Indian OS
schneier.com
schneier.com
Instead, I would humbly point you to http://greatbong.net/2010/10/14/the-grand-secret-os/, which recognizes this for what it actually is. At least you can have some fun talking about it.
G@ND = expletive for ass(the body part).
Block Development Officer - Officer in charge of administering a block (a block in turn is a small administrative area typically a few villages).
SC - Scheduled Castes
ST - Scheduled Tribes
OBC - Other Backward Classes
SC, ST, OBC are different categorization of the castes.
Indian institutions (govt. jobs, colleges etc) have to offer atleast 49.5% seats to people belonging to these sections. This is kind of an affirmative action. This affirmative action is based on the archaic caste system and not on the something tangible like income. So quite often the rich people of these castes end up reaping the benefits. Because of this reason most of the intellectuals of India oppose such an affirmative action. Politicians still do it, because its a easy way to get votes.
Class IV employees - Employees under a particular government pay grade. The lowest grade in government pay scale. People in this grade form unions and assert their labour rights through frequent strikes.
Babus - may refer to either bureaucrats or the clerical staff in their office. Both are known to be admirers of red tape and corruption.
Paan - piper betel leaf based mouth freshener. Hard to explain so refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paan
With less than 1% marriages inter-caste, they literally hate each other.
Since Economic mobility != Social mobility it is better for India to give autonomy to FC/BC/SC/ST/Minority regions with a single passport and currency across these regions.
3. The default state of processes is “sleep” which is where they are found 95% of the time.
It's obviously meant as a joke, but if you think about it, your real processes in your real OS are (on average) going to spend even more time sleeping, and it's exactly what you want.
But that announcement made me remember of that security researcher sent to jail for his analysis of the voting machine last month or so, who knows how that ended...
When I read the original Inquirer post, I immediately checked the date just to make sure this isn't some old April 1st joke.
That's very typical of India. If you want to do it, do it - no need to hold press conferences for things like this.
Of course what would actually happen is they'd have bought Amstrad word processors and e-mailers from that snake-oil salesman Alan Sugar. Oh well.
Why should software be the only attack vector?
Based on what I've read (which admittedly isn't a whole lot), it sounds like they need to take a few minutes to read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[1].
1. http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/kingst/Research_files/king08.pd...
http://www.cnews.ru/news/top/indexEn.shtml?2007/09/14/266177
anyway, I have no idea what Real-time system with "Windows" software really means. Bad quoting or they really need to polish up on what they say in press conferences.
disclaimer: I'm Indian and while this is all typical in terms of getting publicity, I have no idea on who makes these decisions.
Grand plan right? Then, it went no where. Dead. period.
Having known a thing or two about C-DAC & DRDO, I seriously doubt this grand secret OS plan.
A friend of mine used to work at C-DAC in the late '80s and early '90s. I remember talking to him about the work they were doing in the area of parallel processing. My memory is vague, but I remember he was quite excited to work there. Not sure when things had started to go downhill.
However, I can't imagine building an OS from the ground up for the purpose of fending for their own cyber security being a good idea.
That is a choice quote. It's amazing that India is the go-to place for outsourcing when they have such backwards ideas about security and software development. Historically, the most secure operating systems on the market have been "open", not closed.
That's a horrible generalisation. India has millions of developers. Just because one thinks security by obscurity is a good idea, doesn't mean they all do.
This is just one of them with a soapbox and the sort of government grant that keeps on giving.
I'll just say that I think the belief that closed == secure is a stupid notion given the history we all know, no matter who holds the belief.
if you take security to be assured in some sense, TCSEC might be a reasonable standard. I do not know of any open source operating system certified to A1, but there is at least one closed source OS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTS-400
if you mean track record, in terms of number of compromises, i'd be interested to see the data.
Certification costs money which is most likely the real reason why open source OS's have not been "certified" as secure, not because they're intrinsically insecure. OpenBSD, for example, has a reputation for being secure.
FWIW none of the open source Unices have UNIX certification (http://www.opengroup.org/platform/unix_certification/) but that obviously is not preventing the spread of Linux into "enterprise" computing.