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India's Cops Meet Technology
TopherTG writes "Do cops told to seize computers to return only with monitors, stapling pirated floppies together or arresting CEOs for their customer's crimes sound familiar? It would in India. Wired is running a rather humorous article on the minglings between cops and techies."
The guy who installed my dad's IT system. We found 2 floppies stapled to a sheet of instructions on how to back up from them...
Advice to the Indian Authorities:
The best way to search for Hard Disks and other media is with a large and very powerful magnet.
Make sure you download an entire copy of the Internet so you can be sure that what you find is indeed illegal.
Oh, and bounce the computer case around a little bit on the way back to the station. It'll kill any computer bugs still in the system.
your welcome.
-Teiresias
It's cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians.
You start mixing those up and no telling what might happen.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
The files are in the computer?
Maybe the cops should outsource?
Apple needs to establish themselves in India, last time I checked it's hard to sieze just the monitor from an iMac.
...is the difference between +4, funny and 0, redundant
It's cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians.
You start mixing those up and no telling what might happen.
Add a construction worker and a sailor and you might end up ruining every school dance in the country.
The story begins in punchcard days at one of the major mainframe companies (UNIVAC or IBM). A new release of software was shipped from the U.S. to France in the form of a large deck of punched cards. Upon arrival, the deck is loaded on the reader and the whole thing crashes. A second deck is shipped to the eagerly awaiting customer (remember, this was before overnight shipping) and the mainframe crashes again, but in an entirely different manner. The customer is frantic so it is decided (possibly after a few more iterations) to send an employee to babysit the delivery.
All goes well until the deck hits Customs. It turns out that Paris had recently declared punchcard decks to be a bulk commodity (until then, there'd been no category to descibe them). This category includes things like shipments of grain, goose down, or reams of blank paper. Standard procedure calls for taking a small sample from each shipment and filing it away just in case there's a later question about the quality or identity of the goods.
This means that the customs inspector would examine the card deck, verify it was what the manifest claimed it was, and then take two or three cards at random from the stack and carefully file them with the appropriate paperwork. Basically, they were removing 80 characters at a time from each release in random chunks.
In the end the procedure was fixed. Presumably, though, the missing cards are still sitting in an archive somewhere in Paris, stapled to yellowing customs forms.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."