave the task of estimating their value at the national or global level to future economists.

Cuban fake news about some fake news

Four CITF winners (source)

When the CITF was established, it was touted as being formed for the benefit of the Cuban people, but that was fake news.

Granma recently posted a Trump-worthy article charging that the U. S. finances mercenary groups and gives scholarships to train young Cubans as fake leaders in a dirty Internet war on Cuba. The article also alleges that activists who live in Florida, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia have tried to manipulate Cuban opinion on the constitutional referendum using the hashtag #YoVotoNo on Twitter and it claims we do similar things in Iran and Bolivia.

I am not sufficiently naive to think that the US has never meddled with the Internet in Cuba and have blogged extensively about the Alan Gross case, Zunzuneo and the attempted smuggling of satellite receivers disguised as surfing equipment, but the claims made in this article are bogus. It is telling that there there are no links in the story -- nothing to substantiate any of the claims -- and I have first-hand knowledge of the central claim that:

In February of 2018, the so-called Cuba Internet Task Force was created, following instructions outlined in a Presidential memorandum on national security, released June 16, 2017. The website Razones de Cuba has documented that the CIA’s Political Action Group and institutions on the task force have highly qualified specialists who, based on models previously developed through Big Data, sent sector-specific messages to Cubans.

The CITF established two subcommittees, one to explore and develop recommendations on the role of the media and the free, unregulated flow of information through independent media in Cuba and the other to explore and develop recommendations for expanding Internet access in Cuba. I attended the first meeting of the Internet-access subcommittee, participated in the online discussions of both and reviewed and commented on their draft recommendations.

The Task Force Final Report is short -- only 1,904 words on 6 double-spaced pages. (This post is 631 words). It consists of a summary of the state of the Cuban Internet and regulatory policy followed by nine fairly obvious, tersely stated recommendations. I am unaware of any impact it has had on U. S. or Cuban action or policy.

The CIA and its Political Action Group (PAG) are not mentioned in the report and were never mentioned during the discussion leading up to it. No form of cyberattack or propaganda was discussed by the Task Force or called for in the final report. In short, this was a bland report and the Task Force was a show for Florida voters.

The quote regarding the CIA and PAG are taken from the English language version of the story. It is noteworthy that it has been edited out of the Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese versions. Each version credits the same author and I reached out to him asking about this but did not receive a reply. Furthermore, the article credits the Razones de Cuba Web site with having documented this CIA PAG meddling. I searched their Web site for terms like Grupo de trabajo, grupo de tarea and and 1984, but got no hits.

You get the picture -- the CITF did not work with the CIA and this Granma article does not document any of the charges it makes. In fact, it includes no links or quotes -- just assertions. When the CITF was established, it was touted as being formed for the benefit of the Cuban people, but that was fake news. It was a political move, intended to give Trump a boost in Florida. It also provided Cuba with propaganda fodder for articles like this one and strengthened the economic and political ties between Cuba and Russia and China.

SpaceX Starlink Service in Ukraine Is an Important Government Asset

The terminals will be used by key people who are running the government and resistance.

At 4:04 AM on February 26 Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine requested Starlink service from Elon Musk and at 2:45 PM on the 26th, Elon Musk tweeted "Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route." On February 28 at 12:29 PM Fedorov posted a photo of a truck load of terminals. (Kyiv is 10 hours ahead of California). 

I don't know where the terminals had been stored or how they shipped them, but the delivery time was impressive and twenty-four minutes after the truck arrival was posted, Oleg Kutkov, an engineer, tweeted an OOKLA Speedtest result. 

I don't know how many terminals are in Ukraine now -- Elon Musk has promised to send more -- or who will get them, but I assume it is a small number -- perhaps 100. They will be used by government and army officials who run the government and coordinate the resistance and journalists and communication specialists who report to Ukraine and the world. 

Until Starlink satellites are equipped with inter-satellite laser links, terminals will require access to ground stations. I checked for connectivity in Kyiv at two separate times using Mike Puchol's Starlink tracking Web service and found ground stations in Turkey, Lithuania, and Poland. 

Kyiv connects thru satellites (blue)
to ground stations (orange).

The first time I checked, there were nine satellites that could reach all three gateways (as shown here), and the second time five could reach two gateways -- the Turkish gateway was out of reach.

Does it matter?

In 2009 and 2011 the United States attempted to smuggle satellite Internet terminals into Cuba. The best-known effort was by Alan Gross, who spent five years in a Cuban prison when he was caught and the second was an attempt to bring equipment in by a faux surfing film production company with dishes disguised as boogie boards. (If you are curious, I covered both attempts in-depth on my blog on the Cuban Internet).

These attempts failed, but if they had succeeded, they would have been drops in the bucket -- of little importance to either the US or Cuba.

But Starlink in Ukraine is a very different case because there was no organized opposition in Cuba. These terminals will be used by key people who are running the government and resistance. They will be able to communicate synchronously or asynchronously from wherever they are in Ukraine with each other and the outside world. 

Concerns have been raised about the possibility of Russians finding and destroying these terminals using aerial direction finding, but that would be difficult. For one thing, Ukraine is a large country -- over 233,000 square miles and the terminals could be switched off when not in use. Furthermore, SpaceX is currently testing roaming in California and Nevada, The Starlink terminals are small and easily moved and SpaceX should enable roaming in Ukraine. As an added precaution, terminals could be set up a short distance from the people using them. 

This is more than a publicity stunt by SpaceX. 

Update 3/2/2020

I've been sporadically checking the state of connectivity in Kyiv today and have observed between five and nine links to ground stations. I've only seen as much as 2 seconds outage once and quality has been always 98 or 99%.

Update 3/3/2202

SpaceX has enabled fixed and mobile roaming in Ukraine and reduced peak power consumption. 

Update 5/9/2202

Survey article on SpaceX Starlink in Ukraine:

• HOW STARLINK WORKS
• WHO BROUGHT STARLINK TO UKRAINE?
• WHO ALREADY USES STARLINK IN UKRAINE?
• IS EVERYONE ALLOWED TO USE STARLINK IN UKRAINE?
• HOW TO ORDER A TERMINAL IN UKRAINE AND HOW MUCH IT COSTS
• HOW WELL STARLINK WORKS IN UKRAINE
• HOW TO CONNECT TO STARLINK
• DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO USE STARLINK AT ALL?
• WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO STARLINK IN UKRAINE AFTER THE WAR?

The article is in Ukrainian, but the Google and Microsoft Translations are perfectly readable.

Update 5/12/2022

By March 26, 2022, 590 SpaceX Starlink satellite terminals had been transferred to Ukrainian medical and healthcare institutions according to Health Minister Viktor Lyashko.

Update 5/25/2022

Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine posted a short video saying 150,000 daily users were using over 10,000 Starlink terminals in support of key infrastructure, healthcare, financial institutions, and energy plants as well as providing mobile backhaul in several towns. Fedorov thanks Elon Musk. Pretty Good Publicity.

Update 6/9/2022

A recent Politico story on Starlink in Ukraine showed how quickly SpaceX was able to get their first terminals into and online in Ukraine. The request for terminals and subsequent spectrum access permission took place over twitter -- no dealing with regulatory bureaucracy.

USAID bought the first 1,300 Starlink terminals and SpaceX donated 3,600. The service is free.

The invasion occurred on a Thursday. On Friday Elon Musk said he wanted to get Starlink up over Ukraine. By Sunday Starlink was active and on Monday the first five hundred terminals were delivered. By Wednesday, 475 terminals were online.

Update 2/26/2025

There have been reports that SpaceX might cut Starlink connectivity in Ukraine but Oleg Kurtkov, perhaps the foremost Starlink expert in Ukraine, doubts that Starlink will be turned off. He points out that Ukraine is paying "millions of dollars a month" for over 170,000 active terminals. That is more terminals than in Europe, and the number is growing daily. He adds that cutting service off would lead to "massive reputational losses" and many countries and customers would "review their decisions and agreements."

The majority of the terminals are standard consumer models, costing about $95 per month, but 3,000 are Starshield terminals, costing $30,000 per month. The 30-pound Starshield terminals have Starshield antennas and SIM card slots, can use AC or battery power, have custom cables for quick battlefield repair, and are in hardened enclosures.

Update 5/26/2025

Oleg Kurtkov contacted me and reduced his estimate of the number of Starlink terminals in Ukraine to 130.000. 

On the other hand, Poland has contributed another 5.000 terminals, bringing the total number from Poland to 29,500, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for Innovations, Development of Education, Science, and Technology, and Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, says these are "Enterprise" terminals, which can support more simultaneous users than standard terminals with faster, more stable connections.

The UK, France, Germany, and Czechia have also contributed Starlink terminals to Ukraine, and Germany has contributed OneWeb terminals.