
Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism - jackgavigan
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating
======
f_allwein
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?

~~~
pjmlp
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.

~~~
oblio
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.

~~~
awakeasleep
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.

~~~
speeder
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?

------
masterofcookies
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.

~~~
dsr_
That's right. People who contribute to human knowledge by editing Wikipedia
are vastly undercompensated compared to the movie industry.

~~~
coryfklein
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.

~~~
dwaltrip
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.

~~~
jonahx
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.

------
oldmanjay
"Digital colonialism" is almost as silly a concept as cultural appropriation,
which is what the Angolans are doing in a very direct sense.

~~~
SocksCanClose
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.

------
gallerytungsten
"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)

------
elcapitan
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'?

~~~
labster
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.

~~~
notahacker
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.

~~~
emodendroket
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.

~~~
notahacker
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?

~~~
emodendroket
That is a gross distortion of what I said but it's sure easier to argue
against!

~~~
notahacker
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! :)

~~~
emodendroket
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.

------
gojomo
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.)

------
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.

------
FussyZeus
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?

~~~
jacalata
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).

~~~
FussyZeus
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.

~~~
emodendroket
The distinction between an "idea" and an "intellectual product" doesn't seem
very satisfying.

~~~
FussyZeus
The distinction is whether the creator wants to profit from it or give it
away.

~~~
emodendroket
So what if I want to sell a text that is also hate speech?

~~~
FussyZeus
I don't think you'd have many customers, but I'm sure there are at least a few
white supremacist periodicals making money in the US.

~~~
emodendroket
OK, but the point is that we have items that could plausibly fall into either
category, not that I plan to start a racist periodical.

------
hackuser
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?'

------
mih
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.

------
dnqthao
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?

~~~
x5n1
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.

~~~
x5n1
For instance:
[http://www.newsecuritylearning.com/index.php/archive/75-chin...](http://www.newsecuritylearning.com/index.php/archive/75-chinas-
mighty-telecom-footprint-in-africa)

"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."

------
jkot
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.

~~~
Aeolun
I'm still a bit angry that my internet was suddenly cut off :/ not like they
ever notified me of it either.

~~~
cJ0th
You 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
That's strange, as I got several emails from Amazon telling me about the
upgrade.

~~~
cJ0th
Huh ... interessting. They probably ran out of e-mails...

~~~
logfromblammo
If they ran out of e-envelopes, why couldn't they just go online and order
more from Am... oh. I see the problem now.

------
vidarh
Just waiting for someone to tunnel TCP via these services, or use them as a
HTTP proxy.

~~~
JetSpiegel
There was a project that implemented Http over Facebook messenger

~~~
Kristine1975
HN thread about it here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946)

------
keithpeter
[http://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.

------
SCAQTony
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!

------
e15ctr0n
> _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.

------
fkooman
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 :)

~~~
emodendroket
I think they probably do not want to tacitly approve of the use of Wikipedia
as a file-sharing service.

------
jamespo
How hard can it really be to stop this technically?

~~~
Kristine1975
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.

~~~
benplumley
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.

~~~
hobs
Depends 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.

~~~
Kristine1975
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.

------
kwhitefoot
> 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.

------
tudorw
Just read about ICMP and DNS tunnels, is that an option on these systems?

------
TearsInTheRain
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?

------
brownbat
Makes me wonder if someone's hacked together an IP-over-wikimedia or IP-over-
facebook solution yet...

------
NotMeIndeed
"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.

------
cat-dev-null
Route around the externally-imposed digital divide. More power to them.

------
Grue3
How is this a problem? It shows that even limited free Internet access is
hugely beneficial for sharing information.

------
triplesec
Something 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
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.

~~~
jcr
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.

[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)

