BanBerry

From Times of India:
 
India may decide to temporarily shut down BlackBerry Messenger and email services if Research In Motion does not address security concerns in a meeting to be held between the government and operators on Thursday, government officials said. 

India wants to ban Blackberry Messenger and email services. So that next time there’s a terrorist attack where the perpetrators plan everything out and communicate using prepaid SIMs bought in India, VoIP, and Google Earth, we can catch them a la Minority Report and throw them in jail to rot for ever and ever.

Yes, frands, Mumbai 26/11 involved a bunch of

a) cheap SIMs: the kind college kids get to keep in touch with their boy/girlfriends for practically nothing;

b) Skype/random VoIP software: the kind college kids get to keep in touch with their faraway boy/girlfriends for literally nothing;

c) Google Earth, the amazingly well-engineered piece of software available online free for anyone to use

Hmm.

Letting people not use the Blackberry, then, must be a key step if we are to avoid extremist carnage in this country.

What’s with the warped view on technology we have in India?  We have massive auctions for 3G networks, late as it may be, with much fanfare; and then we have the government wanting to monitor people’s Blackberry messages.  What are they going to see anyway?  Most Blackberry users are corporates; if anything, the government will get to see lots of emails about business lunches.  Where’s the privacy in communication anymore?  More importantly, what’s the point pushing for so much technological development in our ‘emerging superpower’ if the purpose is to go through legitimate information in the hope that there MIGHT be some illegitimate information?  The whole process is like searching for a needle in a haystack, only here the needle is wearing running shoes and track pants and slyly sprinting ahead of the truck carrying the hay.

Also, India is setting a great example by threatening (yes, threatening) Research in Motion, the company that manufactures the Blackberry.  Countries that have requested (cough) information to decrypt Blackberry messages are: The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Algeria.  Wow, we’re following a country that disguised spyware as a software update. I’m so proud right now I could regurgitate last night’s dinner.

Atleast I don’t blog from a BlackBerry. Maybe I should, so the government can read this.

To end: (http://tech2.in.com/india/topstuff/smart-mobile-phones/why-the-indian-government-is-wrong-on-blackberry/138012/0)

Recently, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, one of the most important men in India, got a telemarketing call during an extremely important official meeting, offering him an unsolicited home loan. So much for India's state-of-art 'Do Not Call Registry.'

Ahahahahaha.