Nice 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?
As Portuguese I can totally relate to what is happening in Angola.
Back in the 80 and 90's you could hardly buy real software for home computers, even if you wanted to do so.
All tapes and floppy disks that were sold in shops and bazaars across the country were counterfeit. Lisbon and Porto were probably the only two major cities were some shops selling real original software.
Only software being sold for the enterprise was legit.
Fast forward to 2016 and those bazaars and shops selling counterfeit software as legit are long gone, but everyone has a friend that knows where to get stuff.
Open source has helped to reduce that, but many still don't care, because they want the real software that everyone is using and in times of crisis are not going to pay what companies are asking for. Even when explained how production costs in software are distributed.
For example, the majority uses Android and WP, as not everyone can afford an iOS device. Those that can, usually jailbreak it shortly afterwards, with the purpose of installing pirated apps.
I bet no countryman is going to contradict me, that even in 2016, it is possible to get the usual CD and DVD listings at the university from fellow students, from shops around the corner that provide the desired set of software, in spite of police efforts to track them down.
I think it's actually happening all over the developing world. Same thing was (is) happening in Romania.
The thinking is: why buy it if I can pirate it? Especially when it costs something like 1% of my monthly income (for just 1 MP3) or 20%-1000% (for software). Even the most ethically minded tend to think: who loses if I pirate it? Most of the times these products come from faraway corporations making billions of dollars (frequently more than the whole GDP of the country you're living in). It's hard to muster empathy for that.
Intellectual Property pricing schemes do more than make it hard to empathize, they foster active anger.
So far we've discussed people in less wealthy eurozone countries choosing between paying a significant portion of their income and pirating.
Thats bad, in a way we're describing tools that cost nothing, but are priced in a way that whole economies don't have practical access to them.
It gets worse when you consider places like Africa, where every electronic record of an idea is priced out of reach. Can you imagine if your whole country was basically denied access to reference materials, textbooks, and popular culture? The very ideas that could allow you to work your way out of poverty are withheld.
That is really the boot of the privileged stepping on the neck of the poor. And people feel it and understand that.
I am from Brazil, when I was young, I pirated HEAVILY, and frequently without being even aware of it, there was legal legit stores selling pirated stuff and even paying taxes for it, maybe unaware too that it was pirated...
For example, I paid what is equivalent today (inflation corrected) 17 USD to get the DEMO copy of Wolfenstein 3D.
And to me, paying 17 USD for the DEMO of Wolfenstein 3D, was the coolest stuff ever, because I could play it in first place!
When I heard of "doom", the "legendary game that is wolfenstein 3D but with green floors that cause damage and bloody monsters", I wanted it badly... All I could find about it was hearsay, no legal copies, even of a demo existed, no pirated copies existed either! The few people that played it was only on someone else computer, they described it to me, and I really wanted to see it, they described a technical marvel, something awesome!
My dad is a engineer, he was hired by Kia Motors to do some contract stuff for them, he found out that the CEO (or president, or some other extremely high level executive, forgot the details, I was just a kid) of Brazil Kia Motors had a imported legal copy of Doom, and Doom2, he mentioned to the guy, and he made a copy for me, 20 floppies.
I took care of them like if they were the most precious things ever, because floppies that I had were easy to corrupt, and Doom, and Doom2 was too priceless to lose, and it took too much work to get it (I ended visiting Kia motors with my dad several times, and helping a bit when I was allowed to, the total effort to get the thing was something like several months of visiting Kia a lot, nagging people, paying attention, helping install steel cable structures...).
And it was worth it, Doom was legendary as I imaginated in my head (even using PC Speaker audio, because a real sound car costed here about 20 times the monthly mininum wage), I wanted to make it too, I wanted to be a programmer able to create my own Doom, I needed to learn C, and whatnot, the game was fun, and working a lot to get that pirated copy was very worth it.
Then I wonder, what would have happened if Doom and Doom2 had some strong DRM that prevented the Kia executive from making a copy for me?
That'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.
For 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.
Yup! 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!
I always wondered why MS, which benefited from a similar modus operandi, abandoned it so drastically. When the internet got good enough that sharing software became feasible, they introduced online activation, basically pushing people towards alternatives.
They still push Microsoft products pretty heavily in universities. I was very happy when I went off to university to be able to easily get keys for products like Windows, Office and Visual Studio. Our CS department had something set up and the impression I got was that Microsoft was footing a good bit of the bill to make sure that they were the easiest choice for most students to get professional software.
Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh.
However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people more informed, but the bulk of piracy is part of the problem.
1) It's diverting considerable effort that could go into free software. If you had to either pay for Photoshop or use a free solution, Gimp and Krita would get insanely more resources. In other words, piracy is a key element in closed-software dominance.
2) Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles. So sharing research papers is not the same thing as what commonly falls under the "piracy" moniker.
I don't disagree with #1 (cf my other comment in the thread regarding Adobe's MO). But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all.
Re #2: That's the funniest conspiracy theory I've heard all year. But don't take it from me - I edit tvtropes so I'm in on it too.
I write snarky comments targeting opinions that express my thinking in a concise and funny (for me at least) way.
Then you come and tell me to fix my attitude, directly judging my person. At no point did I judge you or used ad hominems.
>But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all.
I'm not interested in getting my point accross, just in having fun. People have different objectives. Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do?
Now regarding your #2, there are many links between TV exposure and bad school grades.
Everybody on HN love to say that you must be a pretty idiot to read the dailymail or watch fox news, so a correlation between low intellectual content media consumption and low intelligence would harly surprise anybody.
Yet you reply with "That's the funniest conspiracy theory", a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.
As you see, the whole conversation is rather useless, so snark is good enough.
> Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do?
Maybe my objective is to tell you what you should do and you shouldn't judge my objectives? I don't know.
There's assumptions you have to make if you want to have a healthy conversation. For example, the assumption that when someone enters a conversation as an active participant, they're not just here to waste everyone's time. That's essentially trolling.
> correlations
Just because you have "links between TV exposure and bad school grades" doesn't mean "TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles". If I told you there's a link between knife usage and missing fingers, would you tell me knives are made to reduce the average amount of fingers?
> a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.
If you don't want to be ridiculed and want your points to be answered seriously, maybe you shouldn't be so snarky all the time and hear people out when they tell you to stop.
You can't have it both ways. You can't be an arse to everybody and then expect them to treat you with respect.
I agree, and this was poor wording on my part. I just wanted to point out that this side of piracy ensure that a large part of the population would not benefit much from it because it won't bring them any good (e.g. education, practical knowledge, etc) while providing easy ways to waste away their energy.
The outcome of downloading research papers or educational content is not the same as downloading entertainment.
The 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.
There 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.
There 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.
Your point is a good one, though I'd say that calling it all subjective takes it too far.
If the outcome of long view -- ie, valuing education and information over watching star wars -- is less poverty, more self-reliance, the ability of a population to provide better for basic biological needs like food and water and shelter, then what you're really looking at isn't a subjective difference of value systems, but a question of delaying gratification.
That is, sure the price of "star wars" is higher because people would rather watch star wars most of the time than put in two hours towards, say, a 500-hour education project that's going to benefit them in the long run. Yet those same people would rather live in the future where they did have those skills.
In that sense, there is such a thing as intrinsic value, and its basis is shared human biology and universal needs. Asking what behaviors and choices ultimately provide for those needs can be objective, at least to a degree.
Would you say that the price to save a life equally matches the value of a life? Doesn't this show a disparity between the "market value" of something and its actual value?
Because the only possible way for a creator of information to survive off said creation is to use extremely invasive state institutions to compel the population into giving them a perpetual monopoly on distribution of said information.
There are plenty of ways to seek compensation for the creation of information, with only a minute subset of them requiring copyright monopoly to function.
Mine has been that contributors (authors, editors, performers, researchers, etc) increase information content, complexity. Kind of a information theoretic metaphor, not that I truly grok that discipline.
isn'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.
Maybe 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'?
The 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.
Would you express the same cultural relativistic sentiments about the validity of purpose if a small group decided to repurpose your Wiki?
It's very damaging to trade with the developing world if we start accusing companies of "attempting to colonize" because they have the temerity to expect people granted subsidised access to their website to actually play by the same rules as everyone else. I mean, if we start assuming that Angolans can't or shouldn't abide by the same rules as everyone else, it's very easy to just ensure services aren't affordable to the average Angolan again.
Angolans might have more reason to avoid paying for content than the rest of the world and they might have more reason to use Wikipedia or Facebook as a vector for delivering pirated content than the rest of the world, but the people pirating the content in this manner are at least as aware and deliberate in their circumvention of rules as crackers in other countries, and they should be respected for their clever hacks and blocked from uploading just like crackers elsewhere, and not patronised as people who couldn't possibly be expected to understand or accept Western mores.
> Would you express the same cultural relativistic sentiments about the validity of purpose if a small group decided to repurpose your Wiki?
Well, I do have a wiki farm now, so I feel compelled to reply. Yes, I would have the same relativistic sentiments. I would just impose the banhammer nonetheless.
That's kind of the thing about the DMCA -- it turns us all into enforcement agents. It doesn't really matter how I feel about the rules, because if I don't follow them I get shut down.
How I feel about the core of the issue is that copyrights and patents are imperialism. Imperialism in every culture. The poor and middle class can't afford to enforce their own copyrights, and the are subject to the whim of the the rich. They've created a place where the only culture of the past available is the one they want to sell. Only a few organizations like the EFF stand in the way of this madness, but the IP system is madness anyway.
I have an uncle who served as US Border Patrol for 20 years. He never believed that all of the illegals need to go back, but it's a job. Someone needs to watch the border and deal with problems or it would be complete anarchy. You can have valid reasons for enforcing rules you don't entirely believe in.
So I'll follow the DMCA because I'm the little guy. And I'll do nothing about the IP laywer who I believe has infringed about a hundred of my own copyrights and has acknowledged and then took no action a DMCA takedown notice from me. Because I cannot afford to go against him in a rigged system. And I understand why Angolans want to work against a system that's rigged against the them.
OK, then let's stop pretending this is a benevolent effort by Internet companies to get people on the Internet if that's not what it is. Facebook wants to have it both ways.
And the rampant profiteering entity that is Wikipedia?
Are you seriously arguing the Wikimedia Foundation's intentions can't possibly be benevolent because they won't let Angolans turn their server space into a repository of pirated content?
Well if your questioning of the Western web empires' benevolence wasn't in response to my statement that Wikipedia et al shouldn't be under any obligation to accommodate Angolans' copyvios then you sure picked the wrong subthread to express that view! :)
I don't know what anyone's intentions are but I do know that companies are going around pushing a version of Internet access that serves their interests without bearing much resemblance to the Internet you and I use, and getting out there and telling people "wait a minute, this is our site and you have to follow our rules" kind of spoils the illusion that that's not the case. It seems to me like the Wikimedia Foundation is lending their name to a questionable cause.
If I was providing the residents of Angola who didn't otherwise have internet with free access to only my wiki -- I certainly wouldn't be surprised when they tried to use my wiki for other than the purpose I wanted them to.
Nope, everybody on Facebook and Wikipedia is expected to play by Facebook and Wikipedia's rules, regardless of whether their local laws are stricter or laxer.
The vast majority of people on facebook and wikipedia are not limited to internet access _only_ to those two sites however.
If the only internet I had was that, and I had no way to start my own internet sites either, I'm sure I'd be trying to find ways to use them for what I wanted regardless of their rules too. As it is, I've got the whole internet and have no reason to try and abuse facebook or wikipedia that way.
Maybe colonialism, like racism, is something much more easy to spot when you are the side suffering from it.
They are not forced to use Wikipedia. They just happen to live in Africa, where most people live in 19th century by Western/Northern standards and they are hacking their way to 21st century. What would you do if you had to pay 80% of your salary for 1Gb of internet?
The hacker culture is about "creatively circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes". I can't find a better example of it.
Let the others call them pirates, but here I think we should celebrate what they did and call them by what they really are, true hackers.
I was never arguing the creativity part of the wikipedia hack, I adore that and welcome it. I can absolutely understand why they do it and how they do it.
I was just questioning the sense of entitlement that is apparently hidden in the "colonialism" criticism, but this seems to be so ideological that it's hard to get to a basic agreement. Different views on the world, I guess.
I can understand the sentiment of feeling offended by the term "colonialism" when giving away something for free. It implies a negative intent when really people/organizations intended to do something charitable.
That said, I can also understand the sentiment of feeling "colonialized" when people are only allowed to use something under conditions/mores imposed by a "foreign party".
Different world views then? I think it's more like two sides of the same coin...
It might be more comparable to missionary work. Wikipedia is providing valuable resources, but that charitable work can be interwoven with foreign ideals.
But it seems like Wikipedia are conscious of that, so they've taken a hands-off approach to this.
Hacking doesn't always cost the system operator anything, in fact I think the confusion between hacking as the activity of creating creative improvised solutions and the circumvention of security comes from settings like the hacking of the phone system where the cost to the phone network of phreakers making calls was negligible.
File sharing is a big resource hog. It's a totally different story.
Well define 'forced' in your view please. If I hold a gun to your head and say your money or your life am I reeeallly forcing you to give me you money or are you giving me your money out your own choice? Absent Mindflayers 'forced' is always going to be on a continuum.
So if I roll in and say "Here have this access to this thing everyone in the world claims is an economic and social miracle. Free!" and then later once you start using it I roll back around and say "oh yeah, by the way you have to follow the laws of the United States, the laws of a country you are entirely unrepresented by, if you want to use this thing that you're already using. This thing which every one swears is an absolute game changer, this thing that people claim will jump you into the 21st century* , this thing that everyone around the world swears you need."
Okay it's not a gun to their head but it certainly feels more than a hair coercive.
*people being varying levels of racist/ignorant in believing that "the 21st century" is not a date on a calendar but instead a particular sort of culture.
It may "feel" coercive but you didn't make any sort of case that it is. You may view words as having personal definitions that make your point valid but that is a linguistic trick, not an argument.
This 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?
I still don't understand the argument why people who are suddenly given a free thing, and not forced to use it, are now a victim of that and entitled to get everything for free.
If we give free drugs for certain diseases to a poor country, would that mean that we enforce our "Western view on health" on them, and that they are actually entitled to get all drugs for free, otherwise it is a form of colonialism?
That, generally, is not the argument. The side you don't see goes a bit like this[1]:
Folks in poor countries aren't stupid, and know Facebook isn't just being nice. Zero-rating strangles local startups who have to compete with the free walled garden; it is a spigot for western culture, which many object to[2]; and it smacks of a particularly Valley-flavored mix of paternalism, greed, and the sort of tote-bagger do-gooderism that led to some major travesties of charity. (You could go look up how Jello Biafra picked his stage name on Wikipedia, over a zero-rated link, if you like.)
Suffice to say, there are good reasons why many people in poor countries are extremely wary of westerners bearing gifts.
This bit isn't directed at the parent, and is something I wanted to say in a different thread about poverty, but here's a rule of thumb that may help: If you observe something that doesn't make sense to you, it is likely that you don't have the whole picture. This rule applies to the behavior of people with less money than you, as well.
[1] If you're really interested, reading some history of colonialism would be good. I don't know your background, but if it involved typical high school U.S. history, you likely learned that colonialism was a sort of adventure-phase where westerners explored and planted flags and whatnot, mostly ignoring the commercial interests driving it. And a lot of the horror.
[2] Not even going to get in to that one, aside from saying that if leading contenders in the Republican primary can hate on U.S. culture, so can folks who actually got the pointy end of the stick.
While your critique is valid when targeted to the "Free Basics" programs (or similar) when it comes to this particular instance of piracy you're reading too much into it. This is just a piracy hack. People everywhere have been doing this kind of thing for as long as there has been an internet and the reason is usually convenience, not some PolSci-level critique of neoliberalism.
I was responding to the parent comment, not the piracy.
On piracy, of course you're absolutely right - given the existence of a storage mechanism, someone will put stuff in it. See also: hacks that use dynamic DNS updates to store and share information.
I personally would welcome a free (as in no money) unrestricted but low bandwidth Internet connection for everyone. Paid would be faster.
I'm in the UK. Free mobile broadband at something like 256Kbits with cheap USB dongles would allow access for all children & low income adults who could find a suitable client device (recycled laptop/cheap smartish phone whatever). Sort of basic income argument applied to Internet connectivity.
Am I being colonialist? Remember I live in the country that more or less invented colonialism!
Kinda depends. Do the people in the UK who use this service have to abide by laws of other countries, laws that don't exist in the UK? That's the problem here, right?
My proposition is 'basic income Internet' provided at low cost in each country by $Government and $PreferredSupplier. Lowish bandwidth, possibly with fair use style bandwidth cap.
All currently existing legal frameworks remain in place in $Country.
The comment was in response to your last question "am I being colonialist?", and my response was intended to point out that the problem isn't really "here's some free stuff", but "here's some stuff that doesn't cost anything (and may well be donated by people who mean well), that comes with other strings attached"
It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.
In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.
On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)
If this is important to you, and it's a noble goal, I suggest you go to Africa, build a startup and give those Angolans free internet access. Accusing others of not making their business free is not the way to go.
Encouraged, 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.
It's not about Western mores, it's about people stealing other peoples stuff. I'm sure stealing in Angola is not tolerated, stealing from these "pirates" would make them angry.
Didn't Zuckerberg steal the Facebook idea from the Winklevoss twins?? Aren't folks in the west also using platforms like YouTube and Facebook to post copyrighted videos and content??
1. Copyright violation is not theft
2. Copyright is not a right, it is a government granted, time limited, monopoly. In the Act of Anne it was for 12 years and that is how it should have stayed. Now it is life plus 75 which is simply oppressive and counterproductive.
It's colonialism because it's patronizing. You can have this much of the Internet, but no more.
If that's your approach then you don't understand the main value proposition of the web.
These programs are silly and ineffective. Facebook and Wikipedia should just channel their funds to a join effort at making all of the Internet accessible.
We've been down this road before, it didn't work for AOL, why keep trying it?
It's training users to only use their products, and by the time access becomes cheaper, those products will be able to crowd out any competitors. It also means that any local competitors don't get fair treatment, and will automatically lose to these services provided by the 'colonials'.
Is that an argument that makes any sense in the context of Wikipedia? Where users actually form the content itself, and where access and content are free anyway everywhere?
I thought it was a liberal use of colonialism (but still fair) until I reached the part in the article about disabling IP ranges for not using the service in ways that align with admin sensibilities. In particular, the reenabling of an account because its contributions were seen as valuable illustrates the power relationships at play here. Angolans don't seem to be able to form content the way they think it should be formed, and are required to go through an outsider gatekeeper. Colonialism becomes more relevant when you consider that these services are the only ones that were made free and widely accessible. Over time, it pushes western/northern concepts of knowledge, data organization, copyright, etc onto a culture that didn't ask for it. That's colonialism.
I'm largely in favor of a reduction in quite a few of those concepts here in the West(North).
HOWEVER, you can survive if you can't pirate and edit wikipedia at the same time.
You can use wikipedia for free, and express yourself better, within wikipedia rules. Same for all of us. That's a pure bonus (that some poor people I know here would like to have for education btw).
How does that prevent you from having a better internet ? Because you're too poor as a country ? Well preventing to have Free wikipedia will not solve that. having a free wikipedia will 1) show you the greatness of internet even if limited, 2) make you more educated so potentially richer so potentially with more disposable income to afford full internet. Then you can't say well, it discourages you from getting anything other than wikipedia because it's good enough AND you're missing an important part of internet which is pirating US movies (which are much more invasive worldwide).
I don't see many differences between this situation and the one in the west ~10/15 years ago without torrents sites, and barely a few sites available for free if you used the free AOL 50hour CDs, trying to pirate photoshop with disks.
We managed to survive and grow internet also.
Of course, Facebook offering is entirely different.
Offering free internet for the whole earth would be nice. It's not a requirement however.
> Over time, it pushes western/northern concepts of knowledge, data organization, copyright, etc onto a culture that didn't ask for it. That's colonialism.
Is the thrust of your argument that Angolans should be deprived of knowledge and data because they didn't ask for it, or that Wikipedia admins should only be allowed to block and unblock people from the same culture as them?
I mean, Angola has had copyright laws for a while now: the idea that the people behind these hacks are noble savages whose fragile culture is imperilled by Wikipedia admins is really insulting and patronising.
I think it's harder to argue colonialism for Wikipedia specifically, given that they go out of their way to provide a plethora of sites for as many locales as they can, presented in a way best suited for their locale. Similarly, Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly interested in market capture and selling information behind the scenes. But, on the other hand, of the big names, WP seems to be the only site with this approach.
>how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?
The British sold cloth in India at lower prices, undoubtedly providing many people with cloth they could not otherwise afford, and destroying India's textile industry making India dependent on buying British cloth.
Oh, they also insisted upon opium (that China could not otherwise afford?) being legal in China, when China wanted to prohibit it, and fought a war over it, because they wanted to sell opium in China.
The concept is basically that facebook is trying to establish a colony of users by drastically undercutting the competition in terms of $/byte. They establish an unequal playing field tilted in their favor.
Inhibiting development by providing imports at prices that are difficult to match by local offerings, that's about as colonialistic as it can get. In the case of pirated entertainment on donated bandwidth, the effective price of those imports is zero.
But this is surely not what the article meant by "digital colonialism", so your question remains unanswered.
Heavy 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.)
Hm...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.
So 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?
It'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).
The 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.
Here'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?'
While 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.
The 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?
Mostly 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.
"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."
Kindle 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.
Back 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.
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.
Perhaps 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!
> 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.
They 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 :)
The 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.
I'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.
ZIP can contain arbitrary data before the archive data itself. That's an intended feature that's used e.g. for self-extracting archives. They look like this on disk:
+-----------+-------------+
| extractor | zip archive |
+-----------+-------------+
The extractor, when run, simply opens itself as a ZIP archive and decompresses itself.
So you could append the ZIP archive to an image file and then decompress the result without having to remove the image beforehand.
But you cannot concatenate several ZIP archives and expect a working bigger archive.
One thing that's happened is that Wikimedia Common's is utilizing IP range blocks for the country. (meaning users will have to request exempt accounts) [0] However, users can also upload files to their local Wikipedias and the Portuguese Wikipedia couldn't really range block a whole country of its participants. That's what this article and the mailing list [1] is having trouble with. Wikipedia does have a permissions system so that's the likely avenue they might pursue. For example, on the English Wikipedia, users have to be "autoconfirmed" to create pages or upload files. However, it is very easy to attain: an account just has to be older than 4 days and made at least 10 edits. Maybe they'll create a stricter group for uploading files. (though who knows, maybe they'll start encoding the files as text comments into articles) Another possibility is making each upload subject to review, similar to a pending changes system, but that has its own problem in having enough reviewers. [2] When I looked at the mailing list discussion when it was just starting, the foundation was suggesting user education over blanket banning policies. It's certainly not a problem with an easy solution, and in my opinion it's much more of a people problem; throwing tech at it might exacerbate matters. Not to mention that any potential solutions will also make it harder for new would-be editors, making it a tragedy of the commons. (where I'm referring to the open nature of Wikipedia rather than the free data) [3]
Sidenote: Wikipedia and commons already have a concept of "patrolling", which puts up every new article or file to be patrolled by another editor for spam/copyright violations. That's likely how these bad uploads were caught. Unfortunately this doesn't stop the upload in the first place and requires work to look at and delete the files which is hard to keep up with. (Not to mention that not enough people patrol pages either. On the English Wikipedia, nearly every page I've had patrolled was by one user called SisterTwister. I was also given autopatrolled rights on commons even though I'm hardly a prolific uploader)
> 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.
Isn'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?
"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.
> 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.
I'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.
How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?