On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 2:10 AM, Praveen A pravi.a@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/26 Raj Mathur raju@linux-delhi.org:
Er, would you have some data to back up that statement? If you mean organised crime is technically advanced, sure, I have no quarrel with that.
I could have used 'Many' instead of 'Most'. But I meant to include entities like the 'US Government ' and their agencies in the term 'organized crime industry'.
There are plenty of known cases in proprietary software for elections, hedge funds and ... Desktops/servers : )
If some body commits a cyber crime from an OSS platform, then it becomes a honest crime only if the relevant scripts/programs along with relevant documentation are published ... with due credits.
This is an interesting article which shows what some of the corporate "cutting edge research" produces.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye
That is another biased article by Klein. Democracy, unions and information are not as problematic as Klein believes it to be. The people's daily online for example provides lot more info. The problem is more severe in other countries, where the dominant media is more tightly in corporate reins and people are fed 'democracy'. Capitalism is always a problem. ... may be a lesser problem when trained administrators try to rein them in.
Research in pattern recognition and facial recognition has been a hot topic... especially since the seventies. It has its positive and evil uses. But basic research on the subject is 'well known'. Given the capability of present day computers, it adds an extra dimension to spying and surveillance. The US administration (a bunch of corporates) also has a partly stated full time imperialism programme in place in this regard.
A different concern is the private research carried out by different secret service and defence agencies. The 'who-knows-what-it-is ' programs produced will be all the more unknown.
Best
A. Mani