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Angola's Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing Loopholes in Zero Rating
Reader Jason Koebler quotes a Motherboard article: Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their respective websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have taken to hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and are also sharing links to these files on Facebook, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive. It's undeniably a creative use of two services that were designed to give people in the developing world some access to the internet. But now that Angolans are causing headaches for Wikipedia editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, no one is sure what to do about it.
Facebook and wikimedia are disgusting to exploit the poor in this way
It is amazing how any communications system eventually descends in to Chaos.
Block files larger than X,
Block file types
Disable anonymous edits, force phone verification so no multiple accounts.
The free facebook access for the third world is designed to make third worlders dependent on facebook.
Anybody else remember hiding rars in jpgs?
I didn't know that Facebook charged for access outside of Angola. I've been using Facebook for 10 years and haven't paid a cent. Are fees mentioned in the terms of service which I didn't read? Are they going to suddenly bill me $1000? Oh god please no.
Crazy thought but how about limiting uploads to, say, 2MB?
Second crazy thought, how about scanning the files they already have uploaded, identifying the ones that are way too big for what they are (say, over 2MB) and checking each one manually?
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Angolans see censorship as damage, and route around it just like anybody else. I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
This is just like the library catalog I hacked when I was younger. The librarians thought they had it locked down to catalog search only; but those machines were actually on the Internet and all you had to do was fool the search engine into echoing a URL back to you, which was easy to do.
I know that at least the Wikimedia people were trying to do good, and I sort of feel for them... but they should have seen this coming.
You can't send out invites to the ball and not let them have the whole dance floor.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
>no one is sure what to do about it.
Stop giving it to them. Tada!
Problem solved.
Man, the control freaks at Wikipedia must be going crazy. On one hand, they're doing a Good Deed[tm] for the Poor Third Worlders[tm] which is part and parcel of their Knight In Shining Armor Self-Image[tm].
On the other hand, the filthy peasants are Using Wikipedia Wrong[tm], a capital offense that carries the penalty of Summary Deletion. They must be experiencing such cognitive dissonance that cerebrospinal fluid is squirting out their ears under high pressure. I wish I cared enough to go follow the tortured discussions.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's Facebook and Wikimedia's job to give Angolans access to the rest of the Internet?
This is another classic example of why, although it is very tempting, subsidizing things by type, rather than by quantity, usually doesn't end well.
People providing subsidies really like attaching strings to them, it feels much better than just handing over cash(whether, as in this case, it's because the subsidy is mostly there to support facebook's business interests with wikipedia thrown in to make the process look vaguely altruistic; or because Senator Somebody heard that WIC was being used to buy junk food and doesn't approve); but this means that the people receiving the subsidy have a strong incentive to shoehorn whatever it is that actually want or need into a form allowed by the subsidy, even if doing so isn't very efficient.
If this zero-rating stuff were actually about the interests of the users, rather than basically being facebook's pet project, the obvious solution would be to drop the site-by-site classification nonsense and just subsidize the first x GBs of data use and let the user decide what to do with it.
With how fast any changes done by someone who isn't in the Wikipedia inner circle get reverted, I can't see how piracy can be done. Even with full references, I have encountered article changes reverted with a generic "FU" message in less than 30-45 seconds after they were submitted.
Rip Mix Burn... The Internet is a device to steal intellectual property. Some steal a little some a lot.
Jesus Christ! Is that ass even real?
If it is... that, my friends, is an amazing ass.
I love a good outrage when I see it. Screw companies with walled gardens offering you only a selective service based on their "partners" who pay them money.
As a side note does anyone know how to install a different browser on my iPhone, they are all just skins for safari. Would throwing another $800 at Apple help? Do I need Apple care? Or maybe an iWatch?
Angola is many things....
I am surprised that this made it to Slashdot and not that Unitel is the personal slush fund for the president's daughter. I suppose 'blood diamonds' have been supplanted by 'blood tech'.
As for editing articles and such, the solution seems easy enough to me. Do not allow people with free access to upload files or images. They can edit articles to their heart's content.
The article itself talks about 'digital rights' which is rather ironic in a country with blatant human right violations.
What's the best way to covertly shift gigabytes of data via Facebook?
Just put more of your stellar editors in place.
That is all.
Meanwhile "the poor backwards Angolans" have said "what, you think we're idiots? Screw you, we want movies, porn, music, and picture's of Nicki Minaj's ass (apparently), just like everyone else on the interwebs."
I see this as flipping the bird to the patronizing attempts to give them a tiny bit of the internet and expect them to be all "thank you boss" about it.
I think this is hilarious, and I applaud them for doing it.
Will the geek still be applauding when Wikimedia pulls out because it can't afford to provide Angola with a free porn fix? No encyclopedia? No free textbooks or other educational resources that might actually make a difference?
All over the world...
LOL at "developing world", I think you meant "third world hellhole", and you could have added "because it's full of AFRICANS".
Simple: put Jimmy Wales and Mark Zuckerberg in the same cell as those Pirate Bay guys. They're facilitating piracy while pretending to provide an encyclopedia and a social network. They'll play well with those guys who pretended to provide a search engine.
> to give people in the developing world some access to the internet
Giving people access to Facebook and Wikipedia is as much access to the internet as access to MSN or AOL (without internet) was during the 90s.
Neither Wikipedia nor Facebook are the internet. Period. They give people access to two websites. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is why socialism doesn't work even if it were moral-- which it isn't!
Truth:
1. People don't respect anything unless they, personally, paid something for it.
2. There's ain't no sech thing as a free lunch.
3. Not everyone is dishonest or behaves dishonestly. But enough people do that it's impossible to do nice things for others on a large scale without being abused.
So even if socialism was morally right it would still end in disaster.
But it isn't morally right to take (by force!) from some to give to others.
If you cannot afford Internet, then what the hell are they marketing to them? Is Facebook just using them to inflate their user count and trick investors/advertisers or on Facebook Angola do they advertise bread, "mud cookies", and goats instead of PlayStation 4s and designer cars?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
People that can't afford internet often spend $200 on Nike sneakers.
Apparently stating this fact makes you a racist.
That should slow them down a bit.
clap em in irons and ship them off to America!
Too early?