Cuba: US Using New Weapon Against Us -- Spam 139
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about accusations from Cuban officials about a spamming campaign against the country by the U.S.. "Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam. 'It's overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,' said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA. At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba's creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages. The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature. Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over about five hours."
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They might be right. (Score:5, Informative)
I work at an SMS aggregator. We are the fat pipe. We run at a peak capacity of 2000 messages per second per connection to an operator. Cuba has one operator (officially).
Operators are capable of handling more than we can send, but in that 5 hours we could have flooded their network with 36m messages. 300k is a drop in the bucket.
If we used multiple routes instead of direct to the operator, we could have run hundreds of millions in that same period.
check us out. http://www.cmtelecom.com/why-cm
Re:They might be right. (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for trying to post some truth, but between the government astroturf and the useful idiots there is not much chance anyone will pay attention.