China is setting a dangerous precedent for humanity as a whole.
Not caring about what's happening in China is not caring about humanity at all.
Whats different from the attrocities committed by organised terror like ISIS when compared to the atrocities committed by Chinese government towards Tibetians, Muslims, Prisoners etc. ?
For all the boasting about Privacy, Humanity by Apple it gives away data to Chinese govt for someone to rot in their prison or worse death. So is the state of all other companies doing business with China.
Now that it's a super power, it's been flexing its power outside its borders. It aided in the genocide of Tamil population in Srilanka during final Elam war just to get to India at south. It has a military base in Myanmar & we all know what happened there.
This is the thing I worry about, technology is making it easier to speak up against the power but its also making much easier to quash any rebellion before it gathers steam. Autocratic empires like china are using technology quite efficiently to do this. God only helps us if an AGI or near AGI gets into the hand of a regime like this before anybody else.
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 ).
Now that the BJP has found an ally in the AIDMK and Nitish kumar, I am hoping that they will take their foot off the Hindutva pedal.
It is ironic, that in its efforts to serve as opposition to Islam, Hindu ideologues are reforming Hinduism to fit a more abrahmic/western definition of religion.
If Hinduism is to be thought as the culture and beliefs of people living in the Indian subcontinent around 1000AD (the earliest origins of the Sindhu -> Hindu name). Then it completely separates itself from any scripture based religious belief system.
If the original scriptures of the Sanathan Dharma are to be used as guide books to define Hinduism, then the modern cultural beliefs of each region in India have diverged enough that they bear no resemblance to the original scriptures. The most egregious would be that beef, was seen as purely a food item. In addition, these scriptures were studied and followed mostly by the upper class. So, it is hard to make it apply to the whole country.
I don't see light at the end of the the tunnel, but the hypocrisy of the reformists is certainly hilarious.
There are a few fascinating notable exceptions. Israel and Egypt in particular support and sponsor archeology - probably for some similar and some diverging reasons.
This really makes me wonder why controlling the understanding of anything older than 3000 years ago is such a big deal. Isn't there a statute of limitations on this kind of thing?
It might be tied to the ancient notions of lineage that have somehow persisted into the modern era and for bettet or fot worse link the ancient with the modern.
For an interesting take on the ancient history of conflict among Semitic tribes, I recommend Matthew Woodring Stover's Jericho Moon. The ancient Hebrews come across a lot like marauding Bedouin tribes.
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.
As an Indian who has worked extensively in multiple elections have "been there done that", let me tell everyone that above comment is completely ridiculous and devoid of any truth. It is not even a fringe phenomenon.
Let me answer the original question.
No one buys a vote in return of goodies. They buy "loyalty" vote is a consequence of that.
Each candidate appoints a booth level worker first. The booth level worker is in the inner circle of trust for the candidate and booth size is typically <1400 voters. Entire history of voting patterns of each booth is available publicly. A worker may handle multiple booths too.
The booth worker being a local already knows which way the winds are blowing and how to change their directions. For the poorest of poor he might offer cash and alcohol. For others he might offers government jobs, fake degrees, sex, licenses for businesses, shut eye approach towards illegal construction, protection from abusive husband and so on.
Once the voter buys in, he has to show absolute loyalty towards this candidate. He is expected to appear in rallies, at local speeches and even argue in favor of the candidate in market. Each person has enemies and in case Mr X appears to be saying unfavorable things in public someone will inform the booth level worker who will then show up at his house with goons.
You also need to understand secondary consequences of this sort of signaling. It means if a person was seen so actively working for Candidate X and if candidate Y wins, Candidate Y will not even help this person in future because obviously he was seen with Candidate X so often. (This can literally ruin people's lives from what I have seen). This also means there is zilch advantage for the person to backstab candidate X at the voting booth. (If you are married to her , you might as well have sex with her sort of thing). It is this phenomenon that eliminates back stabbing voters.
In my personal experience this soon reaches the level of lassie fair economics. At some point it pays lot more to simply sabotage the booth agent of your opponent instead of actually buying voters. If your prospective booth agent betrays you, you lose hundreds of votes. Just like voters even the booth agents are greedy. The candidate gives him lot of cash to distribute but sometimes he just keeps it to himself.
Part of the reason why BJP has done well in recent times despite spending less money than Congress is because BJP relies on its sister organization RSS which is a cadre based organization. They have pre-vetted individuals at every booth level whose loyalty is beyond doubt. The Congress party on other hand mostly relies on mercenary concept. They do a primary round of bidding where people who want their tickets tell how much money they can spend. The highest spender will then be given the ticket to fight elections. He has to donate 10% upfront to the party chief.
Note:
In my personal experience, with the exception of certain regions in most regions elections are pretty fair and are not determined by money. At least when it comes to Federal (central) elections. All candidates are aware of this fact. You might be able to gain additional 3% votes by sheer cash but you need to employ various other tactics to get more votes. As the middle class in India becomes larger and more aspirational the bids for votes change too. Even the poorest of poor now has electricity and hence correctly values 24x7 electricity above Rs 500 once in 5 years.
> At some point it pays lot more to simply sabotage the booth agent of your opponent instead of actually buying voters.
Could you please elaborate how after the booth agent is sabotaged, he changes the voters mindset or vote? I believe it is very difficult to actively do it i.e. tell the voters to vote for the opposite candidate. At the maximum it will be very passive i.e. he keeps the money to himself and simply not go to voters to work for his candidate.
Booth agents are sabotaged very early in the campaigning process. The most common scenario is where the booth agent will secretly contact the opposition candidate and continue to pretend to be loyal to his own master while deliberately feeding incorrect information. In many cases he will simply not spend the cash that was given to him to distribute among voters. In some cases he will deliberately ignore visiting the swing votes.
Isn't this very risky? There is a high chance that he will get caught. A smart politician would do recce to see if the money is distributed. What would happen if he is caught?
That is an excellent observation. People and societies are more or less very similar all across the world. The details might vary but the main motivations are more or less same.
This is true. Especially in the slum area's this is very common. The voters are supposed to switch off the burning camper with their hand as a religious promise ritual.
I have heard from family members who were approached by party workers asking to swear on god to get money. But they refused. It doesn’t happen in rich and posh areas they target less developed uneducated neighborhoods.
There is no doubt in some remote corner of India some party worker might ask people to swear on their kids, gods and what not. But let me confirm that it is not even a phenomenon. Mostly figure of speech. OP used graphic details as if it is some cult practice "For Hindu voters, a plate with oil lamp, an idol, a mixture of auspicious powder is used."
Either the party worker has to be naive to believe that such ritual has any value or the people have to be completely stupid. Poor people are desperate and will happily take whatever money that comes their way and will not care too hoots about swearing on Gods. Remember if you can do a ritual to swear on God another one can invent a ritual to free you from that oath.
I don't understand why this is being down voted. The op is backing his argument with a link to national news paper and he is getting down voted. This post getting down voted is the proof of educated people still having caste feelings within them. Thanks to the Indian Constitution, without it most of population in India would never had education.
I am not sure what your agenda is, but your response is disingenuous. You have taken a specific and rare incident which was reported for its "shock value" (it is quite easy in India to publish a story with an agenda) and have presented it in a manner which implies it is some sort of a norm.
While there certainly is corruption, given the size and scale of elections in India, it is laudable that things are conducted in a proper manner for the large part.
If their integrity on privacy is true, they why lie about the PRISM program? What assurance do we have that Apple isn't part of PRISM or similar program anymore.
Apple as a hardware company,privacy narrative has worked in its favour & yes the consumers as well; but seeing it as a saviour of our privacy is just naive.
What I respect about Apples approach to this is their commitment to not being able to access your data themselves anyway. That way the NSA can hit them with whatever secret court orders they like, Apple cannot help them. They’re not completely there yet, but they appear to be doing it and nobody else seems to be even trying.
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!
Bill Gates in past has supported horrible centralized mechanisms like Common Core. People like Bill Gates do not fully understand countries like India and their knowledge solely comes from "Intellectual Yet Idiots"[1].
Certainly. It's a free country after all. There's already an army of "critics" in Indian Supreme Court who want Aadhar to be thrown into the bin under Article 21.
It won't happen any time soon or even ever. There are already talks of a Universal Basic Income by two major parties. They need this kind of infrastructure to roll out their scheme soon.
In short it will be mostly activist rage on Twitter, and beyond that nothing much actually.
Realistically there is no concept of security and much less privacy in India. you could do a filetype:xlsx PAN aadhaar on Google and tons of files with phone numbers, addresses etc will show up. The central voting list of all voting eligible indians with age, address, gender etc is publicly available to anyone who wants at https://electoralsearch.in/ You just have to give the starting initial like A and leave everything else blank.
Despite terrible service and security, I still opened an account few years ago. Why? Because statements from private banks are not a valid address for various purposes. I was hit hard because I needed a new passport, and they changed the rule last minute (barely any notice) that only nationalized banks are acceptable, and even if I made a new account I still needed multiple months of statements.[1]
So despite the fact I would rather not have a nationalized bank account at all, I'm forced to keep one just in cases something else changed in future without any notice. And that's one reason why many other people prefer to open at-least one (first) account there.
This is untrue. The list of documents that are valid as proof-of-address when applying for a passport [1] include electricity bill, water bill, telephone bill, gas connection, election ID, rent agreement among many others. If you're really keen on using your bank passbook for some reason, you'll be happy to know that ICICI and HDFC (the largest private banks) are also accepted [2].
I have an SBI bank account but I've never had to use it for anything in the past half a decade. So I would dispute your claim that it's indispensable.
I was like 20/21 then, without any kind of bills as they were all under parents name. I missed on elections, so didn't have election ID. I had an ICICI account though for years, and it was for a fact rejected back in 2014, and that is exactly why I opened SBI. Maybe they changed the rule now. And that is exactly the reason why I or some of my friends had an nationalized bank account back then. My complain here is that govt keeps changing rules, and SBI is kind of safe choice even though I don't use it for anything.
You could get address proof from local municipality or BDO (if rural area).
And you could get India Post's address proof. Very little known feature but excellent. I have used it once in a city where I was there just for 5 months.
I work with US FIs and security isn't great there either(some don't even have a legit HTTPS cert). Even private Indian banks don't have secured sites, you could still get your details leaked there as well. As for Aadhar, it's no longer necessary for opening an account.
Citibank sends me Credit Card fraud alerts and when I click on those links I end up on links that are not from citibank domain but some third party service. I am then expected to enter my bank login on that site. I always thought this was fishing until the bank support confirmed to me that it is legit.
Many private banks have strange ways of conducting business. I've been receiving calls from ICICI Bank (through private numbers) to verify my Credit Card. The procedure eventually ends with the operator asking me to enter my CVV through IVRS. Now how am I supposed to know if the IVRS(or even the operator) is legit? On one hand we are not supposed to share our details with anyone and the on the other hand the bank itself asks for these details through shady numbers. It's sad that banks don't do anything properly without RBI guidelines.
The Indian banks, especially public banks, have been hounding everyone with an account for their Aadhaar number for the past 3+ years. It only stopped when the 5 judge bench of the SC ruled last year that Indians have a Right to Privacy and Aadhaar cannot be demanded for everything.
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.
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.
>The Ministry of Home Affairs on Friday clarified that its recent order authorising 10 agencies to snoop on any computer in the country in the interest of national security is based on the UPA-era IT Act and the IT Rules 2009 that allow for surveillance by a competent authority and said all cases of surveillance will be placed before a review committee headed by the cabinet secretary.
I know for sure that "give password or spend 7 years in jail" is not a new rule. It was there for at least a while.
>Section 69 of the Information Technology Act, as amended by the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, empowers the central and state governments to compel assistance from any "subscriber or intermediary or any person in charge of the computer resource" in decrypting information. Failure to comply is punishable by up to seven years imprisonment and/or a fine.
>A major amendment was made in 2008. It introduced the Section 66A which penalized sending of "offensive messages". It also introduced the Section 69, which gave authorities the power of "interception or monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource". It also introduced for child porn, cyber terrorism and voyeurism. It was passed on 22 December 2008 without any debate in Lok Sabha. The next day it was passed by the Rajya Sabha. It was signed by the then President (Pratibha Patil) on 5 February 2009.
Not caring about what's happening in China is not caring about humanity at all.
Whats different from the attrocities committed by organised terror like ISIS when compared to the atrocities committed by Chinese government towards Tibetians, Muslims, Prisoners etc. ?
For all the boasting about Privacy, Humanity by Apple it gives away data to Chinese govt for someone to rot in their prison or worse death. So is the state of all other companies doing business with China.
Now that it's a super power, it's been flexing its power outside its borders. It aided in the genocide of Tamil population in Srilanka during final Elam war just to get to India at south. It has a military base in Myanmar & we all know what happened there.
Edit:Typo