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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...
Do cops [...] arresting CEOs for their customer's crimes sound familiar?
Why yes. It sounds like torrent tracker sites, which host no files, being taken down for the crimes of their users.
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
sticker equaling shoddy quality stereotype back in the early 1960's, just before they started to kill American manufacturers.
Yeah, let's laugh at the silly Indians and their computer inexperience, while they start grabbing more and more outsourced IT jobs.
As it will hinge a lot of what can be done with India. They could easily set themselves back a few years if they keep this up and head down this route
1. Outsource IT department to India.
2. Department computers siezed by Indian government containing US customer info.
3. Indian government now has full access to the detailed financial, demographic and medical information of US citizens.
India Tech Support: "Sounds like your harddrive is broken. Please find it and staple it with your receipt and sent it to..."
Customer: "Which part is the hard drive?"
India Tech Support: "It's the screen part, where the flashy picture thing comes up"
The files are in the computer?
Well, no, not really. They just know how to tell you to insert the restore CDs, follow the onscreen prompts, and call back when you're done.
Oh, and we won't bother to tell you that what you're doing will in fact wipe your hard drive.
(not that I've had this problem, but I know people who have)
I don't find an ignorant police force beating confessions out of people with a belt that humorous.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
Maybe the cops should outsource?
"The passport official who checks your passport does not go abroad. The cop to whom you go to register a credit card misuse does not own a credit card. If a cop is in no position to own a computer, how can he fight cybercrime?"
that seems like a pretty weak argument. granted a non-computer user (read: cop) may not be able to tell a harddrive from a computer case (still synonymous to some people), that doesn't mean that he can't be given instructions on it. I doubt cops *always* know what they are dealing with but that's what makes their job interesting.
i don't know how a car works yet i still use it on a daily basis.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
I assume you just forgot...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
In other news:
Those goofy Westerns who cant even figure out how to use a non-western toilet in the rest of the world!
Video at 10:00
I bet there are a lot of broken coffee cup holders in the Indian police stations.
I hope everyone realizes the issue at hand is rampant poverty not blatant stupidity. The west is infusing money into India's economy but the money isn't really spreading to everyone, just the techno-elite. I'm not saying that it could or should be spread evenly because the population is so enormous, but think about the situation India is in before you judge and mock.
Personally I think this is just a transient period while the country adjusts. What will happen down the road? Probably even wider economic disparity.
This is Jon Katz quality reporting. Stapled floppies containing pirated software? Two years ago? Nonsense. Even in the thirdest world places of the third world, there is no way anyone was using 5.25 or 8 inch floppies two years ago. And certainly not to hold application software.
This is just a racist jab at "those comical brown fellows".
Apple needs to establish themselves in India, last time I checked it's hard to sieze just the monitor from an iMac.
yup, most indian cops are still on the learning but remember the ones who do the dirty work of confiscating stuff get paid ~$100 per month and don't know anything about a computer forget internet and storage (floppy).
It would also be a wise idea to first check the tech horror stories of the 80s in the us and uk before making fun of indian cops..
if you are so much against india and the tech support that we provide then stop using these products and start using "prouly made / supported in the us" products.. don't whine.
- dhawal
I agree. Not being a Computer Expert doesn't make you stupid.
I'm sure many people here don't know much about Fine Art or Knitting or something, and that doesn't make them stupid, either.
Their jobs aren't to work with computers, so whilst it is 'okay' to laugh at their mistakes, we mustn't mistake them for stupid.
- Jax
But you see...
It isn't irrelevant to them. It is their job to know what they are doing, and they don't.
They are trying to enforce old school rules in a way that doesn't make sense in modern times.
...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.
You need some crack? You can get it from a guy with a red hat standing on the corner of 15th and K.
Can I now be charged with distributing also? What amount do you charge me with selling? How ever much he has with him or how ever much he sold since I told you where he was? What if I use different wording to describe the exact same thing.
CAUTION, I saw the idiot with a red hat at the corner of 15th and K selling crack, he must be stopped, please avoid him at all costs and call the cops!!! Can I be charged for that also? I still told you where you could get it.
The law is not as cut and dry as you think it is.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I think the guy with the article might need a bit of clueing too. To make the point that a part of India is very technically advanced, he calls it "the Taj Mahal of outsourcing."
The Taj Mahal is a TOMB!
From the Article "The cop who checks your car license does not own a car," said Raghu Raman, who heads an information security firm called Mahindra Special Services Group. "The passport official who checks your passport does not go abroad. The cop to whom you go to register a credit card misuse does not own a credit card. If a cop is in no position to own a computer, how can he fight cybercrime? The field cop (and) the beat constable live in another world."
'No where USA' has the same problems. I can remember back in the 80s when I had a user on my BBS that crashed the BBS on purpose. He was working on his PHD in Physics at RICE and was bored. I didn't know that at the time though. I tried to get Friendswood, TX Police involved. It took an eternity to get them to understand what the crime was and then they were so happy to have the first computer crime. Long story short the cops didn't know anything about computers and we ended up catching the guy by a plain old wire tapped phone call.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
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."
Japan has been, since the Shogunate, a pretty centralized operation and a land mass about equal to that of California. It has one ethnic group, Okinawans and other tiny minorities aside. Until the arrival of missionaries, the dominant religions (Shintoism and Buddhism) got along ok. By contrast, India is a large nation with many languages, violently opposing religions (Hinduism and Islam).
Americans see the (academically speaking) creme de la creme of India, and sometimes we forget that most of India, both in land mass and population, is third world. Look at a street in Tokyo, then look at one in Calcutta. If that isn't a big enough contrast, just look down. Better yet, just take a deep breath and smell. Japan was able to do what it did, IMHO, because it was able to educate and modernize itself quickly and pervasively. Whether India can do that, or even if it is willing to do that (They throw away their best engineers, who graduated from a massive, publicly-funded university system! Does this sound like a sane government to you?), remains to be seen.