India's Cops Meet Technology

TopherTG writes "Do cops told to seize computers to return only with monitors, stapling pirated floppies together or arresting CEOs for their customer's crimes sound familiar? It would in India. Wired is running a rather humorous article on the minglings between cops and techies."

Sounds like...

[Blapto]

The guy who installed my dad's IT system. We found 2 floppies stapled to a sheet of instructions on how to back up from them...

Advice to the Indian Authorities:

[teiresias]

Advice to the Indian Authorities:

The best way to search for Hard Disks and other media is with a large and very powerful magnet.

Make sure you download an entire copy of the Internet so you can be sure that what you find is indeed illegal.

Oh, and bounce the computer case around a little bit on the way back to the station. It'll kill any computer bugs still in the system.

your welcome.

No wonder they're confused.

[Garg]

It's cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians.

You start mixing those up and no telling what might happen.

Garg

Re:I think they do tech support on the side....

[DeathFlame]

India Tech Support: "Sounds like your harddrive is broken. Please find it and staple it with your receipt and sent it to..."

Customer: "Which part is the hard drive?"

India Tech Support: "It's the screen part, where the flashy picture thing comes up"

Obligatory Zoolander Reference

[bwcarty]

The files are in the computer?

Suggestion

[chowdmouse]

Maybe the cops should outsource?

4. Profit!

[i_r_sensitive]

I assume you just forgot...

I bet

[Fr05t]

I bet there are a lot of broken coffee cup holders in the Indian police stations.

Desktop = monitor

[proudlyindian]

This once happened with a fairly elderly person (EP) in my friends office while swapping PC monitors .... the EP asked "can u pls transfer data on the desktop now"

I can help you with the car thing...

[nathan s]

Once you get up to a high speed, be sure to press all pedals at once - that will make you go even faster. In addition, you need to turn the wheel really fast and hard any time another vehicle approaches in the opposite lane. This will scare away any crash demons that might try to take over your car.

Hope this helps!

Apple

[Waqman]

Apple needs to establish themselves in India, last time I checked it's hard to sieze just the monitor from an iMac.

Re:Faked story.

[Schwartzboy]

Background: I grew up in the most dag-gummed thirdest world-ed part of the....well, Missouri.

While I was in the Midwest to attend a wedding this past August, I took an extra week to visit dear old mom and dad. The small midwestern town they live in still uses 8-inch, 5.25-inch, and 3.5-inch floppies, as well as zip disks and CDs for data, at least in city hall and the public library. I don't think it's ever occurred to anyone to media-shift, so they keep most if not all of their older machines around until they die, then fix them with as much duct tape as possible and kick 'em till they work again.

This is just a racist jab at "those amusing white fellows with the very red necks"

One minute...

[SoTuA]

...is the difference between +4, funny and 0, redundant

What did happen

[roystgnr]

It's cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians.

You start mixing those up and no telling what might happen.

Add a construction worker and a sailor and you might end up ruining every school dance in the country.

Re:Dell Support

[DaddyDonMynack]

I got a Dell a couple of years ago, first time I had used XP. I need to change file permissions on a directory, and the security tab was not there (it's not on by default in XP) when I right-clicked it. I called Dell tech support, hoping for a quick answer.

They told me to reinstall Windows. I shit you not. I then googled the issue and found it how to make the security tab show up (XP was new then, not a lot of tips were out there). Thanks for the great support, Dell.

Give that Government Official A Raise!

[sampson7]

Quote from the Article:

When he wanted to register a firm called Pinstorm Online last year, the Registrar of Companies "refused to grant me the name because the government officials out there did not comprehend the word 'online,'" Murthy said. "I had to change the name to Pinstorm Technologies. And, in my detailed application in which I described my company, I had to change the word 'internet' to 'computer network' because the officials did not think (the) internet was a credible medium for business. They told me that."

What's so strange about this? I hear the same thing from investers all the time!

I wish that official had been managing my stock portfolio in 2001....

Re:Obligatory Zoolander Reference

[Idarubicin]

I didn't realize that there was such a thing as an obligatory Zoolander reference....

I tried this in Pittsburgh

[drewzhrodague]

I live in Pittsburgh, tried this and failed. I think I should move to a more metropolitan City, like Mumbai!

Re:Faked story.

[zalle]

Because floppies and floppy drives aren't manufactured anymore. Not to mention that you can't fit a single application on a floppy that's in any way modern. I bet that an old WordPerfect or a Ms-Dos 3.0 copy on a floppy would be harder and more expensive for the Indians to obtain than a dvd drive and win2k.

Re:Lots and Lots of wrong.

[Rei]

Hey! My new S-meter indicates that you're trying to make fun of my religion. Either that, or you're trying to con me out of a sandwich. It's always so hard to tell, the indicator settings are so close together.

Not just India...

[Embedded Geek]

There is a great old war story I heard which supposedly took place in France. While I think it was in the RISKs newsletter, I'm not entirely sure where I heard it so you should take it with a grain of salt...

The story begins in punchcard days at one of the major mainframe companies (UNIVAC or IBM). A new release of software was shipped from the U.S. to France in the form of a large deck of punched cards. Upon arrival, the deck is loaded on the reader and the whole thing crashes. A second deck is shipped to the eagerly awaiting customer (remember, this was before overnight shipping) and the mainframe crashes again, but in an entirely different manner. The customer is frantic so it is decided (possibly after a few more iterations) to send an employee to babysit the delivery.

All goes well until the deck hits Customs. It turns out that Paris had recently declared punchcard decks to be a bulk commodity (until then, there'd been no category to descibe them). This category includes things like shipments of grain, goose down, or reams of blank paper. Standard procedure calls for taking a small sample from each shipment and filing it away just in case there's a later question about the quality or identity of the goods.

This means that the customs inspector would examine the card deck, verify it was what the manifest claimed it was, and then take two or three cards at random from the stack and carefully file them with the appropriate paperwork. Basically, they were removing 80 characters at a time from each release in random chunks.

In the end the procedure was fixed. Presumably, though, the missing cards are still sitting in an archive somewhere in Paris, stapled to yellowing customs forms.

Re:Not just India...

[Avian visitor]

I've heard a simillar story. A company my father was working for ordered some quite expensive software from a foreign vendor for a mainframe or some other big machinery.

The software came on rolls of magnetic tape and the insurance and customs papers for the shipment said something like:

contents: 5 rolls of magnetic tape, value 10$
xyz software, value 10000$

Customs department of our country promptly returned the shipment back to the sender with an explanation: "Contents of the package not according to the documents enclosed. Inspection found 5 rolls of tape, but no software."

Re:Wrong

[roman_mir]

Strangely enough a large number of people came by the 15th and K, to my hot dog stand and ask me if I could sell them some crack.

Even more strangely, some of them asked me if I would sell my red hat!