Slashdot Mirror
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.
I hid an rpg in a jar. It didn't end well.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.