Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 150 posts

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#41

Post by gus_massa »

triplesec wrote: post #37

Something went wrong because this was posted a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347144 But I'm glad this has got its due notice at last.

From 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.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#42

Post by robbiep »

Kristine1975 wrote: post #14
jamespo wrote: post #13

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.

how many legitimate uses can there be for >300mb jpeg and gifs?

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#44

Post by tobitobi »

elcapitan wrote: post #36
fredguth wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 circ…

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...

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#45

Post by f_allwein »

cJ0th wrote: post #12
Aeolun wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, worked for me - download the update(s) from http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_b... , mount your kindle and drag&drop them there.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#46

Post by itsuart »

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.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#47

Post by x5n1 »

dnqthao wrote: post #43

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.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#48

Post by Kristine1975 »

robbiep wrote: post #42
Kristine1975 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how many legitimate uses can there be for >300mb jpeg and gifs?

Just split the files into a lot of small parts like in the good old Usenet/Hotline days. Then upload your "collection of holiday pictures".

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#49

Post by jessaustin »

triplesec wrote: post #37

Something went wrong because this was posted a day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347144 But I'm glad this has got its due notice at last.

Please don't link to previous submissions that inspired no discussion whatsoever. It's just noise.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#50

Post by oblio »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
f_allwein wrote: post #8

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 enterpr…

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.

Post reply on HN