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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 now instead of getting charged for distributing one file, you get charged for the production and distribution of 337 different derivative works. You just cost the movie industry 5 billion dollars!
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.
I hid an rpg in a jar. It didn't end well.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Pretty much, yeah.
And it just seems so patronizing ... oh, look at these poor backwards Angolans without the interwebs ... we should give them Facebook and Wikipedia so they can uplift themselves from their savagery.
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 don't see this as misuse. 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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
Kids these days don't even remember the arguments over UUencode vs yenc, RARs and PARs, the lengthy toolchain needed just to get a binary file out in the same shape it went in, or the other joys of the early years. Damn kids on my lawn!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
I think that it is great that the locals are taking facebooks "altruistic" 'hey, let's lock down the emerging markets on an awful walled garden non-internet before anyone else does!' plan and getting actual use out of it. Good for them, and hopefully throwing a spanner in facebook's plan(or at least inflating its costs a bit, I'm assuming that the local telcos want to get paid by someone for the extra traffic).
It does seem somewhat unfortunate that wikipedia, rather than facebook, is the one whose relative openness is being exploited to serve as an improvised transfer mechanism for assorted blobs. Allowing themselves to be included as the 'altruistic' face of the plan was a dubiously principled move; but they are still eating the additional costs of hosting a bunch of stuff that doesn't advance their mission at all because a blatant market distortion makes anything you can squeeze into their system effectively 'free' in certain cost-sensitive markets. I'd be much happier if they'd figured out how to use facebook's systems for the purpose.
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.
What's the best way to covertly shift gigabytes of data via Facebook?
Conveniently for Angolans, all of those things (I assume) have Wikipedia articles about them.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
The problem is you can't seriously expect people to be told "this part of the internet is special and magical and you can only have it if you use it this way."
You can't just slap it together and then be all shocked that people said "I reject your limited reality and substitute my own". You gave them a means to exchange data and a place to host files and expected them to only use it the way you told them they were allowed to.
Which is kind of like putting up a public graffiti wall and then being outraged someone put up a dick joke.
Have you ever seen something which someone said "you may use this as long as you play nicely and only according to what we've told you that you're allowed to do", and not seen it misused?
Bypassing the intended use was pretty much inevitable ... if you only have Facebook and Wikipedia, then Wikipedia is suddenly your file sharing network.
Can I stop the possibility that Angola could lose cheap network access because they refuse to be dictated to? Nope. Am I at all surprised that human ingenuity worked around a crippled network to use it for something else? Not even in the slightest.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.