>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:46:07 -0500 >Subject: Cuba's Internet Silence: Blame the Canadian >To: undisclosed-recipients:; >Status: > >Cuba's Internet Silence: Blame the Canadian > > >Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit >................................................................... > > >CUBA'S INTERNET SILENCE: IT WAS THE CANADIANS > > >NEW YORK CITY, January 28 -- For the past six days, almost every Cuban >website has been unreachable to browsers the world over. Website visitors >looking for news about Cuba from a Cuban point of view received only error >messages from Friday, Jan 21st until Thursday evening, Jan 27th, when the >websites suddenly came back to life. > >NY Transfer News, an alternative news provider active in the Cuban >solidarity movement, has been receiving hundreds of queries from people >all over the world who were unable to access Cuban websites. Speculation >has ranged from "overloaded servers" to dark conspiracies in Washington. > >Actually, it was the Canadians. > >Because of the embargo, all internet traffic to and from Cuba travels via >international bandwidth providers outside the US, such as Teleglobe, >which has routers throughout the US and the rest of the world. There are >also "mirror sites" -- clones of most of the Cuban websites -- located in >Toronto, Canada at pathcom.com. These sites actually pre-date the "real" >Cuban sites which they now mirror, and were mounted before Cuba had the >facilities to host its own internet websites. > >The real Cuban websites now in place on Cuban servers are a big improvement >over the clone sites, which are known collectively as www.cubaweb.cu, but >are actually located in Toronto at a commercial provider named Pathcom. >Cubaweb has always been been poorly run, and plagued with bad links, >missing graphics, and unreliable and slow technical service. This very >unprofessional site is run by a Cuban enterprise called Teledatos-GET. > >On Friday, Jan 21st, a router in the chain of links between Pathcom and >Havana went dead. This took out all connectivity to every real Cuban website >located in Cuba (Trabajadores, AIN, Radio Rebelde, Granma, even the new >Cuban government site, www.gob.cu) along with the entire Cuban mirror site >in Toronto, www.cubaweb.cu. All sites remaind dark for 6 days. > >The router that went down is run by pathcom.com in Toronto. For those who >are knowledgeable about the internet, we are including a traceroute and >"whois" results at the end of this message. The traceroute displays the >situation that existed from a week ago -- Friday, Jan 21 -- until Thursday, >Jan 27, when the link to the Cuban web was restored, and the sites were >reachable once again. > >During those 6 days, the only cuban site that was accessible was >colombus.cu, one of the new ISPs in cuba, whose URL is www.islagrande.cu. >Islagrande has links to all the cuban news sites, but the links just led to >dead air, since they only reference sites available via the Canadian router >that was down. Islagrande's own Canadian mirror site, www.islagrande.COM >(also hosted by pathcom.com on the badly run cubaweb.cu site in Toronto), >was itself unreachable. Blythe Systems, which hosts NY Transfer News, ran >tests last week and confirmed that the Pathcom router was "down" and >blocking Cuban website access to internet systems all over the world, not >just one or two domains, or just sites in the US. > >During the 6-day outage, only websurfers inside Cuba could reach Cuban >websites in Cuba. The Canadian sites were down to everyone. This is not the >first time that Cuba has been disconnected from the world by Canadian >failures, or errors, or whatever they are. It's only the latest example of >countless similar problems over the last 5+ years. These technical >difficulties always seem to surface at moments of political tension, or >during important international events involving Cuba. (Is anyone thinking >RCMP?) > >This 6-day outage was most curious, beginning as it did on the day Elian >Gonzalez's grandmothers arrived in New York, and lasting much longer than >any normal router problem might be expected to continue. It also occurred >during an unprecedented outage of the Radio Havana Cuba news website, the >only independently distributed source of Cuban news on the internet. > >The Radio Havana Cuba site, which has been online continuously providing >news in 4 languages daily since 1996, has not been updated since Jan 5th. >NY Transfer News hosts the RHC website at www.radiohc.org, and their mailing >lists, at no cost to Cuba -- all facilities are donated. The RHC outage >continues. There is nothing wrong with their site; there is nothing wrong >that we can tell with their mail, but there's no news arriving at their >domain, despite e-mail received from RHC promising to resume sending news on >Jan 10th. NY Transfer has lost contact with the staff at RHC, with no >communication since Jan 8th. Early in January, RHC staff members informed us >via e-mail that they had tried to phone us several times during the last few >months, but that our phones were blocked to Cuban callers. NY Transfer's >attempts to reach various parties in Cuba by phone have not succeeded since >last Spring. > >We at NY Transfer have no explanation, except the most obvious one -- >government interference, which can easily explain the phone problem, but not >the e-mail problem. Aside from the Canadian router, we cannot detect any >difficulties, interference, or interception on our side of the border with >our e-mail link to and from Cuba. In response to the hundreds of queries >from all over the world asking us what is going on, we can only reply that >we don't know. We have many contacts inside Cuba. We notified everyone we >could about the problem with their websites and identified the cause for >them, as soon as we detected it on Jan 21st. There was no response. > >Our highly experienced engineers have examined our links with Cuba very >carefully. We are able to send mail without any problems; we believe it is >reaching its destination. We have received private e-mail (and replies to >our e-mail) from friends in Cuba without a problem. But nothing has arrived >from Radio Havana Cuba. The only blockage we were able to detect up north >was the bad router in Toronto earlier this week. This only affected traffic >to the websites in Cuba and in Canada -- e-mail was not affected by this >router. > >Based on our many years of experience assisting various countries >and radical groups in their efforts to communicate via the internet, we >are very concerned and somewhat mystified by this phenomenon affecting >only Cuban communications. Even the best efforts of Fujimori's military >have not been successful in shutting down the website of the Communist >Party of Peru, hosted here, or their news distributio: Several internet >wars against NY Transfer have been launched (and lost) by the Peruvian >government since 1994. But Cuba certainly presents some unique and -- to >our dismay -- apparently insurmountable problems. > >These problems may be intended to discourage advocates of free >communication with Cuba. It's something that might discourage us if >we were less determined. But we aren't discouraged; we have continued >our efforts and intend to in the future. > >The term "free communication" is used advisedly -- we suspect that >commercial interests might be playing a role, and that some of these >interests are Cuban. > >We understand and support Cuba's efforts to build its own national >internetwork. We realize that this effort is expensive, and requires >customers who can pay in hard currency for internet services. We don't >know whether all Cuban institutions are now expected to contribute hard >currency to Cuban internet providers to pay for their internet access. > >Many important Cuban national institutions, including RHC, have no >foreign currency, and such a requirement would pose a major problem for >them, especially since the rates charged by Cuban providers -- hundreds >of US dollars a month for one full-service PPP account -- are unaffordable >even for many foreign businesses. > >At this point, we believe that what we are seeing is partly an internal >Cuban problem -- whether commercial, political, or both we cannot say. If >so, only Cuba can solve the problem, and only a Cuban resolution would be >appropriate. We hope that Radio Havana Cuba can reach a resolution soon of >whatever their problems are, and that they will honestly inform us of their >solution. > >At the same time, we will continue to support open information exchange with >Cuba; our non-commercial services will remain available, without charge, to >Cuban institutions which lack the funds to pay for Cuban-owned commercial >internet services. > >The internet provides Cuba with much-needed access to the world, but it is >also a source of poisonous counter-revolutionary propaganda and cultural >pollution, and it offers a dangerous potential for corruption. It therefore >remains a very controversial medium in Cuba, and for good reason. > >We have had no first-hand information for nearly a year, and now we are >out of touch with our friends at Radio Havana, so we'd appreciate hearing >from anyone who has traveled to Cuba recently and has current knowledge >of the highly charged "politics of the Internet." If you have any > >We will continue to update our readers if we have any further info. > >NY Transfer News > >----------------------------------------------------- >traceroute to Cuban websites: Tuesday 25 Jan 2000 21:10 > >traceroute to www.granma.cu (209.250.134.230), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets > > 2 ocsny-gw.ocsny.com (204.107.76.1) 26.893 ms 25.918 ms 26.424 ms > 3 Loopback0.GW1.NYC1.ALTER.NET (137.39.2.66) 30.232 ms 32.545 ms 29.865 ms > 4 103.ATM2-0.XR1.NYC1.ALTER.NET (146.188.177.114) 32.452 ms 30.638 ms >30.938 ms > 5 195.ATM3-0.TR1.NYC1.ALTER.NET (146.188.178.182) 31.728 ms 30.846 ms >32.193 ms > 6 152.63.9.145 (152.63.9.145) 103.782 ms 102.981 ms 103.464 ms > 7 197.ATM7-0.XR1.TOR2.ALTER.NET (152.63.128.69) 111.92 ms 113.35 ms >112.278 ms > 8 152.63.129.34 (152.63.129.34) 87.414 ms 87.649 ms 87.517 ms > 9 f0-0-0.bb2.tor2.uunet.ca (205.150.242.110) 94.164 ms 86.69 ms 87.096 ms >10 205.150.154.142 (205.150.154.142) 87.789 ms 233.833 ms 255.839 ms >11 216.13.1.42 (216.13.1.42) 229.296 ms 120.84 ms 87.641 ms >12 207.245.0.66 (207.245.0.66) 89.932 ms * 381.465 ms <== packets die here >13 * * * go no further >14 * * * >15 * * * > >------------------- > >Who handles Domain Name Service for Granma?? > >whois [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >[whois.arin.net] >Pathway Communications (NETBLK-PATHWAYCOMM) > 1 Yonge Street, Suite 2205 > Toronto, ON M5E 1E5 > CA > > Netname: PATHWAYCOMM > Netblock: 209.250.128.0 - 209.250.159.255 > Maintainer: PATH > > Coordinator: > Administrator, Ip (IA6-ARIN) [EMAIL PROTECTED] > 1-416-214-6363 > > Domain System inverse mapping provided by: > > PATHWAY1.PATHCOM.COM 209.250.128.4 > LITHIUM.PATHCOM.COM 209.250.128.8 > >------------------------------------------------------- > >the blocked router: >whois [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >[whois.arin.net] >MetroNet Communications (NETBLK-METRONETCOMM) > 100 King St. W., 29th Floor > Toronto Ont., ON M5X 1B5 > CA > > Netname: METRONETCOMM > Netblock: 207.245.0.0 - 207.245.63.255 > Maintainer: MTCO > > Coordinator: > Noc, Metronet Toronto (MTN-ARIN) [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (416)935-5355 > > Domain System inverse mapping provided by: > > NS1.METRONET.CA 209.82.127.10 > NS2.METRONET.CA 216.13.0.10 > > > >================================================================= > NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems > Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us > 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 > http://www.blythe.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >================================================================= > >nytcari-01.28.00-23:40:24-24264 > __________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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