[ad_1]
When the Taliban captured the city of Herat on August 12, Yasin and his colleagues predicted that it would not be long before the Taliban’s invading forces occupied their home city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
“Things were more tense in Mazar too, so me and the other computer kars Working together, Mazar held a secret meeting to decide what we would do to protect all of our content,” he says. Among them, the informal computer union kars It had several hundred terabytes of data collected over several years, much of which would be considered controversial or even criminal by the Taliban.
“We’ve all decided not to delete it, but instead to hide the worse content,” he says. “We thought that these regimes come and go frequently in Afghanistan, but our work should not be disrupted.”
He’s not too worried about being discovered.
“People hide guns, money, jewelry, etc., so I’m not afraid to hide my hard drives. they’ll never find it. [them]”I’m a 21st century kid, and most Taliban live in the past.”
less than 20 years After ex-president Hamid Karzai made Afghanistan’s first mobile phone call, he almost 23 million mobile phone users In a country of less than 39 million inhabitants. But internet access is a different matter: in early 2021, 9 million internet users, a delay largely attributed to widespread physical security problems, high costs, and a lack of infrastructure development in the country’s mountainous terrain.
so the computer kars Like Yasin it can now be found all over Afghanistan. Although they sometimes download their information from the Internet when they can connect, they physically carry most of them on hard drives from neighboring countries – this is called “sneakers”.
“I use Wi-Fi at home to download some music and apps; I also have five SIM cards for the internet,” says Mohibullah. snow Kim asked not to be known by her real name. “But the link here is unreliable, so every month I send a 4 terabyte hard drive to Jalalabad and they fill it with content and return it within a week with the latest Indian movies or Turkish serials, music and apps. For that, 800 to 1000 Afghans ( He says he pays between $8.75 and $11.
“People hide guns, money, jewelry and stuff, so I’m not afraid to hide my hard drives. I’m a kid in the 21st century and most of the Taliban live in the past.”
Mohammed Yasin, computer snow
Mohibullah says it can load more than 5 gigabytes of data, including movies, songs, music videos, and even course lectures, into a phone for just 100 Afghans, or $1.09. “I have the latest Hollywood and Bollywood movies dubbed in Dari and Pashto. [Afghan national languages], music, games, apps from around the world,” he told me in early August, days before the Taliban took over.
For a little more, Mohibullah helps clients set up social media accounts, set up their phones and laptops, and even write emails for them. “I sell everything from A to Z. Everything except ‘100% movies’,” he said, referring to pornography. (He later admitted that he has some “free videos”, another alias for porn, but only sells them to trusted customers.)
[ad_2]
Source link