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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.
It is amazing how any communications system eventually descends in to Chaos.
Anybody else remember hiding rars in jpgs?
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!”
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"?
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 not a bakery
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Split rar files. /uploads directory that's misconfigured to allow downloads as well.
Rename extensions.
Write a little script that renames them all and extracts along with a helper executable that features some cool music and graphics from your pirating group
Dump them in your favorite public FTP site's
I keep having to remind myself that kids today didn't grow up in the 80s and 90s.
What's old is new again.
Facebook and wikimedia are disgusting to exploit the poor in this way
Giving free service to the poor is exploiting the poor? Or do you imagine Facebook is making millions from that lucrative advertizing market for poor Angolans? And wikimedia's going to clean up from all the donations?
I think both companies are a bit shady in general, but I don't see any problem here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Rip Mix Burn... The Internet is a device to steal intellectual property. Some steal a little some a lot.
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.
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.
Yeah fuck those giving something to someone who can't get anything for nothing, they shouldn't not be ... it's not right to.... it's not fair to.... I mean... they are corporations so just fuck them in general right?
Or do you imagine Facebook is making millions from that lucrative advertizing market for poor Angolans?
Angola is not so poor. It is one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, and the economy is growing rapidly. Unfortunately, it has a repressive government and high levels of inequality. There is plenty of money to be made advertising to the poor.
Blocking should rile people up. I'm glad to see they are getting around it. It balances the power structure just a tiny bit.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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?
Old versions of articles are still viewable in the page history. I wonder if this related to the bots that I've seen recently that vandalize a page with "random" garbage and then immediately self-reverts.
I kinda miss the days of proggies, phat MMs, and naked amputee chat. I don't miss the dialup downloads, though.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
What's the best way to covertly shift gigabytes of data via Facebook?
Life, uh, finds a way...
Hardly. They've giving free and borderline essential information to a large mass of people in exchange for the ability to control the flow of that information. While that's a nice gesture, it's also laying the groundwork for future abuses. The amount of power gained by the people controlling the flow of information into the information starved masses isn't something to be taken lightly, and I can think of many ways it could potentially be abused.
Okay, but that's not saying much!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you are referring to the article's image (about halfway down) I think that's Nikki Minaj, and yes, she's, well, "real" in that she's not photoshop, but she's also not real as in lots of surgery. Some people find her attractive, but those people also like Kardiashian butt as well.
Sir Mix Alot would agree though.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Angola is not so poor. It is one of the most prosperous countries in Africa. Unfortunately, it has a repressive government and high levels of inequality. There is plenty of money to be made advertising to the poor.
I can't find a good recent source for median income, but Angola hasn't been doing that much better than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, and the average income for the region is ~$1600 /year, while the average upper middle class income (lets say that's the target market) is a whopping $7000-ish.
The free-fall of oil prices won't make life better there, and other commodities haven't been doing much better.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bad analogy. This is more like a bakery giving people with no transportation free access to self-driving cars, but the cars are only allowed to drive to destinations approved by the bakery. The bakery promises not to do anything evil with this power they wield over the destinations these previously transportationless people can now visit (e.g. letting the people visit an amusement park for a few weeks, then threatening to take that destination away if they don't capitulate to certain demands, or enabling specific polling places as destinations based on which politicians paid for them), but has a track record of doing sketchy stuff and no one believes them.
The "cost" of this "free" access is too high, and it's being sold to people who don't know any better.
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?
We are talking about corporates and non-profit entities here. Both have their own advantage at heart, which happens to correlate with many user's desires to access their service. You can't force a company, which spends a lot of good money on promoting their product, to freely promote other services. If we were talking about sponsored internet, right. However despite the name this is not sponsored internet but a product in itself!
> 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.
Developing is not the same as developed. Angola (and the rest of Africa) certainly has the potential to become prosperous, but trying to claim that it is already so is just silly.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Angola is richer than Portugal and many Portuguese are MOVING THERE!!!
That was before oil prices plummeted to under US$ 45,00 a barrel.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
AC, this is PR. PR, this is AC.
Every end has half a stick.
No, life has trouble finding a way, which is why countries that are closer to kleptocracies with corruption struggle, decade after decade, let's say indefinitely, to lift up to modrn standards.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That should slow them down a bit.
You can't force a company, which spends a lot of good money on promoting their product, to freely promote other services.
Never said I wanted to. The simple goal is circumventing the blockage.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The article is an object lesson in the three truths I outlined.
And because those three truths are relevant to the overarching humanitarian struggle for the past century and a half I figured it would count as something worth saying.