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Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism
- vidarh 11y agoJust waiting for someone to tunnel TCP via these services, or use them as a HTTP proxy.
- JetSpiegel 11y agoThere was a project that implemented Http over Facebook messenger
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoBack in the day there was a Facebook app called "IPv6 over human" where you would receive packets from your connections and had to manually route them.
- Kristine1975 11y agoHN thread about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
- jkot 11y agoKindle 3g was used similar way. This stuff is on youtube, even on github etc... I dont think it should be framed as a problem specific only to poor countries.
- Aeolun 11y agoI'm still a bit angry that my internet was suddenly cut off :/ not like they ever notified me of it either.
- cJ0th 11y agoYou should be able to fix it by installing the latest updates. http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-kindle-update-march-22/ http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-kindle-update-march-22/ But yeah, they should have let us known beforehand. I only read an article about it by accident.
- xomateix 11y agoThat's strange, as I got several emails from Amazon telling me about the upgrade.
- cJ0th 11y agoHuh ... interessting. They probably ran out of e-mails...
- logfromblammo 11y agoIf they ran out of e-envelopes, why couldn't they just go online and order more from Am... oh. I see the problem now.
- f_allwein 11y agoyes, worked for me - download the update(s) from http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_bc_nav?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200529680 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_b... , mount your kindle and drag&drop them there.
- f_allwein 11y agoNice and creative use of a restrictive system. While most people will just use it for piracy, I'm sure a good few will end up contributing to Wikipedia as well. How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?
- cdubzzz 11y agoAmen. The reason that I am able to use Photoshop effectively (enough) today is split up rar files in AOL emails and Hotline (:
- scrollaway 11y agoThat's been Adobe's business model for a long time, and a very clever one at that. Let Photoshop be pirated all over schools and unis, reap the enterprise benefits when the graphics designers who only learned Photoshop are getting hired.
- cdubzzz 11y agoYep. Creative Cloud subscriber through work right here. Well done, Adobe.
- zodPod 11y agoYup! I've chosen to buy several things that I pirated as a kid now just because I was able to pick it up then and now I have an income and these things are accessible!
- earlz 11y agoFor all the hate Creative Cloud gets, I love it as a hobbyist. I have a subscription for I think $10 or $20/month and even though sure I could save up and have purchased the software one-time outright, but last time I looked at buying a boxed copy in a university bookstore it was somewhere around $700. That's just not possible for someone who only uses photoshop for some of the stuff that GIMP tends to suck at, and only quite rarely Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- elcapitan 11y agoMaybe this is just a detail of Vice's way to sell their articles, but how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?
- labster 11y agoThe colonialism is attempting to enforce Western mores and laws about copyright on the Angolan population. As well as Wikipedia's own culture which is pretty Western itself. While Wikipedia may be attempting to colonize Angola with some of its community conduct values, the population there has another view of Wikipedia's purpose which might be equally valid.
- elcapitan 11y agoMaybe I missed the part of the article where it said that people in Angola are being forced to use Wikipedia.
- amazon_not 11y agoEncouraged, is perhaps more appropriate, as Wikipedia is the service being zero rated rather than something else that would be more suitable to the task at hand. Forced, to the extent that they cannot afford to use other services that are not zero rated. The article mentions $2.5 for 50 Mb which is quite expensive by any measure.
- marcus_holmes 11y agoThis is the objection to zero-rated services. Angolans get to use the internet, but they only get to use the zero-rated bits of it. And they have to use them in ways that westerners approve of. It comes down to money, really. Do we put a "you must be this rich to use the internet" sign up on the planet's communications, or do we allow people to bring their culture and ideas to the party despite their poverty? This whole thing reminds me of UseNet in the early days. It was supposed to be about news and conversations. It ended up being about sharing copyrighted content, because it was one of the only ways we could do it. So we (Westerners) misused our internet services to share copyrighted content in the early days of our internet experience, why are we even surprised, let alone objecting, that others are doing the same?
- jamespo 11y agoHow hard can it really be to stop this technically?
- Kristine1975 11y agoThe pirates (arrr!) are essentially using steganography when they hide videos in jpeg images or pdf files. Steganography can (sometimes, depending on the algorithm used) be detected, but in the end it's an arms race between one side using more sophisticated steganography and the other side using more sophisticated detection mechanisms.
- benplumley 11y agoI'd be very surprised if that were the case. The impression I got from the article was that they were just changing the extension on video files so that they could be uploaded as PDFs. For it to be steganography would require the PDF of the video file to still be readable as a PDF, which is vastly more work and takes much more technical knowhow (and the ability to download a decryption program) than just renaming.
- cooper12 11y agoLooks like MediaWiki (the software behind WIkipedia) verifies that the MIME type matches the extension: "MediaWiki tries to detect the MIME type of the files you upload, and rejects the file if the file-extension does not match the mime type" (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MIME_type_detection https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MIME_type_detection) However, MIME types can be spoofed... (http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/35933/how-can-i-spoof-the-mimetype-of-a-file-upload http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/35933/how-can-i-...)
- hobs 11y agoDepends on the file type, there are a few that ignore anything in certain areas and if you change the extension should just work. Pretty sure, with gifs and zip you can just combine them together with one append command and you are done.
- tudorw 11y agoJust read about ICMP and DNS tunnels, is that an option on these systems?
- masterofcookies 11y agoThe author puts encyclopedic knowledge and movies in the same category ("information") and seems to be arguing that they both should be freely available. I'm not saying that current copyright system isn't completely screwed up and in need of reform, but I don't think disregarding content creators is an optimal solution.
- dsr_ 11y agoThat's right. People who contribute to human knowledge by editing Wikipedia are vastly undercompensated compared to the movie industry.
- coryfklein 11y agoThere is a difference between the value of information and the price of that information. Using value to determine undercompensation ignores that markets work on price, and often things of low intrinsic value are priced higher than others with high intrinsic value. An encyclopedia with broad coverage clearly has greater intrinsic value than a Star Wars Blu-ray, yet the market has priced Star Wars Blu-rays as more expensive.
- dwaltrip 11y agoThere is no such thing as intrinsic value. All value is subjective. Any item has no value unless an observer is present to value it. An, unsurprisingly, different observers will value the object differently, often wildly so. Price is an extremely rough heuristic on the median or average valuation of an object. However, the majority can often be short-sighted at times, leading those who are looking more longer term to make statements like "the price doesn't reflect the intrinsic value of this thing". But even then, the big picture thinkers are of course assuming that the long view is the "correct view", when really, there is no single "correct view". How would one even go about attempting to define such a thing? It's all subjective.
- jonahx 11y ago
- gojomo 11y agoHeavy editorializing in the headline. These practices instead demonstrate how flimsy and temporary the supposed harms of 'digital colonialism' can be. Any walled-garden slice of the net – 'zero rating', 'free basics', etc – hints to people how much more is out there, whetting their appetites. Given human creativity and plummeting networking-technology costs, people will figure out how to get the full boat, soon enough, by legal or underground methods. Business-model or cost-based barriers to the flow of digital information decay very quickly. And in practice, even these much-hated 'tiered'/subsidized programs mainly accelerate the discovery and deployment of work-arounds. (Where limits persist, look for police or soldiers, using violence/imprisonment to enforce political edicts.)
- keithpeter 11y agohttp://thepiratebook.net/ http://thepiratebook.net/ This was posted to HN some time ago and I bought a (paper) copy. Looks like a new example for the authors to add to any second edition they decide to produce.
- mih 11y agoWhile Wikipedia might be used as a storage service, it's actually Facebook which is being used to share access to the stored data. How trivial would it be for Facebook to clamp down on those groups from Angola which openly advertise themselves as sharing hubs? Facebook after all is no stranger to blocking content, sometimes even if it is legal.
- triplesec 11y agoSomething went wrong because this was posted a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347144 But I'm glad this has got its due notice at last.
- gus_massa 11y agoFrom the guidelines: > Are reposts ok? > If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. In other threads, the mods explained that the dupe detector is weaker than expected on purpose so good stories get a second (and third, ...) chance to get popular. Sometimes the first submission don't get attention by bad luck (wrong time, another submission was too popular, random, ...). So it's common to see that the second or third resubmission gets to the front page.
- jcr 11y agoI'm sorry to be so pedantic, but prevent an argument from anyone looking for confirmation, the quote is from the HN FAQ [1], not the HN Guidelines [2]. Both are linked at the bottom of most HN pages. BTW, Gus, at least some of the time I've been trying to use your preferred "Previous" format with points, days, and comment count when it seem relevant and useful (i.e. when it won't be killed as a dupe). You suggested it in a comment a few days or weeks ago. It's more work, but I'd bet it's more helpful, especially for new users. Most of the time, adding dupe links is simple and should happen quickly since it prevents split discussions and manual merges. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- triplesec 11y agoThank you for the constructive answers
- jessaustin 11y agoPlease don't link to previous submissions that inspired no discussion whatsoever. It's just noise.
- dnqthao 11y agoThe problem is the telco data rate is too high. In Vietnam, we have $3 for unlimited access to 3G data/month (ofcourse the speed is slow). Why didn't some Telco companies jump into the Angolan market?
- x5n1 11y agoMostly because most Telco companies are monopolies that are not run by 3rd world people, and even if they are they still feel the right to milk it for every dollar; eg. Carlos Slim. I think though if China was to get into the game, they might drop the price like it's hot, but it's China.
- x5n1 11y agoFor instance: http://www.newsecuritylearning.com/index.php/archive/75-chinas-mighty-telecom-footprint-in-africa http://www.newsecuritylearning.com/index.php/archive/75-chin... "The key market strategy of the Chinese companies seems to be their competitive pricing, tailor-made for cash-stricken African countries." "Huawei’s former head of operations in West Africa, Wilson Yang, quoted in a case study on the company by the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School in 2009, says that Huawei manages to achieve tremendous margins while still pricing itself only 5 to 15 per cent lower than its major international competitors, Ericsson and Nokia. ZTE prices 30 to 40 per cent below European competitors."
- itsuart 11y agoHm...So, what conditions person needs to satisfy to elevate from ToS violator to fighter against colonial rule? Does 'fighter' status gives free pass on such violations? Are people who pay to keep Wikipedia free in agreement with this? What is digital colonialism? Which problems of it were exposed? Weird article.
- Grue3 11y agoHow is this a problem? It shows that even limited free Internet access is hugely beneficial for sharing information.
- NotMeIndeed 11y ago"Angolan’s pirates are learning how to organize online, they’re learning how to cover their tracks, they are learning how to direct people toward information and how to hide and share files. Many of these skills are the same ones that would come in handy for a dissident or a protestor or an activist." I'm sure breaking and stealing cars is a valuable skill for an activist in the US.
- fkooman 11y agoThey could just create 'share.wikipedia.org' and make that available so everyone can go there to share/distribute whatever files they want using a secret token they put in their FB group instead of hiding them in Wikipedia articles. No need to clean up articles anymore. With a nice retention policy to automatically expire old content it could actually work :)
- emodendroket 11y agoI think they probably do not want to tacitly approve of the use of Wikipedia as a file-sharing service.
- oldmanjay 11y ago"Digital colonialism" is almost as silly a concept as cultural appropriation, which is what the Angolans are doing in a very direct sense.
- SocksCanClose 11y ago+1
- SocksCanClose 11y agoisn't this what happens when you make something free? people use it to the maximum extent. this is the beauty of pricing. it allows supply to meet demand. imagine if "zero" turned into some reasonable multiple (say, the equivalent of one gigabyte of wikipedia for 1/1000th of an Angolan's annual salary). How many Angolans would chose to pay for this? To continue thinking down this road is to begin thinking along the lines of introductory economics. And interesting things happen. Imagine if Wikipedia were to show that this is a sustainable business model? If one million Angolans were to pay USD$1 for this annually, it would generate (hard math here, I know) a million dollars of revenue. That could do any number of things. Pay for a full-time staffer to work in the Angolan patois of Portuguese perhaps. Or even go to pay for building out basic infrastructure. Or it could serve as the seed funding of an MNVO that would provide greater services, at a reasonable cost, to Angolans. Just a thought.
- FussyZeus 11y agoSo a serious question for HN: The primary objection seems to boil down to the idea that the people of whatever other country (in this case Angola) should not be beholden to the ideals and laws of the country where these things are coming from (in this case the United States). While I totally agree with the idea that the US's copyright system is in dire need of repair, I can't help but think that saying it's alright for another country's people to entirely subvert the rule of law of another nation will result in nothing but anarchy. I understand the fact that many people in these situations either have no ability to or it's incredibly hard for them to attain these same things legally, and that's terrible (and a huge opportunity to be solved by an enterprising group to be honest), but while I think that the spread of general knowledge such as Wikipedia is a net gain, I don't think that same thing can be applied to Transformers and Naruto. So the question I posit is this: Does an inability to acquire something legally, for whatever reason, justify stealing it and if so where do we draw the next line?
- jacalata 11y agoIt's already possible, common and expected for people in one country to subvert the laws of another country - for instance, Americans don't think they should be jailed for spreading Holocaust denialism, do they? Why should Germany not have the obvious right to enforce that law on the entire internet? How do you see that case as different to this one? (Aside, of course, from the money Hollywood is prepared to spend on it).
- FussyZeus 11y agoThe difference that springs immediately to mind is that holocaust denial is an idea, a concept, where movies and games are intellectual products not intended for free exchange. Apples and oranges.
- emodendroket 11y agoThe distinction between an "idea" and an "intellectual product" doesn't seem very satisfying.
- SCAQTony 11y agoPerhaps Beyonce and Marvel have done more for the USA in regards to culture, values and reputation than tanks, drones and torture has? IMHO, A good President would tell our trade reps to keep one eye closed on this matter and perhaps consider compensating American companies that "illegally" get their arts and entertainment smuggled into difficult countries such as Iran, North Korea, and friendly nations in Africa like Angola!
- gallerytungsten 11y ago"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it." Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore
- TearsInTheRain 11y agoIsn't this wikipedia zero deal the same thing that facebook was trying to do in India? is it any better that a nonprofit acts as a gatekeeper to the internet?
- cat-dev-null 11y agoRoute around the externally-imposed digital divide. More power to them.
- hackuser 11y agoHere's one way to look at it: Given what Western nations have done to their country and region, why should Angolans care about Westerners' intellectual property? i.e., 'You kidnapped and enslaved our people, colonized our country, financed and supported a brutal civil war that caused over 500,000 deaths - and now you say we should worry about your intellectual property?'
- e15ctr0n 11y ago> In Cuba, for instance, movies, music, news, and games are traded on USB drives that are smuggled into the country every week. In another third world country, things are more sophisticated thanks to the wide availability of cheap Android phones. In offices on Friday evenings, everyone swaps movies on SD cards so that they can watch them on the weekend on the phone itself.
- brownbat 11y agoMakes me wonder if someone's hacked together an IP-over-wikimedia or IP-over-facebook solution yet...
- kwhitefoot 11y ago> Legal questions aside (Angola has more lax copyright laws than much of the world), Lax implies that there is some kind of objective ranking system. It would be better to simply say that Angola's law allows some practices that, say, the US' law does not.