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Mandatory Keyloggers in Mumbai's Cyber Cafes
YIAAL writes "Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai's police are requiring the city's 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have your credit card number. 'Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely.'"
Depending on the key logger's capabilities, an easy way to improve your security is to open another edit window (for example notepad) next to the password input window. Enter a character of your secret password, credit card number, etc), then, using the mouse, switch focus to the second window, type in a bunch of random characters, switch back, rinse and repeat. The logger ends with a bunch of gibberish, some of which is your key. If you do it right, extracting your secret from the resulting log will be really difficult (especially since the mouse allows you to add new characters in the middle of the already typed string, which means the characters in your secret won't even be in order).
About 10 years ago in Bangalore a software company got a piracy operation raided by the police with a bunch of floppies being the major evidence collected. When evidence was presented in court the police had punched the floppies and filed them like paper. The pirates literally laughed their way out of court.
These days the police in India are technology savvy and most serious crime cases are solved quickly within days. This is possible because criminals use technology like mobile phones and internet to plan and coordinate. For the most part people are thankful for all this - a few years ago it was looking like criminals were smarter than most people.
India had a law named Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) that had draconian provisions and was repealed by the current government. Right now there isn't any law in India to arrest people on the basis of suspicion alone. The police need solid evidence to book people under regular laws.
Assuming the translation is correct, Karl Marx wrote this:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
While I am indeed an idiot, I can still read and understand what "forcible overthrow" means and implies (especially given the context).
"gewaltsamen Umsturz" = Revolution by force.
My claim still stands - a "Communist Revolution" is one of the best ways to create a dictatorship.
India is still a democracy (they don't use Diebold voting machines the last I checked), so they can and should still fix things in nonviolent ways. The many communists in India might prefer the Marx approach but if they choose that they're being ignorant or evil.