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India Now Wants Access To Google and Skype

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the voip-is-hoip dept.

crabel writes "A couple of weeks ago India went after RIM and its mail service; it has extended its hunger for data now to all telecommunications. All telecom companies have to give them access to all voice over IP services that go in/out or happen within the country. Heck, they are even going after VPNs used by corporate employees working remotely."

8 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by panda · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fuck doing business with India or Indian corporation/nationals.

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    1. Re:Well... by blackraven14250 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm fairly sure most of the issue with RIM and the others is their encrypted communications.

    2. Re:Well... by Shotgun · · Score: 3, Informative

      Case in point. In the '93 time frame, I worked in a AT&T factory (before they split off Lucent). One of the devices we manufactured was a small device that you connected to your telephone headset to encrypt your conversation (the other end would have to have a similar device).

      The US government caught wind of it, came in and bought all the stock, and paid AT&T to not produce any more.

      All the digital switches we produced were required by law to have a backdoor that the government could use at will to monitor calls.

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  2. S/MIME by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is a solution: Use S/MIME. This is the email encryption standard supported by all major mail clients without need for plugins. It can even work with web-based gmail using a firefox addon: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-smime/gmail-smime.html

    You can create your own certificates or get free certificates from places like Comodo.

    One quirk of S/MIME is that the subject line is not encrypted. This is a good place to add the text "India can suck my beef jerky" to every encrypted message.

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  3. vrtual privacy networks? by nedlohs · · Score: 2, Informative

    virtual private network, surely.

    Or did some group decide to replace a perfectly good name with a crappy one?

  4. Re:If only ... by jgagnon · · Score: 2, Informative

    Any action by the US government on this issue would not go over well diplomatically.

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  5. Re:Sevens Sins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I don't think a nation state with polytheistic Hindu as it's official religion

    Nitpick time. India does not have a official religion, though the majority of the population follows Hinduism.

  6. Re:India = not all that democratic by schmidt349 · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Lean toward?" India took billions of rubles in Soviet military equipment and actively participated in Soviet intelligence activities. Yeah, that's just "leaning toward."