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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.
This multi-chunk system is EXACTLY how piracy existed in the old AOL days. There were chat rooms with bots, you typed in commands to the chat room to search for a program/movie, and then the bot would forward you the emails with 10MB attachments (AOLs size limit). Since this was all contained within the AOL ecosystem, the forwarding of emails was instant, since the attachments stayed server-side until downloaded by the client. This made it extremely easy to push larger files out to tons of people all at once.