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I'm still a bit angry that my internet was suddenly cut off :/ not like they ever notified me of it either.
You should be able to fix it by installing the latest updates. 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.
How hard can it really be to stop this technically?
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:St...
[1]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-March...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should be able to fix it by installing the latest updates. 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.
That's strange, as I got several emails from Amazon telling me about the upgrade.
How hard can it really be to stop this technically?
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.
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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.
Maybe I missed the part of the article where it said that people in Angola are being forced to use Wikipedia.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe I missed the part of the article where it said that people in Angola are being forced to use Wikipedia.
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?
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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.
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Maybe I missed the part of the article where it said that people in Angola are being forced to use Wikipedia.
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 wh…
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I missed the part of the article where it said that people in Angola are being forced to use Wikipedia.
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 wh…
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!
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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?