10 ms·
Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA
- dmurawsky 9y agoGreat article, thanks for doing what you do ;)
- Markoff 9y agoyou mean making huge profits from donations? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/?utm_term=.e8fbc81a9606 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
- godzillabrennus 9y agoThey provide a valuable service, it's better to see them thrive than be close to failure.
- Markoff 9y agothey don't provide anything, they use outdated software provided by volunteer, their content is managed by volunteers for free and pretty much only expenses they have to run Wikipedia are servers but they still have 300 people in payroll
- strathmeyer 9y agoIt must be real tough to run a smear job here.
- pwdisswordfish 9y agoWith HN being such an echo chamber, indeed it is.
- Markoff 9y agoyeah, I thought Reddit is echo chamber, but judging by comments here I am reconsidering my opinion and find people on Reddit more reasonable and open minded
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- losteric 9y agoDid you read that article? Their reserve of 1.5 years of operational funding seems prudent. That $MM donation stream is a pittance considering their scale - orders of magnitude larger than most VC-funded startups.
- Markoff 9y agoi read they have 300 employees who create zero content on Wikipedia which is created by volunteers for free
- F_r_k 9y agoWho supervises the servers ? Who creates Wikipedia ? Who defends Wikipedia legally ?
- a3_nm 9y agoSpeaking as a Wikipedia "volunteer" (or rather "editor"), I think it is in fact a very good idea that the Foundation takes no editorial responsibilities (except reacting to legal challenges via so-called "office actions"). It means that editors don't have to worry about legal, sysadmin, PR, etc.; and conversely WMF is not directly responsible for Wikipedia content. Believe me, it would be silly for WMF to be involved in all editorial disputes about what should or shouldn't be on Wikipedia, how things should be formatted, etc., in all languages. Basically, the foundation is managing the playground where the editors can build an encyclopedia (along with other projects, e.g., Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), and then mostly leaves the community alone (with some exceptions, not all of which were well-perceived). Given the scale of Wikimedia projects, I don't think 300 employees is excessive (it's very little when looking at other sites in the Alexa rankings except Reddit), and it's great that the expenses can be supported by donations so WMF doesn't have to depend on other people than readers. I don't see why I would mind that WMF staff gets a salary and editors don't -- editing Wikipedia is not my full-time job, but running it is theirs. (In fact, to the extent that editing Wikipedia is part of my job as a public researcher, I already get a salary from my institution...) It's easier to manage Wikipedia content with volunteers (where most processes don't depend on one single person and where there are little firm deadlines) but to have paid staff to manage operations (if the website goes down you want someone to have a look immediately). OK, it would be conceivable that the foundation could offer grants to pay some full-time editors, or redistribute money as small gifts, or as a lottery, or something, but it raises a lot of complicated questions (I don't know whether the topic has been discussed before) and I'm not sure it would be worth the effort. Another important point is that the WMF is not a company but a nonprofit, so it is reasonably transparent, and many people in the staff are chosen through elections. It's not like individuals are getting large dividends from donations to the WMF. I my opinion, the most important point to keep in mind is that WMF asks for volunteer work, but the outcome of that work is shared on fair terms with the public. If I want, I can just grab their entire database https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and software https://www.mediawiki.org/ https://www.mediawiki.org/ and start hosting a mirror with the data, and I have both the technical possibility and the legal right to do it. So WMF is not like companies who ask for volunteer work and then keep it behind closed doors (e.g., the volunteer Google Maps editors, or the historical CDDB example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History).
- justicezyx 9y agoCome on, FB makes way more money on an user by building social echo chamber and ads... Wiki give user knowledge, probably one of the highest quality sources...
- Markoff 9y agoFB is not asking me for donations and FB pay to people working for them unlike Wikipedia parasiting on work of volunteers pretending to be non profit organization so 300 people can enjoy doing nothing for good salary
- avh02 9y agoWith FB you're the product, your data is milked and sold. Have fun with your "free" social network. What a poor example of what you consider the viable alternative.
- Markoff 9y agolearn to read, I was just responding to someone who mentioned FB, never said anything about being alternative to wikipedia, you are writing to wrong person
- sctb 9y agoYou've been breaking the guidelines all over the place in this thread. Please don't do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- singold 9y agoDoes FB pay people who create content there? Afaik they don't. I'm that sense I prefer YouTube that at least shares ad revenue with creators.
- quickben 9y agoNo, FB forever locks one into a tiny little echo chamber, so one never learn anything else besides what one clicked on and what they can sell. But am I to judge. There are encyclopedias and yellow press, and happiness is very subjective.
- omginternets 9y agoAre profits in and of themselves evil now?
- jacquesm 9y agoI have a hard time choosing what's the best thing to come out of the internet: WikiPedia or the Khan Academy. If you're so intent on smearing WikiPedia it would probably help you if you studied it for a bit before spouting off a bunch of nonsense in this thread. I get it: you don't like WikiPedia because they ask you for a donation. Note that you're under no obligation whatsoever to donate and that the content is yours for the taking. As compared to say owning the Encyclopedia Britannica, which took on average a tree (or two) to print and was outdated the day you received it. On top of that it took up a huge shelf and cost as much as a car.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoI agree on their impact but disagree on best ons: it's Google. They let people reliably get the content they needed. Later made great email system, cheap alternatives to Microsoft, a browser, and so on. If I need Wikipedia article, Google will put the right one on top plus other sources right below it. Google is awesome.
- jacquesm 9y agoNo, Google is large. But without Google Wikipedia would still be around, without content sites Google wouldn't exist. And as for email: I'd much rather have the federated system we used to have rather than the few big players that are dominating the market (I'll never give up running my own email server), cheap alternatives to Microsoft already existed (OpenOffice), and an advertising company producing a browser is just plain wrong. Google is terrible, but we'll just have to live with it.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoYour response surprises me because you're old enough to have tried to find information before major search engines for WWW existed. The process involved mostly word-of-mouth, finding obscure sources, books, consultants, academic journals, associations, and so on. As Internet grew, we got that over dial-up lines with shitty search engines. Eventually, with early Web, I had to painfully grab all this content you talk about with a handful of search engines whose strengths and weaknesses varied. Most lay people thought they sucked with many using the older methods as often as search. Then, there was Google. Initially, it was just another tool in my meta-search toolbox. It grew to index massive number of content sites, its engine filtered bullshit a bit better, its presentation was efficient/clean, and its front-page results were better than the competition. Got to the point that lay people adopted it massively with most of them talking about how it improved their productivity, learning, and entertainment. They supplanted that on video side with YouTube. I continued to use Google to find info I needed before and during build of Wikipedia. It found the Wikipedia articles along with others that may or may not be better. Many people told me they also do what I do: just Google the topic if you're interested in a Wikipedia article since it will be on or near the top anyway. The productivity and discovery benefits of Google were huge. They just went up with its massive market share and investments. So many people benefit from it for finding content now that they literally tell people to "Google" something instead of search for it. Wikipedia could disappear and I could find all that information through Google. Actually, Google plus Wayback Machine if I'm being totally honest. Content pages can disappear but the archive can keep them. So, Google plus Wayback Machine were most amazing things to me with one giving me everything I need to know plus other preserving everything I need or might want to know. You think that's terrible but I say it's awesome. The problems you mention come from the market's and voters' preference rather than Google's excellence at search. Market chose to go to surveillance model. They punish most who try to free us from it. The voters chose to put corrupt people in office who would pass or strengthen IP laws benefiting the bribing few over the many. They chose temporary safety over liberty later. Different choices could've led to a very different Google (or replacement). I blame the demand side since they seem to always pull that shit.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jimnotgym 9y agoThey don't make any profit from anything. Profit is a concept from commercial entities, and has no meaning when applied to the Wikimedia Foundation
- Markoff 9y agowhat is there to surveil about wikimedia? aren't all articles public and even IP of non registered users? this seem like something to justify showing those donation requests in your face, despite Wikipedia drowning in money https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
- dmix 9y agoWhat do people have to hide with any 'public' metadata? This argument you're using with Wikipedia is basically the same one US government is making that this metadata information is public so they should be free to vacuum all of it up, including Americans. Even though we would never allow the police, or basically anyone else, to tap this at will and this information only exists in private pipes that must be tapped. The leaked documents have shown a lot of this metadata included data that was included in unsecured HTTP POST headers, such as the multitude of mobile apps that broadcast user information over clear text, such as the various examples in PowerPoint screens shots of real 'metadata' that showed GPS coordinates being pinged back to servers via HTTP along with email addresses. We can pretend all we want that this is public data because these sites are access publicly but any basic level of analysis into what 'metadata' contains it's quite obvious this doesn't hold up. Especially considering it includes individual interactions with web servers with private data. You may not care about your private interactions with Wikipedia being scanned and stored in databases forever, but it's hardly just Wikipedia and I'm happy that Wikimedia is standing up against this stuff for all people. It's not too much to ask to hold security services to the same privacy standards we've held all government agencies for two centuries.
- schoen 9y agoHow about who reads which articles, like who checks out which books from a library?
- losteric 9y agoThis case is not specific to Wikipedia, it questions the legality of all NSA Upstream surveillance. It's time to get rid of these wire taps. The past year has repeatedly shown US intelligence agencies are not as secure as they imagined - some of these taps are no doubt being leveraged by the Kremlin, China, and other sophisticated enemies of freedom.
- asher 9y agoSeems like it's trendy to hate the NSA. It gets conflated with an anti-authoritarian mindset. I wish smart people would gain some perspective - I got some by reading Bamford's books and a new one by Fred Kaplan - Dark Territories, about NSAs painful move to cyber. Some key points: * All the great powers have NSA equivalents. Meaning they play offence and defense in crypto, RF, and cyber. We (USA) can impose restrictions on our NSA but not on anyone else's. Our exploit-riddled networks are a playground for American, Russian and Chinese cyber warriors - and probably many others. * In cyber, offense and defense become the same. Kaplan's book covers this. So a smart country seeks cyber-superiority. The more we hamper NSA, the more we empower foreign cyber-warriors. * The focus has moved from RF to cyber. Giant antennas are far less important and giant datacenters are the new stars. Vacuuming up packets is less alarming when you understand we've been vacuuming up radio and telephone signals for decades. When comsats were important, NSA was vacuuming up their downlinks. When international telegrams were punched on paper tape, NSA's predecessors picked up the tape each day. * The US has tried going "NSA-less". It happened in 1929 under the slogan "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". That noble slogan led to the US operating at a disadvantage in the lead up to WWII. It doesn't pay to fly blind. * Fear of an overreaching state is always justified; however we should focus that fear more on how NSA shares data than how it acquires it. For instance fusion centers: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/why-fusion-centers-matter-faq https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/why-fusion-centers-mat...
- skrebbel 9y agoTrendy or not trendy, your argument boils down to "we should trade liberty for security in this global surveillance arms race".
- sametmax 9y agoIt's like saying peace is trendy and we should not try to go weaponless. That makes no sense. We all want peace. We all know that peace is not there yet and that without weapons the other countries would take advantage of it. Yet we all know that the weapon oriented society the US has become is a major issue. It's not contradictory, just being honest with yourself.
- jokoon 9y agoI'm curious, can the government use surveillance on paper mail at the large mail operators?
- zzo38computer 9y agoYes, but only the addressing as far as I know.
- dom0 9y agoThe Stasi was able to read all mail of targets (and they had many) fifty years ago. Practically all mail crossing the border was read, which again was a lot. I'd assume addresses are scraped anyway, since they are digitized for routing already, and targeted mail being opened without leaving marks (an art existing for hundreds of years).
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoI wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to read mail while still sealed in an envelope. Wouldn't a sufficiently bright light and OCR be sufficient to read the average single page folded in thirds?
- jimnotgym 9y agoIn 'Spycatcher' IIRC MI5 actually steamed letters open with a kettle, or rolled them out of the gap at the top of the flap with a split cane! They had no way (at that time) to deal with cellotape, however. I suspect the metadata is a pretty valuable resource in itself. Suggests that people wishing to protect their privacy would do well to shield the inside of their envelopes with junk text, tape them shut, post them from random locations and use mail forwarding services and a mailbox service
- nickpsecurity 9y agoThere was a spray that made them temporarily transparent a long time ago.
- yuhong 9y agoThinking about it, it was in about 1971 that US left the gold standard, and that was partly due to government spending. Watergate came not long afterwards. This design of the economic system where the government prints money still exists today.
- unityByFreedom 9y agoGiven the current climate, with a foreign actor attempting to subvert our democracy, I'm more inclined to support other more obvious victims of NSA spying than Wikimedia. This seems loosely held together - that said I do trust that our justice system will investigate it properly. Given the climate, my feeling is anyone attempting to say our justice system is awful, or that the NSA doesn't provide any security, are witting or unwitting supporters of a foreign adversary. Unless, of course, Russia succeeds; then it's all kosher and the history books will be written as such. If you think our justice system is terrible then please point to a country that does it better. Note I'm not talking about laws- rather, the judiciary itself.