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Submission + - Angola's Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Zero Rating

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have taken to hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and are sharing links to them on Facebook, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive.
It’s an undeniably creative use of two services that were designed to give people in the developing world some access to the internet. But now that Angolans are causing headaches for Wikipedia editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, no one is sure what to do about it.

Comment Encryption is a wartime weapon (Score 1) 162

by pbr (#51726835) Attached to: Gov't Accidentally Publishes Target of Lavabit Probe: It's Snowden

If in doubt, research Alan Turing, what he did, how his team basically won WWII by besting enigma.

Some years ago, people made fun of federal munitions export restrictions by printing simple encryption/decryption code on Tshirts. We were the enlightened, chuckling at how darn near impossible it would be to truly ensure encryption technologies didn't spread around like wildfire.

Crypto DID spread like wildfire - the federal government's regulations couldn't stop it. Good encryption's everywhere now. (well, relatively good, mostly unbroken, but you never know what some genius will figure out tomorrow)

Guns are everywhere too. Just as the law reasonably disallows individuals from waving around munitions and discharging them and such in public - it can disallow individuals from abusing wartime-level encryption. Just as arms vendors are regulated (albiet somewhat poorly) - encryption providers may very well be regulated at some point.

As best I understand the law, in the U.S. you do not have the right to board an international flight carrying a device with military-grade encrypted data on it. It's hard, darn near impossible, for them to be able to assess this - but it doesn't mean you're not doing something illegal if you do it.

Pure and simple - the fact that the data was encrypted at a given strength makes you dangerous. You become a criminal, because of what you are doing and how you are using technology.

This is not new, nor is it anything to get outraged about. It's simply something you need to know, about the technology you're using. Just as you're not free to drive your car around in any manner you wish (over curbs, running lights, hitting people/things), you're not free to abuse encryption technology in various ways either. Get used to it.

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