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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.
Looks like the "poor" are doing some exploiting of their own. Good for them! Circumvention of a blockage is what the internet is about. Wiki and Facebook are unwitting VPN providers. I like it..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The tragedy of the wikimedia commons.
Well, it's also amazing how quickly people realize "wait, this is free and that isn't, so if I rename this to look like that it's free"
If you tell people they can only use a communication medium one or two ways, they'll eventually figure out how to do all of the rest by piggy-backing on those methods.
This isn't "this is why we can't have nice things". This is telling people "we have nice things, but you can't have nice things so you get these things". And then those people turned around and said "no, we can have nice things too".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So a bakery giving its products for free to the poor is considered a "blockage" ... ?
Poor analogy. Facebook is not giving away their product. The users are the product.
I have mixed feelings about Facebook Free Basics, and I am not sure if it is good or bad, but it certainly isn't comparable to free bread.