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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
The files are in the computer?
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?
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 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.
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
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
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.
Why would you think that? We're talking about a country where the average citizen earns $450 a year. If the average person is able to afford a computer, then it's not going to be a top of the line system.
This is just a racist jab at "those comical brown fellows".
This was a jab not based on racism. Nothing was brought up on their skin color. There was no defamation of their nationality. The article talked about the courts, the police, and the law and nothing else.
If you want to find anything negative, it was a jab at the power structure of a poor country trying to regulate something they know nothing about because they can't afford the equipment. It was a jab at them being poor.
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.
You're right, it's pretty weak. Granted that most Indian cops don't know their arsehole from their armpit when it comes to computers, they don't really need to. What i mean is that this issue can easily be solved by setting up a dedicated cyber-crime unit. All the dummkops need to do is to redirect any computer/internet related crimes to the concerned department.
Guess what? There's already such a unit in place (at least in Mumbai). Quoth the article:-
"It was a triumph for the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell after the public embarrassment of having its own website defaced."
Recent articles in Indian newspapers have also mentioned some very good successes by the Cyber Crime Cell.
Another thing: The belt-beating sadly is very commonplace and IMHO, is very mild compared to the other police brutality incidents. However, in all fairness, there is a bit of background behind this. Mumbai has always been know as the organized crime capital of India, and with very good reason. In a country where gun related violence is quite rare, Mumbai was going crazy with a spate of shootings.
In response to this, the mayor, police chief, and the top brass decided to wage war on organized crime. Their MO was simple: Catch the buggers, shoot them dead, and call it an "encounter" death. In fact, the "encounter" squad of the Mumbai police was so successful that they completely broke the back of most of the major crime syndicates. My point of this digression being that this official acceptance of police violence does have a trickle down effect.
Another aspect to the excessive violence is that in India, the majority of the crime commited is petty in nature and the thieves are often dirt poor compulsives. Very often, the police simply decide to give the common thief a "sound thrashing", lock them up for a couple of days, and then release them. They don't have much experience with white-collared criminals and don't have a clue of how they should behave with them.
It's easy to ridicule something that seems very quaint or barbaric. A lot of it is justified as well. However, please also realize that social systems in different countries often have a history of their own. Usually, these are borne out of good reasons, and they only seem barbaric today because the reasons have become outdated.
Having said this, i do shudder to get into the wrong side of the law in India, especially in the really backward states like Bihar or UP. Which reminds me, back when i was in high school, a couple of friends of mine were caught drunk driving by the Delhi police. They were made to squat frog-legged with 2 heavy bricks on their backs! All night. Now, that's a backache for you!
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.