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It went from hilarious to dangerous,when democracy in the country itself is under threat.

Egypt surely deserves an applause for keeping archeology separate from prominent religious sentiments & capitalising it in the tourism Industry.

India had all the potential to do the same, considering it is home to at-least half dozen civilizaltions; but extremist ideologies is a vote winner.

When the current ruling party came into power, they tried to undermine Taj mahal by removing its name from the tourism list[0]!

[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/taj-mah...

My username is not to project any ideology as superior, but to project my identity of the civilisation as it has come into threat lately.

I will refrain from making any comments on your user name though.

Governments at odds with archeology to protect the origin story of the country is common across the world.

In India, as recent as latter part of this decade archeologists found gold mine of evidence for >2100 year old Tamil civilization at Keezhadi including Roman artifacts[0].

There was no evidence of Hinduism found, for the matter of fact no religious artifacts of known organised religions was found there.

The archeologist who made the discovery was transferred and the excavations was halted. Fortunately, Tamil civilization is still very much in existence in the state of Tamilnadu,India; so the matter was taken to court and the court has now ordered continuation of excavation at Keezhadi & ordered the original archeologist back to the site[1].

But there has been numerous hurdles since, a blatant obstruction by the central government.

India is a culmination of several such civilizations, but the ruling party wants to project India as a 'Hindu Nation' which magically originated before any other civilization in the world. Unfortunately, they have the popular support for obvious reasons (You'll likely witness in the comments ).

Wiki[2].

[0]: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/keezhadi-hittin...

[1]: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/keezhadi-excavations-h...

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeladi

I presume, most readers if HN would know Bangalore.

'Karnataka election 2018: Rider for freebies - swear in the name of god that you'd vote for me'[1]

[1]:https://m.timesofindia.com/city/bengaluru/karnataka-election...

I've seen religious tactics applied effectively for this,

The potential voter is asked to swear over a religious artifact after receiving the money (bribe).

e.g. For Hindu voters, a plate with oil lamp, an idol, a mixture of auspicious powder is used.The voter should swear over it that they will vote for that particular candidate.

Elections are the main reason, politicians ensure religious superstitions flourish in India inspite of evil practices like casteism, sharia etc. Even when India's constitution is godless & secular (amended).

Thanks to really noble people behind India's constitution.

Not just SBI,I bet every nationalized bank in India has pathetic security. I've worked with some of them & I will say that if you want to sleep peacefully don't keep your money in a nationalised Indian bank; unfortunately private banks are out of reach for majority of the population.

Anyway, it's not that a criminal needs to target the banks for sensitive data when the govt has made it easy by giving a central depository of citizen data in the name of Aadhaar; for the ease of use -it is linked with bank accounts & mobile numbers as well!

>Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

Apple was part of the PRISM program.

Apple is a hardware company from the start, their strategy has been fixed long before other Internet companies figured the value of customer data.

Their narrative of being privacy enforcer aids their strategy of building closed systems.

I'm not telling Apple is deceiving its customers with the privacy narrative, but it isn't a guardian of privacy either; if it was it wouldn't have entered CHINA like other comments have pointed out.

India's telecom authority released a consultation paper asking whether OTT (Over the top - a stupid term telecos came up with when VoIP & IM took away their profits) players should be regulated[0]

Jio telecom, owned by India's richest person with close affiliations to current ruling party & prime minister has a chat app of their own with questionable security [1]

Paytm, India's leading wallet is facing immense competition from WhatsApp's integrated payment features & uses the opportunity to showcase encrypted platforms as being against national security. Paytm ran full front page news ads with Narendra Modi in it supporting the I'll conceived demonetisation when poor people of India were literally dying because of it.

Other chat apps mentioned in the article are just trying to advertise their lack of encryption as a policy for national security.

[0]: http://main.trai.gov.in/consultation-paper-regulatory-framew...

[1]: https://m.economictimes.com/tech/software/reliance-jio-chat-...

They needn't decrypt, only negligible population use End to End encryption. They can do mass surveillance with the support of ISP; may be some of the ISP's objected to their surveillance requests & hence blanket permission to do so.

I think this is specifically aimed at elections, data from ISP's, set top boxes provide enough data to determine political affiliations such as whether you watch NDTV or Republic.

Atleast in developed countries individual rights are well enforced, so NSA atleast requires permission from secret court & Australian anti-encryption law at least was passed in their parliament (or equivalent).

In India govt just used a loophole to give several government aagencies to access any computer without limitations or hurdles.

I certainly believe this is intended for data analysis for elections & for abuse of people critical oof the government; especially journalists.

>national security is a sham

Now the chinese would just need to infiltrate single infrastructure.

What did the Indian govt do when it was revealed that the Huawei was siphoning off data from BSNL (state run ISP)? Other countries have started to ban Huawei telecom products.

This is much worst than what we saw in Australia, current Indian govt headed by right wing political party with track record of human rights abuses have passed this order without passing through Parliament using a loop hole in the IT ACT.

This is likely aimed at upcoming elections for data analyses via ISP & to target journalists critical of the current govt in India.

But I feel that the International community isn't going to rally up for India like they did for Australia; I doubt even if expats would.

>narrated by a banker friend

BS. This is a right wing fundamentalist template cooked to save the face from pathetic failure of demonetisation.

As other commentators pointed out, it was underprivileged people who were most affected by this preposterous nonsense.

1. Poor people died of starvation, standing in queues at ATM i.e if they had a bank account in first place. [Only 53% had bank accounts as of 2014 & much of it was inactive] & mental agony of loosing their life long savings.

2. Privileged people exchanged their demonetized unaccounted money to new one's by bribing bankers & by forcing under privileged people to do it under their names.

3. Paytm (India's leading payment wallet) grew over 1000% in revenue with demonetisation running full front paged ads featuring the prime minister.

Guys, please don't be so naive to forget Apple was indeed part of PRISM program.

If Apple gets free chit because they said they didn't know about the program, then so does Google & Facebook.

IMO, any multi-billion $ company with cash balance higher than several countries put together; does have bones under their rug.

Indian government mandates original information to be filled in RABT else the domain registrar can cancel your account.

And since GST, if you register a domain you are supposedly a business owner and need to provide a GST number mandatorily. Check these out with Net4.

Indian govt sucks big time when it comes to privacy.

I appreciate the guts of the researchers, Iam quite sure that they will be under immense political pressure to contain the results.

History is 13.5 billion years old, till now.