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Indian Minister Seeks To Censor User-Generated Content Online
First time accepted submitter punit_r writes "Indian minister for Communications & Information Technology Kapil Sibal met officials from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Yahoo on Monday, 5 December 2011, and told them to screen what goes on the sites. He basically asked the websites to actively screen content. How do you screen such massive amount of data? Well, the IT minister has the perfect recipe: 'We'll use humans to screen content and not technology,' said the IT minister. Meanwhile, he got it back from the social media."
Just deduct the costs for that bullshit from the his ministry's budget.
So this guy is so rich that he can afford to finance a whole industry of millions of workers to monitor the web? Well, that should solve a lot of economic problems in India! Maybe he could outsource some of those jobs over here!
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Seen any spam ads on Slashdot moderated into oblivion?
The various trolls and first posts done the same way?
We're already doing it here!
The meat algorithm is highly scalable.
the Government loots the money of the people and there is a lot of black money in Swiss banks and there is a lot of protest going on to get it out from there..India is facing the same situation as US there were protest by a guy called Anna Hazare about getting Indian black money from Swiss Bank!!Now i guess you must have got the point!!
Of-course he wants to stop people from speaking. That's what all people in power want - to make sure that the masses never speak.
That's why individual liberties must be the primary concern of all people and that's why the principles upon which governments get established must put individual liberties ahead of all other concerns.
You can't handle the truth.
If you hire all those humans to check the content, just think of all those minds that will be corrupted from the content they are supposed to sift through.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
codes, plz. kthxbye.
He could call it the State Telecommunications And Security Initiative? I'll have to check now, I'm worried that STASI might be already taken...
Every community needs their own individual library -- it's a basic right, especially in the sub-literate parts of India.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
He's just trying to boost the Indian economy by creating a new sector of tech support people thus supporting the bubble and burgeoning middle class in India. The migration of millions of tech support and call center jobs has created a middle class in a formerly 2 tiered country. Now that they are starting to lose those jobs due to rising wages, he's looking to expand it is all. Oh, and you got to keep the people ignorant too.
I got here through a series of tubes
The whole problem is because of lack of a tolerance to criticism. The actual reason is most probably someone wrote something really harsh about the policies adopted by his political party. And that is something the he couldn't take in his stride. Anyone who wants to have a public life, should also be ready to face the criticism. Curbing freedom and there by the criticism of the very people who elected you is something very cheap. And in addition to that, he had probably assumed that a large user base from India implied control of the industry. Imagine using humans to track each of those millions of posts on G+, FB, Twitter combined together. Absolutely foolish. If anything, he is tarnishing the image of the country. Hailing from India, what I sense is, he is anticipating a huge wave of protests from the people vis-a-vis the Jan Lokpal bill(a bill to fight corruption). His party is proposing a version which not really liked by a a lot of people. That bill is likely to be tabled sometime soon. And to get away from such criticism, he is going all out.
Balachandran "Arise Awake and Stop not till the goal is reached"
I know - we'll get half of the population to do the screening for each user request, and the other half to actually view it immediately afterwards. The lag shouldn't be too bad - only half a minute per HTML page view.
They can take it in turns, so that half of the population screens one week, and then following week, they're the viewers, and the other half screens.
And the icing on the cake: it will create more work, which results in more jobs too!
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
with some old numbers:
http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709
1355 employees x at €50 per month = € 67750 p/m
Taking into account that an average workweek of +78 hours is not weird in India, it would mean that with 2 shifts working at 79 hours you would be able to cover it at a total expense of € 135500 p/m. Which would mean it would be even beneficial to do so since it cost less in maintenance and reliability lawsuits.
Overtime is already included in the +78 hours workweek (cause without extra time they would not make €20 a month) and you can reduce costs even by only hiring woman! Since they are considered there as cheaper labor!
I am not saying in any way that this is correct, but it is the sad and harsj reality!
This is possible at least for Youtube, obviously not for Facebook or Google. According to Youtube, there are 48 hours of video uploaded every minute. Therefore you would need 2,880 people watching 24/7 to view every video. Divide into 3 shifts of 8 hours a day, and you have 8,640 people working full time. Using a wage of 10,000 Rupees or 250USD a month, this should cost about 26 million USD.
I understand how he can ask, say, Facebook to remove disparaging content and screen for it. Stupid and a fundamentally massive and retarded task, to be sure.
But how in gods name did they think that ISPs have the ability to delete content on other and foreign sites?
India's It leaders literally do not understand the internet.
I've got it! Instead of paying a large number of people to censor the internet, just let people create links to the good stuff and ignore the bad stuff - soon the whole world will be acting as your censors and only the good stuff will be easy to find!
Now to let Minister Sibal know that I will implement this system for only 1.5 million USD.
That's what you get when you make a lawyer the "Minister for Communications & Information Technology".
To his credit, he was also the guy who released the $35 Android tablet, but I doubt he had anything to do with it directly.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
no, we cannot... who knew they could be plotting to bring scandals to public view
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
the pictures of his two bosses ... those who belong to the current Royal Dynasty of India .... those who have to suffixed with G !
There's someone who is firmly rooted in the Class system in India, and is probably to old and outdated to even understand what "Social Media" is, never mind what it implies. The world is changing at an exponential rate, and old-think like this has had it's days numbered and spray painted in neon on the virtual wall. Just pray that this tidal wave doesn't end up killing like that tsunami a few years back..
"If the only tool that you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Donny Rumsfeld
On average an Indian movie is poorly censored . They dont care for movie industry .. I wonder why they are behind youtube/FB/Google........
may be to get some money under table.
YouTube [i.e., Google] is already providing some of the censorship this guy is asking for. Perhaps not for him yet, but certainly for the Chinese and Pakistani governments and various Muslim groups. And not just for overseas consumption: much of this censorship applies to content served in the U.S.
Sounds to me like he has some humans that are just perfect for the job. I'd like to see the companies to tell him to take a flying leap and let the consumers decide what they want to read and ignore what they find offensive.
-Xen
That's not a bad idea. If we are able to censor tv and films,then web cannot be an exception
Unemployment: Solved.
The last time Indian citizens protested against the Govt for Jan Lokpal (an anti-corruption bill) the protesters made use of sms, twitter & facebook.
A month after the protest the Govt passed a bill restricting the number of SMS that can be sent by a person to 100 SMS'es per day.
This looks like the next step.
No one expects fb or twitter to filter all user generated content... But it will certainly give the party in power an excuse to block these sites when the time comes.
Using 'think of the children' and 'hurting religious sentiments' as reasons for censoring is getting out of hand all over the world.
this guy is a known clown. all he wants to achieve out of this is to censor all anti-congress sentiments on the indian internets which has been on an incredible rise this year. he is getting what he deserves. look at #kapilsibal and #idiotkapilsibal
the ire is epic. the biggest democracy on the planet prides its free speech. snubbing that is going to take some doing.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Very sad to see that the world's largest democracy could in fact be the 'largest censored democracy'.
http://isikkim.com/2011-12-is-kapil-sibal-an-idiot-06-06/
Indian Minister Seeks To Censor User-Generated Content Online
Also:
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Mr. Sibbal, meet Senator Ted Stevens. Living examples of stupid politicians who have no clue about technology in the two largest democracies in the world.