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India Now Wants Access To Google and Skype
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."
Fuck doing business with India or Indian corporation/nationals.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Demanding access to all the corporate VPNs is a great way to make companies more skittish about outsourcing there!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Great, another reason not to send American jobs to India as if crappy support from people you can't understand isn't enough ;)
Maybe this is a good thing, in a way. maybe if India requires access to corporate vpn, it will dissuade security-conscious companies, such as a large, multinational, 3-lettered one, from outsourcing to india
trying to look at the bright side (sort of). selfishly, I realize that-
but if there is fear in US companies that they can no longer trust people in india (eg, tech workers) because the risk of losing their competitive edge either to the government or other companies might be too much.
if I had signature authority on outsourcing for a company, I'd strongly reconsider pulling back any 'sensitive' work that is being done there. as of now, its no longer 'secure' (not sure it ever really was but now its totally worthless as a trustable domain).
this could actually help tech workers in the US. in a left-handed kind of way, that is.
suddenly, I'm all for india filtering and spying on its citizens!
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If only all google, skype, and others would just stop service for 1 day, maybe the Indian Government would reconsider. But that would probably be called collusion or something and branded illegal. Were is the State Department? Are they trying to defuse the situation? I ask because I don't know if they have any involvement.
Conservative, mod down for violating
Given that the "Seven Deadly Sins" are a Christian construct and only 2.3% of India's population is Christian, I don't think a nation state with polytheistic Hindu as it's official religion will care much about your datum.
When I was doing my masters(in India) , my friend through his relative was able to get a project with DRDO(One of India's Defence Research Department).
His project was to develop a GUI in QT in linux for the Data Packet Sniffer program they already had in place, yes it reads all the incoming and outgoing emails of all the employees
, and everybody knows about this and nobody cares about it.
India has bigger problems called Corruption,Terrorism,Communal Conflicts to deal with that everyone is treated Guilty until proven Innocent.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
They could potentially do some real damage to their economy while still not being able to monitor all electronic communications in their country. Hopefully they're not putting all their security eggs in the "monitoring" basket, because people will find a way to communicate under the radar. Any terrorists that monitoring catches are probably not the ones you have to worry about.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Only way the government is getting access to my VPNs in the US is with a court order and warrants, and even then they're only getting exactly what is spelled out to the letter in the warrant and nothing more. Any vague sweeping requests will be punted back up stream.
and without money flowing in or out...other corporations aren't going to be so willing to allow some random unsecured third governmental party access. My money is that they continue doing what they are currently doing until someone actually notices or attempts access.
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
Seems like the Indian government has found a more effective way of building a great wall around its borders - let the people outside build it.
virtual private network, surely.
Or did some group decide to replace a perfectly good name with a crappy one?
so let me get this straight. the indian government thinks it has a RIGHT to intercept all communication that it wants to (sans warrant, mind you).
does that essentially make personal end-to-end encryption illegal? it has to! the concept of you being able to conceal your comms is in the process of being ILLEGAL there.
people are commenting on 'well, just use SSH or SSL or ...'.
but you are missing the point. if they insist on getting access to all comms, you think they'll tolerate people doing an end-run around this?
the VERY next step is to identify users who side-step this with their own encryption layer and persecute them, one way or another. it has to follow. first you require all data to be sniffable and then you go after those that won't agree.
I remember about 20 yrs or so ago, it was illegal for french citizens to use encryption (details are fuzzy; I may not have this exactly accurate). but france was some kind of exception and vendors had to do all kinds of backflips to sell to french companies. are we going back to shit like this, again??
I think we are. its absolutely coming that encryption will be deemed 'munitions' again. or, encryption that WORKS; the bullshit encryption you think you can trust but is breakable will be 'allowed' to you to keep you feeling like you have some control.
I guess its now: any encryption that is legal is encryption you cannot trust.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
What the hey is the difference what china is doing and all the western countries are doing? They can wiretap me anywhere anytime, no matter voip, landline, mobile ...
So what?
I doubt things are going to work out well for either of us.
India Now Wants Access To Google and Skype
Google and Skype should just say no. In fact, if everybody said "NO!" then India would condemn itself to being a third world country. It would also give BlackBerry an incentive to say "NO!" too, because if your competition isn't making money off of evil, then BlackBerry isn't losing any business from competition. Of course India (et al) could always just continue to steal technology, but at least that would give trading partners an incentive to retaliate.
When the democracies start spying on there own citizens then being in a "democracy" is quite useless. Warrants, oversight and checks and balances are what made America (on paper at least) a great nation. Too bad everybody is falling for the lowest common denominator repression that used to be the primary domain of dictatorships.
You wanted to be the greatest source of ICT Professionals in the world.
You started low - call centres - but hoped high.
Now you just shot yourself in the foot with a rocket launcher.
As long as they got a good bounce they'll reach the Quad Damage and be rocking despite the minor health loss up front.
our CFO's will outsource the 'mundane' coding, sure. but sensitive stuff? any smart CFO will rethink this.
finally, a competitive advantage. at least RIGHT NOW, the US won't demand that all US based VPN's be sniffable at any time and without a warrant.
we finally have a good reason to NOT offshore; that CFO's can understand.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They'll never want to eavesdrop on private communication data again!
Politricksters & Bureaucrats trying to make a quick buck... "want to talk ... pay up son .... or we will silence you"
What nonsense. The only reason India was closely allied with the Soviets was because Pakistan used to suck up to the USA, and used to receive all kinds of assistance from the US. India wasn't as powerful then as it is now, so there weren't really too many options with us. That does not make India any less democratic, so STFU - or is critical reasoning a bit too tough for you? Going by that logic, since the USA and Pakistan have had. and continue to have, this long love affair, one could say that the US is a terrororist-sponsor nation, just like Pakistan!
first there was letters people would send, and people would try to secretly read from eachother, and govts try to read from people.
pro: quite easy to detect sniffing (letter would be opened)
con: cumbersome
then telephony came, again people tied to spy on eachother and the govt tried to spy on its people.
pro: less cumbersome
con: harder to detect sniffing
now with the internet we are in control. people 'could' get proper end-to-end encryption schemes and signatures, but generally we're too lazy. so we leave the encryption up to the protocols and therefor merely use connection encryption. the govt is now easily denied its spying rights.
pros and cons aside: it's a game changer.
large govts have tried to deny us state-of-the-art encryption (the US), now they are directly demanding access at the companies that facilitate the communication. but the reality is that a youngster with a bit of interest in encryption easily sets up communication channels that the govt will never be able to access: so who want to go private, can go private. additionally the volume of communication is so high the govts will have a really hard time to scan us all.
i think the govt will at some point understand that they cannot (very specific cases aside) effectily spy on us anymore, it is simply too expensive.
Given the amount of money flowing in and out of India that is a result of VPN's, skype and google I seriously doubt this will happen.
RIM is one thing. Skype and Google quite another. You might as well pass a law requiring that everybody in India stop using Windows. Not gunna happen.
Shouldn't mean you will necessarily get. Certainly if I were subject to EU or even the lower US privacy standards, I'd have grave concerns about out-sourcing *anything* to a locale that so cavalierly violated the most rudimentary notions of privacy and security. More pro-actively, to the extent a mere slashdot-peon can, I'd encourage RIM to go back to their pre-agreement stance and begin negotiations with other telecommunications providers and ex-pat companies with an India presence to present a united front at both the political and technical levels - implementing further and hardened security and privacy measures rather than undermining the often-minimal security in place today.
Governments are like puppies. They keep crapping in the middle of the floor until you rub their nose in it a few times.
"It is morally wrong to initiate the aggressive use of force.." Of course, defensive force is fair game...
Except for the state of emergency from 1975 until 1977, elected parliament has always been in power in India. Having a treaty with the Soviet Union has nothing to do with being democratic or not.
My Corporate Risk guy just shot coffee through his nose I'm sure.
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.
You wanted to be the greatest source of ICT Professionals in the world.
Just because their resume said that they had 20 years of experience with Halo and Starcraft, I would not be so quick to try and get them a visa to be on your team!
Wow, touchy much? Admittedly Indo-Soviet relations warmed up in the 1950s after the Pakistanis started taking military aid through SEATO, but the Indians always had the choice to, I don't know, not menace the Pakistanis, who at one-tenth the population never posed a serious threat to them. We wanted strategic entrenchment against the Soviets in Asia and we were prepared to take it any way we could get it; if the Indians had been willing to play ball and not pursue their ridiculous non-alignment policy (which of course they ended up breaking anyway) we probably would have supplied both them and the Pakistanis. It's the same reason why we supported Israel and Turkey.
Whenever the US undergoes a military buildup the Canadians don't run to the nearest dictatorship and start building nuclear weapons. India wanted regional hegemony, was pissed off that American anti-Soviet policy happened to be bulking up their biggest competitor for that role, namely China, so they ran off to the Soviets and started up Smiling Buddha. To suggest that they somehow had clean hands then, or that their international ambitions have somehow cooled off in the meantime, is ridiculous.
For those who don't get the reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT75Uce6pqc
our CFO's will outsource the 'mundane' coding, sure. but sensitive stuff? any smart CFO will rethink this.
Yeah right, the executives that work their way up to CxO are the guys who would save a nickel today to get their bonuses and take a golden parachute out tomorrow when the company tanks.
Or a "National Security Letter" where you can't neither talk nor complain about?
bickerdyke
I am an Indian and I wish my govt stopped this kind of pointless crap. I mean people get killed in broad daylight and people responsible are rarely brought to justice, and also guilty terrorists like Kasab have years long case and leaving all that the mostly semi literate idiots sitting in Lok Sabha decide that they need to see what I am mailing. No thanks.
BTW if somebody actually reads my post, try googling how many of India's MP's have criminal records, you will be surprised.
And yes, I am perfectly well aware that the Pakistani government was up to very nasty things in the 1970s with the people of Bangladesh. But to cast the Indians as the white knight in that particular conflict is, as the Germans say, Quatsch reden.
Firstly, TFA links to USA today, which attributes the tabloid-ish Times of India, which quotes anonymous officials.
Secondly, It's not logical that India will piss off Google and MNCs considering the investments they's pouring in.
It's more likely they'll ask for help and work something out that balances security and privacy concerns.
Pakistan never posed a threat, coz' India had 10 times more population? Well, what the fuck - it's not about the population, even the USA had around one tenth of India's population at that time. Pakistan and India had a rough parity in the 1950s, and forgive me for this, but only an utter moron will compare USA-Canada and India-Pakistan!
Indians always had the choice to 'not menace the Pakistanis', you say? Who menaced whom? The Pakistanis sent tribesemen, followed by their Army into Indian territory, within one year of their formation, and has sent, and continues to try to send, terrorists to bomb public places and murder civilians, and you say they're the ones being menaced?
If you're pissed off with India and Indians over outsourcing, just say so. You really don't need to be a Pakistani apologist to do that.
Maybe I'm just an American ethnocentrist, but majoritarianism is not the same as liberal democracy, which requires you to not blow up the houses of worship of people you don't like.
No, what's wrong with them they can't touch my data. I keep very incriminating things in there.
iburnaga.blogspot.com
Given that the "Seven Deadly Sins" are a Christian construct and only 2.3% of India's population is Christian
Worse, it's not a Christian construct, it's a Catholic construct that only impacts a minority of Christians (the Catholics). To all other Christians, there are 10 deadly sins, and gluttony and greed aren't in the list. Although Christ did speak out against both, they are actions that can lead to sin, not sins in and of themselves.
Free Martian Whores!
Uh, Catholicism is the predominant form of Christianity, about 50-70%, if I remember correctly. So it impacts a (admittedly slight) majority of Christians.
And Indian civil society is not going to take it
Sure they will.
Over the past ten years the government of the USA has eroded the civil rights in your nation, and the citizens by and large have said "meh" and gone back to watching Kate Gosselin on "Dancing with the Stars." Why should India be any different?
Let me get something straight here. The one, only, singular, final, absolute reason the US supported Pakistan was to undermine the Soviets. Had the Indians been willing to resist Soviet totalitarianism in the early 1950s when we asked them to, we would never have gone near Pakistan or at least have equally supported both countries. Those were the terms of the Cold War. Don't blame America for India's unwillingness to get involved in the war against tyranny until it was politically convenient to do so, and then picking the wrong side of history.
Generations allowed the NSA and GCHQ with their helper countries to do this and more. Cheap US cryptography was gifted to NATO that kept the Soviets out but gave plain text back to the NSA. :
European cryptography was subverted from inception and exported to the world.
Now this is happening to the next generation of hand held devices and people sit up?
Another country is getting what a select few had for decades.
The strange question is - why is anyone with anything interesting to say still silly enough to use any of this tech?
Numbers, IM's, friends lists, voice prints - all collected and searched for 24/7.
Make a call in some parts of the world and your voice is on file eg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/3949099/Royal-Marine-killed-on-Christmas-Eve-in-Afghanistan.html
I guess everybody now wants their own internal SIGmod
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/uk/isc2005-06.pdf
The real bite is the effort to get this into a public legal framework.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ten deadly sins? Can't say I ever heard of them. Can't find them with Google, either; mostly I come up with pointers to a book about the Ten Deadly Sins of Kmart. The seven came right up, including a Wikipedia article on them. So what are these ten?
... from the US govt. having laws in place for (warranted) interception of communication.
The article does not say that the govt. is asking for warrantless wiretaps (at least not according to the BBC article that the USA Today article cites). I have friends in the Indian govt. eavesdropping community, and they talk about how oversight is very strong there, and access to such data needs a warrant and is logged.
So, what exactly is the problem here? Or are we demanding different standards for companies in US and India?
Thanks.
"- What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"- You ask a glass of water."[from h2g2]
we finally have a good reason to NOT offshore; that CFO's can understand.
Why would the CFO care? Most CFOs in most companies stay on the job for a few years. So just make the "numbers" for three quarters, make bonus, open the golden parachute, (skip the couple of beers and the rant that is so blue collar) and slide away.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Lean toward?" India took billions of rubles in Soviet military equipment and actively participated in Soviet intelligence activities. Yeah, that's just "leaning toward."
I'm guessing that Sat phones might stage a comeback if this trend keeps up.
As India extends its reach into all communications, they will create an undesireable environment for foreign corporations to do any confidential work. This will make those corporations think twice about offshoring work to India that includes trade secrets, confidential or personal data, or even just really interesting stuff.'
As an American, I look forward to the return of jobs sent there in the past.
Bring it on!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
never works. It only emboldens that aggressor.
Note sure why you got modded down, I'll repeat your post here:
"A lot of people don't know this, but the Indians were closely aligned with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. In particular you had the Indo-Soviet Treaty, under which India received military and (gasp) intelligence assistance from the Russians.
So the fact that they're behaving like pseudo-socialist totalitarians right now shouldn't really surprise anybody. And provided they continue to rent their workforce to US corporations at rates that can't be competed with on US soil, our CEOs and CFOs will continue to patronize them."
"Howdy Partener!"
Yep, and let's recall that dear Premier of Peace who introduced nuclear weapons to the Indian subcontinent: Indira Gandhi.
Then tell them they are making Shiva angry.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
..."Dancing with the Stars."
oh, stop being such a brahma queen.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I am all for India making itself as business unfriendly as possible, so cheapass companies quit outsourcing there. It really was amazing when I called tech support and got an actual AMERICAN person speaking English, because it had been years since this happened, another reason to buy Apple...
Corporatism != Free Market
You have to read about some actual CFOs and corporations and how they plan for the long term sometime - slashdot and reddit are not the places to learn about how corporations work.
To take 1 example, the airline industry plans at least 20 years ahead - fleet strength, maintenance costs, etc; not just the 'numbers for 3 quarters'.
It is funny how, on the one hand, Microsoft is accused of thinking of the long term to kill rivals even if they lose money in the short term, but at the same time, the meme is that 'corporations only care about the short term'.
Indian access = India having access to American consumers data, given the amount of interaction we have. CS at your bank send you an email from India help desk, I think India would/could attempt to use that interaction for access. Somebody better be standing up for me! (oh wait, I can do that for myself)
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Ten deadly sins:
Worshiping other gods than Jehovah
Making idols (statues and amulets meant to be worshiped)
Taking the name of God in vain
Forgetting the Sabbath and not keeping it holy
Not honoring your parents
Murder
Adultery
Theft
Slander
Coveting anything that belongs to your neighbor
Free Martian Whores!
Given that this "Christian construct" is the product of a Catholic monks imagination, and that Catholics are only ~17% of the the Earth's Christian population, I don't think one could reasonably call this a "Christian construct". Maybe a "construct of one sect of Christianity"....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Gordon Gekko does not agree with one of your seven sins...
What *I* wonder is why the Indian government is suddenly so paranoid that they feel the need to spy on everyone.
Has there been a power shift over there? Do they suddenly see a threat to their power that they want to head off early before it becomes too great?
This isn't just about privacy; this may potentially be signalling a dark shift in their government and policies that could result in reduced freedoms for Indian citizens and anyone visiting/doing business there.
Keep your eyes and ears open. The big picture may be scarier than it looks.
"official religion" ?!? 5:Insightful ?!? Mods, are you completely uneducated ?!? There is no "official religion" in India. It's much more secular in both theory and practice than most other countries (for instance, the US)!
Gluttony and greed are both regarded in Bhagavad Gita text and commentaries as serious sins.
...before china it was taiwan....and before that it was japan. The pattern is to be the manufacturer, learn how the design/ tech/ manufacturing works, then become independent.
Ex: Wiki 'Giant Bicycle' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Manufacturing)
It even happens to people who work for a promotion - learn the job of the superior (copy) and then innovate (or bullshit to the higher up).
True story: a few of days ago I requested our Indian subsidiary to set up a Linux box on their local network with SSH access so I could troubleshoot some network problems.
After the usual 10 days or so turnaround time (I believe emails which are sent to India are still transcribed into telegrams once they reach India soil) I got a reply, which I will paraphrase only slightly: "Sorry we cannot do the needful for ur request at this time. So we are sending you login info for our existing system. Plz do not change too much as our system might stop working".
The "login info" was... the root password to their primary application server.
I was sorely tempted to change it and come down on them like a metric shithouse of bricks, however I just know they would not update all the post-it notes and next time the one person at their end who actually requires root access needs it, they won't be able to log on and that part of the business will be royally screwed.
I mean, without giving the keys to the Indian government?
VPNs are already considered in-house administered encryption, and their government is demanding access to them.
Ten deadly sins:
And of course 'ten deadly sins' is not a common way to refer to them, and even the wikipedia page that you reference does not refer to them that way (even in passing). And the list that you give is not universally acknowledged as the Ten. So, you fail at being a pedant.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
When private secure communication is outlawed, only criminals will have secure communication. Then we've got them. We won't know what they communicated, but we'll know it was criminals communicating.
Hinduism is NOT India's 'official religion'. There is no such thing as an 'official religion' in India, stop pulling stuff out of your ass. India is secular, and that's more than I can say for the US.
I'm an Indian and think this is crap that is happening over here. I wish I could do something to make the government do sensible things.
As I commented previously, this is all about catching terrorists, and nothing to do with censorship. Seems a lot of people did not like that comment. Now that even corporate VPNs are included, what can the conclusion be?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Those are the ten commandments.. the Catholics have those too.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
the S/MIME option doesn't work (or alert the users) unless keys can be exchanged ahead of time and out-of-band.
S/MIME is basically in the PKI class, so the same "legal intercept" techniques that work against HTTPS can work against S/MIME with a little adaptation.
Since when has the US government or Companies given a damn how anything goes over diplomatically?
Like Rhett would say, "Frankly, we just don't give a damn!"
Considering how much business the US pumps to India, the US Government could do pretty much anything it wanted, including saying Bend over India, you're going to get Fscked. Of course, that the way pretty much every other country sees the US a now. So, status quo, we can do anything we want as our reputation can't get much worse.
Or a "National Security Letter" where you can't neither talk nor complain about?
Sure you can talk and complain, only you do so under the threat of theft, rapecages and torture.
Let's be clear where the action is here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As others have already pointed out, India has no 'official' religion. The only officially Hindu nation is Nepal. India is a secular country, where all religions are welcome.
Only the separation of Government and Religions never happened. Practically all elections ( village, city, state, nation) are decided based on religion and caste.
But still, there is no official religion.
Despite government rules on how they monitor communications of people with in there nation the real issue have with India and other countries "listening in" on communications is the fact that that country gains a business edge by listening in on communications between citizens and other people. its not about "big brother" its about a COUNTRY having inside information on any global company. That is just dangerous. We've already seen the bleed over of government and corporations during recent bailouts. When do we become a world wide "corporate government"?
Ok that might be a little more "conspiracy theory" then I really believe but these privacy issues defiantly bring things like that to mind.
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
They're not all deadly sins. Some of them are venial.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Jews also have the ten sins and not the seven, although they aren't Christians. I'm pretty sure Muslims have these ten too, as all three religions share the Torah. Also, I'd be surprised to see that most Christians are Catholic. You may be right, but I'd need a citation.
Free Martian Whores!
My first thought is "This is no different than what America has been doing for decades now--but as I read it I can't believe that so many people are striking out at India over this as though they were the first to try it. If you are going to get mad at someone, why are you ignoring the people that are currently using and abusing this exact data--not only as it goes in and out of our own country but as many others as we can get our hands on as well.
You think ANY data gets in or out of Iraq that we don't record and analyze inside and out? Afghanistan? Hell, I'd be surprised if our government doesn't already have (and use) all the data going in and out of India!
I don't see how they can comply without turning over the encryption algorithms?
Um, the algorithms themselves are hardly the problem. Of course, the algorithms in question here are "proprietary" trade secrets. This in itself is a big red flag to anyone with even minimal understanding of security. A secret encryption algorithm should always be assumed to have an exploit that the comm company itself can use to read your communications. The only trustworthy encryption algorithms are the ones that are published openly (along with the code, of course), so that knowledgeable people can examine them and tell the world about exploits. If your comm company is using secret code or algorithms, the only reason you should consider is that they are reading your communications. Anything else they tell you is PR, and worthless.
The real issue is the encryption keys, which the comm company shouldn't even know. If they do, then again we must assume that all communications are compromised, and the comm company is selling your information to your competitors and enemies, (and to their government).
Comm companies everywhere are notoriously in bed with their governments, and routinely give government agencies access to any communications requested. This should always be assumed true, regardless of the company's PR. Even if their name includes the string "google". ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Ok, I admit, I'm only thinking of one or two executives in particular right now, but it can't be too uncommon.
Then how come so many corporations engage in longer term plans? Why do they spend money on things that don't bear fruit for three years, five years, or more?
Leave off it, this corporate hate is stupid, especially from geeks who love to play with the toys corporations make. Do some people in corporations make shortsighted decisions sometimes? Absolutely. They are human after all. Guess what? You make shortsighted decisions sometimes too. That doesn't mean all companies don't care about anything longer than a few months.
Consider the problem HIPAA's security requirements might be for call centers run out of India. Any evidence or even suspicion that personal/medical information is leaked due to such "open access" requirements by the government of India, and all those call centers will move over night to China and elsewhere.
I've got a friend who works at General Dynamics who is a large defense contractor for the US government. He works on defense related stuff too, has his secret clearance. This isn't super secret "Nobody can know you are here," kind of shit, the overall project isn't classified (it is future military communication systems) just the details. As such on his public connected computer he can have all the normal apps like web browser, IM, and so on. However he can't use encryption going off their network. So it is one of those seemingly paradoxical situations where telnet is allowed, but SSH is not. They keep an eye on what their employees do. They don't want you sending out classified data.
They do not, however, monitor his home connection and encryption is fine there.
You think they never heard of S/MIME? You think they can't demand those keys too?
No sig today...
Over the past ten years the government of the USA has eroded the civil rights in your nation, and the citizens by and large have said "meh" and gone back to watching Kate Gosselin on "Dancing with the Stars." Why should India be any different?
Because most of the recent civil rights erosions in the US have been against individuals. Mess with big business and you may start seeing campaign financing conveniently disappear. RIM caved, but what would happen if Google, Microsoft, and IBM said they'd pull out of India?
From the perspective of an Indian, all I can say is that there is nothing to worry about. There are tons of other issues (it is a developing nation) to care about and which undermine stability of government on a day to day basis. What however troubles me is that this request can be a proxy one -- that is US government is pressurizing the present gov. for such practices -- not surprising after the nuclear deal and its terms. Also, the factor of scalability comes into picture. Just imagine the infrastructure required to cast a net on millions of netizens.
While it might, and I emphasize might, be useful against terrorism (depends on how the terrorists communicate and if the intelligence agencies can properly identify who to look at) it will max corruption many times worse. The fix to corruption is not more government power, it is if anything less and more government transparency. Corruption can exist because government have power without good checks on it. Despite the whining about corruption in the US and other free nations, it is far lower than corruption in dictatorships. The more open and transparent the government, the more chance there is to stop corruption.
If the government has unlimited access to private data, and already has a culture of corruption, this will just make it so much worse. Officials will start selling private data to anyone willing to pay the price. Want to know what your competitor is doing? No problem just pay me and I'll show you!
The original poster was talking about "Indian civil society". I am not sure what events in some other random country have to do with this.
If everyone caves to India, how long is it until other governments line up eagerly saying "me too me too"
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Different corporations act differently. Most medium-size corporations (esp. in the tech sector) have a very short-term view, so they operate exactly as the parent says.
Microsoft is NOT a normal corporation. They've had the same small bunch of guys running the place for decades. Bill was there from the beginning, and only recently has really taken off to do his own thing. His buddy Steve has also been there for a very long time, and doesn't appear to be going anywhere soon. With those guys, their personal bank accounts are not their primary motivation; they're sociopaths whose goal in life is power, and their business is really just a big game to them, which is why they play so hard and dirty to "win", by destroying their competitors, even if that means making inferior products or even making less profit (how much money has MS lost on the Xbox?) than if they weren't so destructive.
Other companies don't behave like this; they shuffle executives every few years, and the executives have very short-term views, bolstered by their boards of directors and large institutional investors who want quick stock price gains so they can buy low and sell high, and then leave other suckers to deal with the crash. The executives who run these companies have very different motivations from places like MS; they're never going to get so big that the CEO's name will be known by billions of common people. How many people remember the name of Bob Nardelli, the ex-CEO of Home Depot who drove that company into the ground so he could get a $200 million golden parachute? Everyone knows who Bill Gates is, but your average person on the street doesn't know who Nardelli is, or who the CEO of Lowe's is, etc.
I'd say the ultra short-term view is probably most prevalent at the medium-size publicly-held companies, because their stock price can move quickly, but they don't have much of a legacy to protect and no one knows who their CEO is.
Not if you're careful to limit how much you mess with them - enough to let them know you're a threat but not enough to make it worthwhile for them to evacuate the country seems to be "optimal":
Microsoft Corp is the world's top computer software company. It is also one of the biggest campaign contributors in Washington--an astounding fact when you consider that Microsoft is a relatively new player on the political scene. Prior to 1998, the company and its employees gave virtually nothing in terms of political contributions. But when the Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into the company's marketing of its popular Windows software, things changed. The company opened a Washington lobbying office, founded a political action committee and soon became one of the most generous political givers in the country. The move eventually galvanized an entire industry, as computer and Internet companies quickly moved to emulate Microsoft's political savvy.
Wow, a lot of India-Pakistan rivalry on here. You guys just need to settle the Kashmir dispute and build a giant wall between your countries and go your separate ways. We Americans have a saying: "Good fences make good neighbors".
Citation? Certainly. "Religions: Christians 33.32% (of which Roman Catholics 16.99%, Protestants 5.78%, Orthodox 3.53%, Anglicans 1.25%), Muslims 21.01%, Hindus 13.26%, Buddhists 5.84%, Sikhs 0.35%, Jews 0.23%, Baha'is 0.12%, other religions 11.78%, non-religious 11.77%, atheists 2.32% (2007 est.)" From https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html#People That puts Catholicism as just under 51% of Christians, well above the other groups.
this could actually help tech workers in the US. in a left-handed kind of way, that is.
>p>You are aware that companies do outsource to places other than India, right?
There is outsourcing to places like Canada, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia (minus India) that will be the benefactors of this.
For the US, India has been a preference in the past because of their understanding of English and level of education.
Spain has been outsourcing to Latin America and US data that cannot be 'off-shored' goes to Canada.
It will be interesting to see how quickly VPN pipes are redirected to some other place, after all it is the customers of the off-shoring companies that set the direction.
Load New Commander (Y/N)?
a nation state with polytheistic Hindu as it's official religion
I don't know where you pulled that out from. India has no official religion.
Our Prime Minister is Sikh (about 2% of the population). The most powerful person in the country is an Italian-born christian woman.
Our President (mostly a ceremonial post, with few powers) is Hindu, and vice-president (another ceremonial) is Muslim.
I don't know where AC is from, but we are pretty proud of the fact that we are "genuinely" multi-cultural.
To the point that we are willing to elect someone to the most important office in the country, irrespective of religion.
Life is just a conviction.
"Fuck you...come again!!"
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What does the U.S. have to do with Indira introducing nukes to the Indian subcontinent?
You really think that the managers who do outsourcing really care about democracy in the particular third world country they contract out to? You really think they care about secrets and confidentiality? The whole idea of outsourcing is that it's raw, cheap labor, quality be damned. So far they haven't cared if the contractors keep all the source code, or just patch together new code from Google search results. No CFO is going to read this short USA Today article and infer that they should stop outsourcing, and instead invest in local employees, just because the Indian government has access to Google. That's just naive.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Wiki fail! India does not have "polytheistic Hindu as it's official religion" (sic) - just one link down, you'll find that
Slightly off-topic, i know, but please, get your facts right...
there. i said it. those bastards haven't learned that birth control is an important tool, because when you have so many billions of people, it makes your country more susceptible to natural disasters, famine, and disease outbreaks. google should tell them to shove off.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Also, like blowing up a building with lots of people inside it?
The actions of a citizen or (relatively) small group of citizens does not in any way invalidate the government a country has. Just so you know, the demolishers were arrested and charged with various crimes (or at least, the ringleaders were).
Interesting, thank you.
Free Martian Whores!
You're welcome.
And Protestants don't make that distinction, Catholics do. Sure, some (most) Protestants have some vague hierarchy of sins in their own minds, but it doesn't usually come from the Bible, where Protestants are supposed to derive all their doctrine from.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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remember the Google incident? maybe you think it were two, but think of it as one thing:
Google-USA was intruded
claims said it was China government hackers.
Bruce Schneier said it was through the NSA backdoor of Google.
some time later China says Google needs to commit to its censor-program
Google says it want comply - and moves to Hongkong ( PDR China )
later they skip the re-routing to Hongkong
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maybe one can interpret it like this:
China breaks into Google-US through the NSA backdoor.
it learns that Google-Beijing has also a backdoor for NSA
it does not like this
it tells Google: no way - either you close that hole or you are out!
Google needs to report to its masters at NSA: what can we do?
it tries to play a PR-campaign - and when things settle they comply - hoping to trick China again later
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_noir
Such postal censorship became common during World War I. Governments claimed that the total war which was waged required such censorship to preserve the civilian population's morale from heart-breaking news up from the front. Whatever the justification, this meant that not a single letter sent from a soldier to his family escaped previous reading by a government official, destroying any notion of privacy or of secrecy of correspondence. Post censorship was retained during the interwar period and afterwards, but without being done on such a massive scale.
this was a bit before my time, but I'll trust that this is accurate.
we are well aware of the wiretapping in the US, today; but are you aware that we did it on a VERY blatant scale back in ww2? and americans just *accepted it* !
I know it was a different time and people felt a lot more united against a common enemy, but seriously; the 'need' to open letters in ww2 did not exist; not according to logic and reason. but people fell for the 'reason' given or simply were not used to questioning authority, back then.
the more things change, the more they stay the same.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yep. A country with islamic terrorist neighbor on the north-west and a commie neighbor to north-east (which was already nuclear-armed before Indira Gandhi made India go nuclear) is not allowed to keep nuclear weapons to protect itself. Only western countries, particularly US, is allowed to protect its citizens. India faces active terrorist threats pretty much everyday (from internal maoist-naxal problem to insurgencies in north-east, sponsored by China, to terrorism in Kashmir sponsored by your ally - pakistan). As an Indian, I am happy my govt. went nuclear. Its the only thing that stops China from invading and annexing Arunachal Pradesh.
My point was that the USA is a country with a long rich history of civil rights, democracy, and the rule of law - Yet in the USA the citizens are passively giving up their rights.
If that's the case, why should we expect Indian citizens to stand up, when they have a much shorter history of democracy and the rule of law?
By the same logic, US is a terrorist-sponsor nation. US has pacts and is allied with pakistan. It continues to provide it arms and military aid despite knowing well that pakistan is the epicenter of terrorism and has pretty much sponsored every terror act around the world including 9/11. US also provides weapons to Saudi Arab
While that sounds wonderful, we will see if that saying holds true when you are surrounded by pakistan and China. Imagine if Mexico was pakistan and Canada was China. We will see how well you will stop the terrorists from infiltrating from the south.
Gives new meaning to "Your calls may be monitored..."
= Grow a brain...
That's why you need a big wall.
We don't have much trouble with Canada, so we never needed to bother with a wall there, but Mexico is a different matter, and lots of people are screaming for a wall on that border. There is a wall in many places, but not in Arizona, leading lots of migrants to attempt to cross through the desert, and many dying on the way. It's a mess.
Pakistan (85) is a better nation to do business than India (133)
http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
That's interesting. There are ~1 billion members of the Catholic church. If that's 17% of all Christians then there would be ~5.8 billions of them. Correct me if I am wrong but that's roughly the earth population. So where is the +1.5 billion muslims and +800 millions hindus? Catholics are only ~17% of the the Earth's population. There, corrected it for you.
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly
That is the fundamental difference between Indian and US politics. If Google, Microsoft and IBM pull out of India, they have much more to lose than India. Contrary to popular belief, India does not directly depend on these companies (or any foreign companies for that matter) for their development. In the IT industry, the biggest contributors to the Indian economy are the big outsourcing shops like TCS, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, etc. They will be adversely affected only if outsourcing shuts down completely.
But if outsourcing shuts down, even the US will have a hard time recovering from it. It is a long story to explain how that will happen but to put it in a nutshell, no American company can maintain the same margins that it currently does with outsourced businesses. This either means big revenue losses or a significant rise in prices for everything.
A friend had once quipped that corruption in India is better than the corruption in the US. In the US only the politicians and big businesses get the fruits of corruption. In India, corruption benefits everyone, right down to The Common Man.
Really? Because the Vatican says otherwise. So does the CIA.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'd say India's worse...even otherwise privacy is not considered important. This is a place where it's perfectly normal to start asking you personal questions within minutes of meeting for the first time.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
at least RTFA you are referring to: From the Vatican link: "According to statistics at the end of 2006, Muslims now represent 19.2 percent of the world population, while Catholics represent 17.4 percent, he said." And from the CIA link: "Christians 33.32% (of which Roman Catholics 16.99%, Protestants 5.78%, Orthodox 3.53%, Anglicans 1.25%)" in the latter one 16.99 is not 16.99% of 33.32% but of 100%. world population != 'Earth's Christian population'
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly