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Google's Mapping Contest Draws Ire From Indian Government
hypnosec writes with news that India's Central Bureau of Investigation has ordered a preliminary enquiry (PE) against Google for violating Indian laws by mapping sensitive areas and defence installations in the country. As per the PE, registered on the basis of a complaint made by the Surveyor General of India's office to the Union Home Ministry, Google has been accused of organizing a mapping competition dubbed 'Mapathon' in February-March 2013 without taking prior permission from Survey of India, country's official mapping agency. The mapping competition required citizens to map their neighbourhoods, especially details related to hospitals and restaurants. The Survey of India (SoI), alarmed by the event, asked the company to share its event details. While going through the details the watchdog found that there were several coordinates having details of sensitive defence installations which are out of the public domain."
"You didn't get a permit from us about writing a map, so we will ask you to share the map with us."
There are no national secrets anymore. This is fucking retarded. Anybody with a satellite can see anything they don't want you to see, AND MORE. India is more of a third world shit hole every day, which is saying something.
Someone didn't get his bribe!
Doesn't the Indian government have better things to do? Oh like feeding their hundred of millions of impoverished citizens or even building toilets so they don't shit outside everywhere. Or even solve the massive corruption they have.
No wonder India is such a shithole of a country.
Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!
"The company[Google], noting that it was not aware of any privacy issues, ..."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
FUCKING fire timothy!
Make india a grea area on google maps
You can't really censor that from the internet, now can you?
I get mad when people map out my fences too.
They mapped out "De-fences".
out of the public domain
If you can see it from public property and tell what it is, it's (effectively) in the public domain, isn't it?
If it's supposed to be secret, and someone who shouldn't know where it is does, you've got a security leak.
I'd say Google's doing them a favour. If any of their secret installations turn up on it, you know it's time to shut them down or move them.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Exactly. If it was crowdsourced, then by definition, it is in the public domain. It's public domain information they want to cover up. Not 'information not in the public domain'.
It's not like US with the satellite have seen WMD's in Iraq, or are they seeing WMD's which never exist?
They started a contest with all the usual disclaimers, etc...
The people entering the contest are the ones that need to validate that what they are submitting is legal or not.
This is a non story, unless you count inept Indian government officials... Though that's not really news either.
when a OSM vs google maps flamewar starts?
Title says it all.
If US govt can censor sensitive areas in USA, why can't Indian govt do?
If you can see it from public property and tell what it is, it's (effectively) in the public domain, isn't it?
Not necessarily. This isn't the United States. Different laws and customs applied differently. Your normal expectations regarding the law may not apply.
I'd say Google's doing them a favour. If any of their secret installations turn up on it, you know it's time to shut them down or move them.
Yeah... I'm sure that's exactly how they will see it too... [/sarcasm]
So now anything that Google greys out will be highlighted as an interesting area to investigate.
Illegal numbers strike again!
It is precisely this sort of bureaucracy, where people protect their jobs above all else, that prevents India from being a competitive, global economic power.
Obviously, when the biggest problem is someone is writing up maps without permission, any other problems like crime, slavery, and women being raped and killed must not exist.
They can... And I think they should... Put a big red polygon there with the label "Indian Government Declared Sensitive Area" right on top.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Haters gonna hate
Have you never heard of the Streisand Effect?
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Why Indians Suck (the "dot" Indians that is, not the "woo woo woo" Indians)
People:
Indian people (mostly males) lack manners. They wont leave alone a couple, a foreigner, a modern dressed woman, a beautiful/pretty/okay type (any, all actually) woman. They won’t let them be in peace if they ever confront the peoples types I mentioned like a couple, women etc
If there’s a young couple walking on the road, people will look at them like they are having sex in public, and that it is prohibited (not sex, but walking in public – the couple).
If there’s a minimal moderate looking (or beyond) woman walking on the road the Indian males immediately thrust their eyes on the woman and won’t let her be in peace until she almost immediately ignores them and leaves the space. A woman who’s worn a skirt or jeans or even a modern type of t-shirt is penalized by the public of India in the form of dirty stares and chants and even an attempt to rape.
Foreigners will observe a queue behind them wherever they go, and of course, they (foreign women) will attract stares and moderately dirty stares as well.
Too much about dirty stares for now, and to sum up Indian people’s character:
1. They are cheap
2. They are all perverted (men)
3. They lack manners and common behavioral ethics
4. They (Indian males) are sex craving dogs
–
Politics
Largest democracy only means largest pool of stupid(insane basically) politicians here in India. Need I say more, politicians are the worst people you will ever come across in India. Worst behavior, worst dressing sense, worst physiques!, and worst work. They don’t work but crave like dogs for power: the power to stay in power yet do nothing you get it? They don’t address problems leave alone solving them. They support cricketers like crazy – that’s because there are some currency notes going in their pockets all the while. They are corrupt. They are foolish, they are idiots and they do not know how to speak English.
–
Clarity of thought
Sucks. People of India think they are the best, but everybody knows they are not. Obviously. Whatever these people do, they boast like hell which is completely unnecessary and uncalled for. Yet they do it why? Because, its India. They bring their culture into almost everything and everybody does agree that they have a rich culture but that doesn’t mean that they wear it around their hips intolerably like superman’s red noticeable underwear worn outside.
Indian people are a bunch of losers. Because, their attitude towards life sucks, they boast what they do not possess, act as if its their culture alone which is existing in the world at present. And they think rather weirdly they are just weird man.
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Common sense
May be little. But definitely not even average. A majority of this can be owed to the lazy buggers (politicians) of India. Despite various life taking bomb incidents in India during the last year and before, there are no measures against preventing these type of incidents in the future. When there’s a blast all people come together, and say – we are the people of India, and we will NOT lose our spirit, and we will remain strong! Excuse me, how dumb is that? You guys are strong in resisting? Or did you ever think about something called “prevention” of stuff?
Basically Indian people are one of the worst kind of people in this world. Whatever I am talking about, I am talking about the majority dimension. Not all.
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Obidience
Sucks again. No behavior, no ethics and no matter. Period.
So this is India – a collection of ego rich people who are jobless and do nothing, besides not letting women live peacefully in their own land. Take no cautions to prevent death in their country, and sleep the bombs being some kind of temporary alarms. Besides all these ills, they call themselves the best people out there in this world.
All should spit on these kind of people. Really. Don’t you think? I hope this post helps Indian people realize the actual facts before they usually get enraged for reading the truth about themselves, and most people.
I’ve been studying India for a while now, and the more I study it, the angrier I get. India, quite simply, sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks and then sucks some more. I don’t know how long this shittiness has been going on, maybe forever. When the British first showed up, they were appalled. They tried to civilize the place, but the small-c conservative Indians kept objecting to getting civilized.
What sucks? India sucks. What about it sucks?
First of all, the state.
The Indian state has sucked Devil’s balls in Hell from Day One, birthed in blood-soaked imperial and neo-colonial sin like America, Australia and Israel, with even less of an excuse, as a long-abused colony themselves. Now, via alliances with imperialist America, the UK and Israel, India seems to be aping the worst aspects of its former imperialist and colonialist master. Like a crime victim going on a killing spree. Of all the ways to react.
The shitty nature of the Indian state is of course rooted in Indian society, as all states are rooted in the cultural formations of their societies. The Indian state sucks because Indian society sucks.
Why does Indian society suck? It’s hard to sum it up. First of all, you have one of the most callous and uncaring ruling classes, with the usual upper middle class allies, found on Earth.
Missing the good old days? Go to India. Nostalgic for debt slavery and bondage, feudalism (the real deal, not the semi-feudal modern kind), slavery – child and adult, child labor, shit in the streets like the Middle Ages Europe pre-Black Plague? Go to India. It’s all there in spades.
Even more appalling is that no one in India gives a fuck. The bourgeois either live in denial or could care less if the lower classes live, die, or flop, gasping, somewhere in between.
The poor are too stupid and/or ignorant to know better, and many think that their savage and inhuman abuse, like something out of 1400s England, is actually religiously ordained by God Himself. Sure, the bourgeois sold the poor this rope to hang themselves with, or gave it to them, but they wrapped up all up in one of the most barbaric cultural-religious systems known to modern Man, Hinduism, to give it the staying power of super-glue.
The article makes clear that neoliberalism has ruined India beyond its prior Hellishness. Which is possible, since you don’t need to read Milton to learn that Hell can always get worse.
The pollution and the filth.
The pollution and filth is destroying India and turning it into an actual open cesspool/sewage ditch/garbage dump. One that traverses the whole country. It’s not only nauseous to breathe or look at the filth that surrounds you without respite, but it’s actually literally sickening. A visit to India means a continuous low-level infectious illness from all the filth drowning out your world.
Worse, Indians don’t care. See that guy shitting on the sidewalk? Pay no attention to him. OK, he’s getting up and walking away now. No problem, just don’t step it. The rich pay the trash collectors to keep their neighborhoods clean, and fuck everyone else. A callousness reminiscent of Anglo-Irish absentee landlords in 1820s Ireland.
The one good thing about neoliberalism is a decline in bureaucracy. You gut government, so there’s not much left. Bureaucracy means too many idle government slackers wasting time and dicking off. It could also mean an insanely underfunded state, which is probably the case with India.
The government doesn’t give a fuck about anything but the rich. The state exists only to suck up to the rich or in its human form to move up classwise and become part of the elite class. The state cares nothing about workers, consumers, the environment, Hell, about anything relating to the people.
Everyone who works for the state is a crook, and they are all on the take. Schools and hospitals in rural areas are empty. Doctors and teachers collect salaries and never sh
seriously, "defence", doesn't every freakin' browser have a spell checker built in nowadays ?!
India just needs to construct a giant tarp over their country to protect it from spies (the side benefit is now they can sell access to sunlight to the populace).
When I lived in the UK, there was a big blank space on the official maps just outside town. Anyone who lived near there knew it was the local nuclear weapons dump, and any Soviet spy who drove past would see the buildings that mysteriously didn't appear on the map, and know it must be something important enough to hide, and therefore important enough to bomb in wartime.
The whole thing was just stupid.
Have you never heard of the Streisand Effect?
The Streisand Effect works only if you know and care about Barbara Streisand --- and only in a time and place where Geek Rules override every other consideration.
The geek has a one-size-fits-all cultural mindset that has never served him particularly well.
Also the border is disputed with Pakistan and China. Since Pakistan has been the "ally" of USA since 1950s, and India kept dallying with USSR all those days, almost all the American magazines will carry maps that show disputed parts of Kashmir as part of Pakistan. I have seen so many Reader's Digest, Time, National Geographic, Life mags with maps of Kashmir region stamped with, "This map does not agree with the official map published by the Surveyor General of India. No significance may be attached to the differences published here. " (quoting from memory, actual wording could be even more bureaucratese ).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
well if they are so sensitive, maybe the citizenry shouldn't know about them.
Allah owns your ass! Our generation will witness the miracle of every American and every American child in every American classroom kneel before the Men of Muhammad! If you're uncovered whores refuse our commands, they will be put to death like dogs!
Slashdot never disappoints. It's full of frustrated little white boys worried about losing their coding jobs and pakistani terrorists, ready to throw shit.
Stay classy, slashdot.
If everyone knows it's a secret it's not a secret. Don't blame Google because they've exposed your silliness.
It could also have something to do with the fact that normally foreigners are not allowed in cantonments and other restricted areas and so the use of locals opens both sides up to problems.
My visa specifically mentions which cities I can live in (so I must register with the FRRO in either of those cities; as far as I know, I don't think I can just up and move from say Delhi or Mumbai to somewhere else without getting some additional permitting or a replacement visa first) but it also says "not valid for prohibited / restricted and cantonment areas" meaning I can't even visit those places without getting permission first (which could be a pain in the ass if someone were to actually check my documents as I move around, because sometimes the only way to get from A to B is through such an area).
So apart from the replies concerning bribery (probably a factor), the government may simply be annoyed that Google is recruiting Indians to do stuff for a foreign entity which involves "areas of interest", which is fair enough I suppose - if said foreign entity were a government, wouldn't that basically amount to spying?
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