Digital revolution and a journey through networking history

The internet has certainly changed the world in many, many ways. And I think that's a given and pretty obvious to us today. But it's amazing how so many events that we don't normally associate eight with technology per se were impacted by our newfound interconnectedness.

Today, we're talking with Larry Press who was part of some of these events years and years ago when really the internet, if we could even call it that, was a little more than academic type people sending texts to each other over phone lines.

And as simplistic as that sounds, we'll be talking about doing just that. How sending text over phone lines played a role in a Russian coup attempt in nineteen ninety one, as well as several other initiatives over the years for small nations and and large nation to make their way onto the global stage of information exchange.

We're also joined by Kentic's Doug Madore, who is no stranger to analyzing how technology shapes, geopolitical events.

And my name is Philip Giovanni, and this is telemetry now.

Larry Doug. Welcome today. So glad to have you both. Larry, for the first time meeting you, it's it's a real pleasure.

And then Doug, of course, returning guests, both of you with, incredible, histories, in in the technology space and in networking in particular. And Larry, just getting to know you for the first time. And, and then meeting you the other day prior to the show some real amazing stories that I'm looking forward to hearing today. Now I know that you and Doug have some out of a history.

So, Doug, I'm gonna pass it off to you. If you wouldn't mind kicking us off and getting us started today.

Yeah. So, Larry, I'm so happy to have you on this podcast.

I think, you know, in these days, we have we live in an age where the, the promise of the internet for better or worse is is is here.

But not that long ago. This was something that was still a dream of a lot people, and there were, we have a couple of celebrity internet founders like Vince surf that we talk about a lot, but there are a lot of other people who were, real pioneers and, And what's wonderful about this moment in time is that those pioneers walk among us today still. They're in the industry, and you can reach out and talk to them, about what it was like to, get the internet off the ground in a lot of parts of the world. And that is something that's a fascination of mine.

But, and so hopefully Larry, you can, you can talk talk a little about that. But, I, I came to know Larry Press, maybe more than ten years ago when I was fairly new to the industry as an internet measurement guy. And I had been asked. I was at Renaissance at the time, which is a small boutique startup doing internet, internet measurement routing.

And, I've been asked to try to get smart on How how do we see submarine cable activations, cuts, and any kind of submarine cable activity in our internet measurement data? Because It's a it's a known difficult task. The packets aren't marked by what submarine cable you're on, Rouse neither. So a lot there's a lot of inference.

There's a lot of, you have to kind of use a lot of out of band knowledge to figure this out. And so while I was getting smart on this, one of the stories that I came across and I came it, came across it on the internet in Cuba blog, which is the blog blog that Larry has maintained for many, many years.

Documenting the trials and tribulations of the development of internet in Cuba in that very unique environment. And so I learned of the, this Alba one severing cable, that was, financed by the, Venezuelan government to connect the country island nation of Cuba to the global internet and get them off satellite. And at that time, the cable was supposedly built but, no one had any, any evidence of it. And so that started you know, I started reading those posts by Larry because there was a lot of speculation of what took place there with the cable, had it been stolen the money been stolen, and then the cable was never built, or, you know, maybe it's just being used by Castro himself or something.

And, we had we had good data. We could see We could see this was just as the country was still on satellite. And, so I shared a few graphs with Larry. He asked if he could post him on on his blog as I go for it.

You know, it's that's totally fine. And, and then the next thing, it was a it was a headline in the Miami Harold, the Doug Madori from Renaissance says there's no you know, on the on Larry's blog posts that there's no new news in Cuba. Wow. There's a lot of appetite for this story.

And I, really got into trying to, follow that closely. That led to the discovery of the activation about a year and a half later. But so Larry, you, maybe you could take us back a little before.

You know, I I came to know you, maybe ten years ago, but that your interest in, and internet in Cuba was part of your interest in, helping the develop the internet in the developing world.

Do you wanna tell us about that work?

Sure.

Thanks, Doug.

You know, I didn't I didn't realize that, it's been a long time.

Yeah.

I was messing around with with, tell it with internet before the internet existed. We before, TCPIP and all that. I, myself and a group of guys, they were at, University of Arizona and Stanford.

When the internet came around, we had a a group we formed called the Mosaic group.

And the Mosaic groups charged with to her interest was to try to, both measure the, or study the, integrate the, adoption of the internet in developing nations and also, you know, kind of implicitly to encourage it. And so we had a framework that we used to do case studies and we ran around as many places as we could. And did case studies of the state of the internet in a a given nation. We were were in Bangladesh. We did Cuba That's how I got to know now about Alba One and got to know, Doug.

But a number of other nations and, we were just monitoring the state of the internet and, but we were also really encouraging it. We we thought it a wonderful thing. We were kind of naive.

We didn't understand that it could be used for nefarious purposes at that time.

But, that's what we were doing. Just trying to encourage and monitor the state of the internet.

Larry, what so what was the time what was the time frame for that, what year, that was that group in operation?

Oh, goodness. I don't know.

Nine nineteen eighties.

I yeah.

Let me see if I can figure it out.

Looking at the, the publication Yeah. It looks like the primary activity was throughout the nineties for the most part, the early nineties and the late eighties.

Probably the early nineties. Yep.

In the early nineties, And then, which makes sense because that's when we saw the first major proliferation of the internet as we know it today, at least. Is is that organization Jose still active in any way?

No. No. Okay. It was not a Mosaic was not a formal organization. It was just a, number of people from a couple of different institutes, places that knew each other.

And it it is no longer at any rate. That was done in the early nineties to the mid nineties is when we were doing it. And, at, at that time, the internet existed, but there was we were doing, Like, I can remember doing a teleconference on teleconferencing using a a system called eyes, I think, was called, from jeez. I can't remember from some somebody back in New York had this system. And so people were starting to do this kinda thing. But, you know, without the before the internet, there was bitnet too that was connecting up universities.

So but you're right. This was early in the in the existence the internet.

And, a thing that the the way Cuba got connected and the way a lot of those nations got connected was the National Science Foundation had, program where they would help academic and research net networks in developing nations get connected to the internet.

So for example, in the case of Cuba, Cuba went what NSF would do would help them, buy a router, give them free transport on the, NSF Net within the United States and also help with the link from their country to, to NSF Net. So in the case of Cuba, we paid for their first connection. We paid for a satellite link from Sprint to Florida and and gave them internet connectivity.

And that program went on for several. I can't, I could look it up and tell you, but there were maybe twenty five nations that were, subsidized in that way by NSF.

So that that was a real, you know, a a terrific contribution by the US and also ironically, we were helping Cuba.

Something I I don't think we we could imagine happening today, unfortunately.

Yeah. That's the understatement of the year.

Yeah. It's not even Yeah. The both administrations, it doesn't make a difference really. It's the same as it being the same similar policy.

Yeah. You know, the the truth is Obama had really reached out to the Cubans and made a number of, offers, basically, and the humans were not receptive.

It was the the stoppage there. And then once Trump took over. It was all over.

Yeah. I've ever I so soon after the opening in, So it was December twenty fourteen that, we had announced the the intent to try to normalize relations with Cuba. Obviously, that's ancient history now, and it didn't really come to fruition. But the LACneck conference, so the conference for, that roams around, the Latin American Caribbean.

This is like the, South American version of Rype or, Nanog.

They've scheduled one to take place in Havana. And so I went and, that was my one time, but I, to travel to to Cuba and meet some of the people that we've corresponded with there. But, Again, I I think the times have changed. There was a there was a day top briefly there, but, I I don't see them hosting another conference anytime soon. So back to the, your the mosaic work and, you know, those in those years. So there was another event that took place that is, you you had a role in that I think is it's, maybe a a somewhat forgotten or under told story, of the inter the role of the internet and, or it's precursor in the, the coup or attempted coup of, in nineteen ninety one. So just to set the scene here, this is The Soviet Union is still a thing.

And, Gorbachev is in power.

He's been relaxing, you know, the, and trying to thaw relations with the West, over, over years, and not everybody's happy with that, as far as the authorities and, the the old guard. And so, to in August of that year, there were some generals went rogue, and they decided they would, arrest Gorbachev. It is, summer retreat on the Black Sea and take charge of the the country and along those lines, they they shut down, communications at the time a little bit somewhat similar to the communication shutdowns we see these days, but but different in that the phone lines were cut you couldn't make a call in and out of the country. The, the news organizations' radio, was all either blacked out or they played classical music or ballet, was on TV to to be a completely information blackout. And the one channel to the west ended up being this connection, to the, this precursor to the internet. And and you had a role on that. Do you wanna tell that story?

Yeah. No. It was it was just by luck. I was there at the time.

A friend or Again, we used the UCCP that, network news to communicate asynchronously back and forth.

For some time before the sort of, you know, standard, a regular internet connection and using u c u u c p, I had gotten in touch with a guy called Yuri Garnostiov, who was he ran this sort of, a data center in Moscow, which served all of the, all the, scientific literature for all of the communist nations.

And so he he had a a big data center. He's a pretty big pretty highly play Skype. And, I'm not sure still using this UCP, this precursor network. He contacted me and asked me if I would like to help him organize an international conference on HCI on he he went computer interaction.

And I said, yeah, it sounded like fun.

So we worked for, I don't know, maybe a year or so and we put a conference together and got all the calls for papers and whatnot. And it was in Moscow.

So at the, when the conference finally came up, I went to Moscow and we entered conference.

And since I've been using UUC, to communicate with Yuri and and other people.

I wanted to meet the people that were doing that in Moscow that that kind of nascent networking community.

And, so I just kinda, I contacted them probably using their own network and ended up spending, about a week in Moscow And a lot of that time hanging out with those guys, informally, I went to their place, went parties at their house. We went, swimming together and stuff.

And so I just got to know him and that was about that. And I came home in about I don't remember a day or two later. The, coup attempt that Doug just talked about occurred.

And so, I was there. Another guy that I'd invited to this conference was called Jonathan Groiden from and he's a an American, but he was in Denmark at the time.

And so once that, coup started. Like Doug said, all the media shut down, but, UCP went on. And, one of the people I was talking to said, so we we were able to keep communicating.

So Jonathan and Denmark and and me and the United States, would be feed news from the outside back into Russia.

And they in turn would use UCP to report to us what was going on. So we would like the kind of the main thing that the biggest thing that happened was, Yeltsin when he, stood up on top of a tank in front of the parliament and and redder proclamation.

He sent that to us, but we also got news of, what was happening in different cities. So every two hours or so, we would get an update and, on what was going on there. And for our part, we would do the same. We would give them feedback as to how the good attempt was being reported in the United States and in Denmark.

So it was kind of a really neat communication channel. And, another guy David Bozak. He was at State University in New York, captured all this traffic and put it on a non crime on a server at SUNi. And I'm not sure if it's still there.

I think it is. I was you sent you sent the link and I was I was going through it this morning. So we'll put that in the if it's possible maybe we can put the notes if somebody really want to dig into this story.

Oh, couldn't put all that stuff in the show notes. Yeah. So it's that's a kind of a early example of kind of, catching real time history, I guess. It's kind of a very Yeah.

What's interesting about that episode is that, you know, like these days when a country, you know, like, if the same thing kinda when that's when something similar happens these days, usually Internet service is cut out. That's something where I end up, you know, in our data, I end up, you know, we we contribute some technical details, to the coverage of that.

But the phone lines are often up, but the internet's down. But but in this situation, it was the reverse where the phones were down, but the internet was up only because nobody knew about it, at the time. It was kind of, you know, I don't wanna say insignificant, but it was just, you know, not a lot of people.

He's under the radar, man.

Yeah.

Yeah. If you go through the David's archive, you'll see one of the quotes was woman called, Paulina Antanova, and she ended up in the US, by the way, as did her husband who was system administrator.

And she she wrote something to the effect on radio and on TV, they only show old operas and they don't know we exist, but if they catch us, they will LS. I mean, it's really, yeah, they were taking the risk. Yeah.

Yeah. That was, it was a courageous act. And then, you know, I only know about that story. So I had known you for a number of years.

And I mentioned this. I went down to the Laknick conference in Cuba. It was on the plane While flying to Cuba, I was reading, Andre Sadelta's book, The Red Webb, which is the history of, the internet development and, in the surveillance state and Russian and Soviet Union, and now he's he was a pretty courageous race is, you know, Courageous Russian independent journalist, he no longer can, you know, reside in, in Russia, given the, the risks he faces. In fact, yeah, I think he's on the the hit list of uh-uh Putin these days, but, he, he wrote a book and he he writes this, you know, from the Russian perspective, this this, episode, but it named you.

So I mean, I'm it was kind of a it was a it was a weird I'm on a plane to Cuba. Reading a book about Russia, and in the book about Russia is about Larry, who I know about Cuba. I was like, my mind was spinning, man, worlds are colliding, and I took a picture of it. And I sent it, oh my gosh, I I I I didn't know that about, that that you had been, involved in.

I think I had heard that story, but I didn't know you were the you were the person. But you're in the book.

What's another thing that's weird though is, in so Andre, so about if his father was once So the connection you guys were connecting to was was relcomm, which I guess maybe at that at that time was still you know, it it later became the first kind of ISBN of Russia.

Maybe it wasn't at that moment, but the the the present of relcomm was Alexis Sildaltev which was Andre Sildalte's father.

So it there's, like, so many cross connects here. He ended up being the head of relcomm and later started the like the Russian version of the NSA, sir, signal intelligence, outfit, which ended up being the subject of pretty much all of Andres hold out of the sun's reporting, which is, again, it's, it's a wild story, but I wanna get too far afield here on the the Russian stuff. But, Alright.

Let let me give you another little piece then on Go for it.

Yeah. Go for it.

I remember being at, at his house.

At a party or something just with with the railcomm folks, and there was a teletype over in the corner. And he pointed out the teletype. He had dialed up his server, six months before that and just never bothered to hang up because they didn't meet her local calls in Moscow. So he is he had a a persistent online connection to, well, just to his server.

At that time. But, yeah, but they were a really nice bunch of young people, two of them at least that I know of are in the US now.

So maybe, shifting back to so then that brings us up to the the beginning of the conversation of, you know, the how we got connected on the the the plate of internet connectivity in Cuba. And, and so then, you know, I read your your your post we started corresponding.

And I I think I made a promise like, here I'll, I'll take I'll keep keep an eye on this. And, if it shows up in BGP, you know, I can set something up here. I'll get alerted as soon as it happens. And I may I set that up and it was another, you know, eighteen months or so, something like that, before I one of my automated things shot me an email.

And so there's a new connection coming into Cuba. I was like, I don't know. That's interesting. And so then, again, back to the the conversation about trying to detect things about submarine cables.

It's not obvious. I know that it was like, alright, Telefonica now is a new transit provider for at Texa, which is a state telecom of Cuba, that alone isn't enough to know that that has anything to do with the submarine cable, but we had active measurements. We had traces. We were we were running, to every part of the world, continuously from servers all over the world, and we could see that the latencies had dropped.

So the, prior to that, the, the latencies, so Cuba was entirely reliant on geostationary satellite service, for all of their global connectivity. And that was a product of, the embargo and all the submarine cables that were laid in the Caribbean all steered way clear of trying to not cross paths with the the US embargo against Cuba. And so, so they were entirely dependent on geostationary satellite and geostationary satellite. One of the weaknesses is that it has a very high, latency just just due to physics and the law, speed speed of light like a to send a signal out to outer space and back, you can't do it in under four hundred and eighty milliseconds for geostationary satellites.

So that's usually a a good threshold. If you're seeing latencies, coming in lower, it can't be satellite any more. And so we saw, yeah, we were on our active measurement. We can see the latencies dropped to, like, three hundred.

I think it was still kinda high, but definitely, it could no longer be, both legs of the path going over a satellite.

And, and then we kind of, like, theorized, like, well, I wonder if it's asymmetric, like if the traffic's coming in, over the submarine cable, in a way that we can't and we can't see the return path, but the return path's going out out satellite. And, so it's asymmetric.

I wrote that up in a blog and a couple days later, we saw it just fixed or, or, you know, they could then it dropped again now boat now. It was a lower latency. And it was a couple months later. I was at another LactNet conference in Columbia.

And, I met the director of ATechSA and, and one of the, organizers, asking you to welcome me to the conference. Is there anybody wanna talk to? And I had a few companies I need to to speak with. And then, I was like, oh, would anybody from QW curious what their, you know, take is on the cable?

And he's like, wow, you're you're in luck. You're standing right next to the director of A Texa. You wanna meet him. I was sure.

And so then, I was like, hey, I'm Doug Madore from Renisys. And the guy looked at my badge. He was like, yeah, I know who you are. And I was like, oh, okay.

Well, hey, congratulations on the cable. I'm glad that, you know, interconnectivity is improving your country. I really am not, personally invested in the politics. And, and any any without any prompting, he was like, you were right about the ASM trick routing.

I was like, oh, like, that's funny. I thought we were the he's like, we read your blog, and you're like, oh, yeah. We didn't change the, the outbound traffic was still going over satellite, which is why the latency was still high. But, yeah, so then you know, so Larry, I mean, you've you've done you spent a lot more time documenting, this than than I have as far as, you know, after the cable, which now in in January this year, that's ten years that that cable was activated.

A decade has gone by. And there's, you know, I don't know. You wanna tell it, like, what's what's the state? What what's what's changed in the last ten years since the submarine cable, came active.

What's changed is, this. The, when Obama went to I remember at the time Obama went to Cuba.

And, I can't remember the I think it was that, there were five or six proposals for new for other underground, undersea cables.

At the time.

And I think Cuba I don't know for sure, but my guess is that Cuba was not receptive.

Cuba was kind of going through it was Castro was going out. He was an old man. And maybe they were conservative and didn't wanna do anything radical at the time. I don't know anything about the politics, but there were the number of there was a guy in the state department told me there were five or six active proposals to do an undersea cable.

Another undersea cable connection to the to the US.

And none of those came to pass. But one, Doug, I'm I'm blanking out. What's the name of the that Caribbean cable that goes, around the Caribbean, and it's very close comes within about sixty kilometers of Cuba.

You talk about arcos or the Arcos?

Okay. Yeah.

There was, then a proposal they put in a proposal, and this was after Obama was gone to, link to have a link up to, to Florida.

And, I I can't remember all the the things that went on, but the it was looked at. It was put on a, and there was a committee form to assess it. It was it was sp a decision was supposed to be made really quickly, like, two months. It was supposed to take to make a decision.

And nothing happened.

Trump got in. He set up some kind of a bogus committee to assess the problems of the possible problems long story short, just about six months ago, they said, no. It's they turned it down.

And so the Cubans now have got an undersea cable that goes from Cuba down to Martinique.

And so they now have a second, cable, not just the the first one?

I've been looking I've been looking for evidence of that.

And, some active measurement changes. I haven't seen anything, but it It, so the cable was built by Arange, France telecom, who is already a transit provider for a Texa, who already had a foothold and Martin. So it's possible, that the ca traffic's going through a path that was kind of already in existence. That would make it hard to pick it up from an internet measurement standpoint. But, I do there's a couple of right at ripe Atlas probes that I'm, running measurements from into Cuba to look for a change in the latencies.

And, I haven't seen anything, but, my understanding is the cable is there.

It installed, but it's not operation.

That's probably the case. I guess that was one of the things I learned, early on in doing Internet measurement around submarine cables was that there was usually one date for the press release, of, hey, the cables. And then there's another date when it's actually getting used. And, It's not necessarily anybody's lying.

You know, there's just there are two different there's a couple of different things that happen. You know, the one is the cable is RFS ready ready for service. Like, it's it's This is operational. The guys have installed it.

It's it's, they've tested it. It's it works.

It may be a completely separate matter when the parties that make use of it, do their negotiations and figure out how they're going to, you know, under what terms where they use it, this, you know, when lawyers get involved, this is not instantaneous. And so there sometimes is, another period of time before once that's all ironed out, then the engineers get the tasks that then, you know, start sending traffic down the line. So I know that in some of the, cable activations for, like, Pacific Island countries.

Those are pretty easy to pick out because it's, like, it's all or nothing. It's either gonna be, you know, higher latency loading like, you you pretty dramatic changes. And I would see the press release that, you know, Country X now has a submarine cable and I'd look at our data and be like, Well, it's all satellite still. And then, you know, two months later, all of a sudden, the shift would happen.

And, and you could see, alright, well, that's the day that they actually started carrying traffic So it's not uncommon that there's a kind of an announcement or a press release.

It even happened with, in Crimea. So after, Cramia was annexed in March, twenty fourteen.

And, mevied of the, I guess, I guess, he was prime prime minister at the time. I don't know if you're they've they've skipped around in their roles, but he he made a made a a trip to Crimea. Kinda to claim it for Russia, and then the same breath, ordered Ross telecom telecom of Russia to build a submarine cable across the Kurt straight, to link, Carmia directly with Mainland Russia. And, and I think within a couple of weeks, Ross telecom put out a press release.

Like, the cable's done, and I was looking at our data. Like, I don't see any I don't see any change at all. I don't think I it could be. The cable could be done.

I'm not saying they're wrong. I just like there's a way to see this, change and then it wasn't till mid July that we saw traffic start flowing. And then the ISPs and Crimea were were putting out announcements, saying, you know, you may notice that the latencies to things in Russia may be going down and those things, the latencies to things and Ukraine may be going up because we now are have cut over our connectivity. And, and that was exactly what we were seeing as well.

We had our own data to see to show that shift.

I guess it also in Cuba, so the so I think we win this cable came out, there really wasn't mobile internet didn't exist. I mean, it, like, they are so far behind, most countries in the world. Even developing countries usually get mobile internet going as they kind of skip a generation. They forget the fixed line because that's a lot of work and just skip over to the wireless, stuff because you just need to put up some towers. And so they didn't have mobile. There's no mobile internet. It was just WiFi hotspots, in certain parts of the city, and you see a cluster of people holding a device.

Trying to get some service, then I don't know. I remember I can't remember what year it was.

Maybe five or more years later than they got, like, three g, mobile internet service.

And now, I guess, it's I don't know. I guess I don't know what the state of it is. It it's in existence. People have it.

I'm sure it's not great.

There was there's always this issue of how much of the, the lack of development, of the internet, can you attribute to the Cuban government, which certainly is not really, you know, not it's not the does not embrace, the the promise of internet connectivity, and, you know, to put it lightly. And then, and then there's also these factors from the outside world, coming from the the US embargo So there's it's hard to see hard to hard to tease apart. Just like just like the greater, you know, Cuban picture of the economy, how much of it is, the Cuban government and how much of it is the embargo, well, you know, the end of the day is it's it's in a pretty bad state and there's, definitely there's Those are to the two main contributing factors.

Yeah. They they, you know, one thing they did is an interim thing. They made a big push for, DSL.

DSL at in your home or business became available. It's really crappy.

Spotty service. And, I mean, you know, the Cuban phone lines that the physical lines are ancient. And so I'm I'm sure they were getting you know, you don't get very fast rates over DSL over any distance on bad phone lines. And that they made a big deal, a big push on that.

But I think you're right. And mobile, they're, they're up to they're doing four g. I I I tried to Well, you you saw we were corresponding with, another guy with Armando to I would like to get the latest statistics on on the amount of mobile and what generations and the amount of mobile connectivity But I think it is, like you say, it's not very good. On the other hand, it's really made a difference.

People are using it and people are using it for kind of kind of political sorts of things as well as and cultural sorts of things. So even in its limited state, it's it's it's worth it's worth quite a bit.

I I guess you could say that it's we know the internet arrived in Cuba when they started having internet shutdowns, when there were protests because that really wasn't a thing in Cuba. There wouldn't there's no point in sitting on the internet. Nobody has access to it.

And, you know, I think that really started, maybe see twenty twenty one. So only just a couple of years ago when, the, the protests started, the biggest protests in decades occurred. And, we had, yeah, there was a a a shutdown. There was some multiple shutdown mobile service.

And, I think, you know, like you know, you know, it's, it's reached some But there was a lot of Alright.

Like you say though, there was a lot of stuff posted on a lot of YouTube videos.

Yeah. People got the word out of what was happening.

No. We're a guy now. Take time. Yeah.

Totally. That's a good point. You know, I was gonna just thinking another thing that to just mention back on the submarine cables you and it the first link was to, Venezuela. There's also now a, branch off to, Jamaica, I believe.

And and the one thing I would add, it's not clear that Venezuela financed it. Okay. There's I have also read that China financed.

It could I I guess I I'm just going off of what I read.

So, Well, I'm going off of what I've read too.

I can tell you.

I haven't done the research to know, trace the dollar, the the pesos back to where it came from, but No, and I don't think no, there's nobody that's giving a a a straight answer on that.

But I do know one thing I I, a long time ago, I came across there. Somebody sent me a a Wiki League, just a thing that had been leaked on WikiLeaks And what it was was a a meeting in which the, the guy in the Embassy NASA The financial guy in the Chinese embassy was complaining about how Cuba doesn't pay their debts.

In here. It's really, having some tension there.

They have some serious financial issues there.

But, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if if China was at least involved in the in the construction of it. China's we're we're hearing now all this stuff that China's doing now. So, And but what you said is true. Is China doing it sort of nefarious and in Cuba's letting them do it? Or is it because the embargo and we pushed them against the wall and they have no choice?

There's a lot of there's a lot of debate there, on that.

I was gonna bring up the the levels of pervasiveness that you, you, you know, you, you identified in the mosaic or when you were talking about Cuba, you know, and the level of sophistication of the actual use of the internet. To that extent that we can judge whether this is successful or not. You know, you got a cable. I have just reading through it it it makes sense.

I mean, it is so we have this connectivity. Does anyone have access to the connectivity? Okay. So now we're starting to move in the right direction.

Now that folks have access, is it changing the economy, hopefully, for the better? Is there anything is there anything that's, that we can identify as this, this activity that's, you know, international with the United States and China. We're talking about all these countries and and paragulfurment organizations. Is it having an on people's lives.

So it's it is an interesting. I I get it that it's thirty years old. I was in junior high when you were working on this.

But, but certainly still very interesting, and it feels very relevant still when we consider other developing countries in world and how it, you know, it has changed their lives too.

I think that it hasn't had it's not like the connectivity we have here where it like you said, maybe hugely facilitates e commerce and so many other things.

However, I think that the biggest impact is it does enable people to talk to each other to, organize protests in real time.

And to it it has facilitated the existence of of kind of an alternative publications both on the internet and off the internet. And I can give you a a plug for a book whose name I can't remember, but I the exact name, but it's an anthology that, a guy, Ted Henn can put together. And there are a whole bunch of chapters on this kind of thing, more on like what what it has come to mean, the the way that it's been used.

Rather than the technology itself. I I wrote the first chapter on sort of the history of the technology.

And kind of where the technology was as of at that time. I think it was two years ago.

So if people wanna kind of follow-up and kind of know how it's being used and what impact it's having on in on the society on enabling other print and online publications.

Ted's book is is that that's focused on Cuba or is that other question?

Yeah. Cuba.

It's Cuba. Yeah. Yeah.

Of course.

You've been cubic you've all, you've been a hundred percent Cuba.

There, it's been it's been great, chatting with you and hearing some of these stories and, I look forward to chatting with you again sometime soon and learning more about some of this, some stuff of, you know, how how the internet came to be, and here in other places. And it's a it's a really important topic. We should learn our history, because it, it usually ends up helping us out in the in the present and the future.

Yeah. Oh, man. It's been it's been fun talking and conversely, I really love that the stuff you do is invaluable.

Oh, thank you. Every time something goes down right away, everybody knows about it.

And, Larry, I I thank you as well. I agree with Doug, considering that we take history classes in school, and here we are talking about the internet, which has completely changed and shaped the world.

And how much how much, more important is learning about that immediate history while we still have our primary source still available. So very much appreciated.

So, Larry, if, if our listeners have a question or a comment that they'd, like to pass along to you, how can they reach out to you?

Jeez. I can give you my phone number, but I don't know if they can get that anymore.

Yeah, just, I guess the easiest way it's done, send email I either to larry press all one word on Gmail or l press at c s u d h dot e d u either way.

Great. Thank you. And and, Doug, how about you?

I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter. Those are usually the easiest ways to reach out to me.

Great. Thanks, Doug. And, I'm still active on Twitter network underscore fill. You can find my blog network fill dot com, search my name on LinkedIn.

And, if you are interested in being a guest on telemetry now. Or if you have, an idea for an episode, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out at telemetry now at kentic dot com. And until next time, thanks for listening.

Bye bye.