(no subject)
Hidden away in the depths of the wikipedia project, the wikimedia foundation has pages that are supposed to be used when migrating existing stuff to new languages. China has an obscure language called the Yi language, with about 2 million speakers, mostly quite isolated, and certainly isolated from Wikipedia, which the Chinese government dislikes strongly. Tucked away in an alleged migration of content into a Yi Wikipedia is a page whose title is two normally unprintable unicode characters, and whose content is 16 photos of nude women, mostly taken from Flickr accounts which may be artistic photography, amateur exhibitionists, or porn spammers. (Side note: Photos of attractive young nude women on Flickr seem inevitably to get dozens of semi-literate comments complimenting and propositioning them, even when the photos aren't tagged as self portraits and the posters are apparently professional porn spammers and probably male. Please, God, let me be bright enough not to make that kind of shameful, utterly futile effort at flirtation. Some of these people probably fail to understand what's going on because Flickr is a complex new technology. I hope I understand the new technologies I use well enough to avoid that kind of mistake, as long as I live.) Anyway, Wikipedia apparently has some sort of policy regarding freezing abandoned language migration projects such that these photos aren't going to be deleted. Now, I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but my best guess is that some porn website pays its monthly hosting bill at least partly based on how much data the server transmits, and that by tricking Wikipedia into hosting these photos, they can send out tiny html files referencing the Wikipedia-hosted photos and not have to send any large photo files themselves, saving tons of money. This is slick, smart, and thoroughly evil. Anyone want to guess whether that's what's going on here, or something else?