Re: Drunken Eben interviewed by Indiatimes

[peterwn]

On Sep 8, 12:29 am, Alexander Terekhov <terek...@web.de> wrote:
> He is on tour in Inida, opening the indian SFLC branch...
>

His statement is NOT the sort of statement that a person under the
influence of alcohol would make.

The sort of comment in the heading is a reflection on the writer, not
the subject.

Eben's answers are quite reasonable and logical. OK, they are open to
counter arguments and discussions, but that is fair enough.

This sort of attitude that India has to sovereignty is nothing new.
For example in the 1970's India demanded that all multinational
subsidiaries operating in India had to be majority owned by locals.
Coca Cola and IBM packed their bags rather than succumb to that. At
that time all IBM 029 card punch machines were made in India (OK they
were obsolete now, but they were an essential item for every computer
installation and data center probably even where non IBM mainframes
were used).

I will however venture to say that no nation would rely on proprietary
software products in matters of state security, especially those from
a foreign company. OK, the British Royal Navy uses MS Windows based
products on its warships, but such systems would be strictly internal
to the ship, and heavily firewalled against external links (IMO they
are a bunch of fools for deploying Windows on warships).

Nations can readily have secure communications links to embassies, UN
delegations, etc by using Linux based computers with open source
cryptography software. The main Achilles heel concerns communications
management and procedures. For example, prefacing every message with
'Heil Hitler' or such like is pretty dumb. The code breakers at
Bletchley Park just loved that sort of thing.