Indian Site Offers Reward For Googler Vandal 84
An anonymous reader writes "Indian website Techgoss, which offered a reward of Rs. 10,000 to get photos of Facebook founder in India, did manage to get photos of Zuckerberg attired in Indian clothes at an Indian wedding. They have followed up the success of the reward for photos of the Facebook founder with a bounty of Rs. 15,000 for the identity / details of the Google India employee who vandalized open source OpenStreetMaps in Jan, 2012. (Rs. 15,000 is one week's wages for a programmer at a top IT company in India)."
Free time (Score:2)
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What's the story behind the story here? Why was that website defaced? Did the person defacing it have some message of importance or was is just the action of a competitor or someone bitter for personal reasons?
The mass media often focus on unimportant stories and provide too little detail on those that do matter. Shouldn't we try to focus on getting the bigger picture and more depth?
Since Google relates to this story is an opportunity to bring up another deeper issue of importance. Sometimes finding out
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"Some men just want to watch the world burn". Regardless who's side they are on
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"Sometimes finding out what is going on in the world requires digging deeper than what the commercial giants publish."
Eliminate the "sometimes", and your statement will be accurate. None of the media reports the whole story. And, most of the media actually reports the story with a spin. The only way to get the real story in any case, is to read from multiple sources, check the police reports, and to read the transcripts of interviews. Even then, if it's really important to you that you have the full sto
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Lots of free time in India??
Well..
Rs. 15,000 is one week's wages for a programmer at a top IT company in India
Maybe there's a glut of programming talent over there and they're targeting the unemployed.
For those in the U.S. (Score:3, Informative)
That's about $300, or roughly what a cashier at Safeway makes in the U.S.
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People in the US forget that most jobs in many companies require minimum wage and benefits. I am going to exclude the less than 40 hours and tip based compensations as, to include those, most of the world would beat the pants off of us.
The minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour; benefits and all support structure (ie: IT, janitorial, break room, etc) will easily bring that up to $10/hour. So the minimum cost of an American is ~$400/week. Although the IT guy gets $300/week, this support structure will easil
Validate claims? (Score:1)
How will they validate that the employee that was turned in really vandalized the data? Witch hunt?
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How will they validate that the employee that was turned in really vandalized the data? Witch hunt?
Who knows. And how do they prevent someone from offering up an innocent (either as a joke or as a calculated move)? The world has changed. First there were bug bounties, which made sense. Now there's a bounty to identify accused vandals. Next there will be serious (and dangerous) bounties on spammers, anonymous bloggers, and who knows who else. And after that? A bounty on more than just their names? Bounties on the heads of members of Anonymous?
That slippery slope people keep clamoring about? I think we
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The world has changed. First there were bug bounties, which made sense. Now there's a bounty to identify accused vandals. Next there will be serious (and dangerous) bounties on spammers, anonymous bloggers, and who knows who else. And after that? A bounty on more than just their names? Bounties on the heads of members of Anonymous?
That slippery slope people keep clamoring about? I think were about to find out if they were right.
You're a little late [wildwestweb.net]
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How will they validate that the employee that was turned in really vandalized the data? Witch hunt?
You would be amazed what can be done with computer forensics today. Or more likely, you would be scared.
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10? people know personally, 100? know after gathering around a friend of a friends display at work - 1000?'s share in the IT photo news - a few will will have the finale say to hire.
If you got that far to get a top brand name job, what work is to the left or right of you or just below you?
Its a very small world at the very top and your now very famous.
Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to be trollish (although just by saying that I may have just pigeonholed myself) but this summary is *really* bad. I can barely follow the logic, grammar, or even the train of thought of those sentences!
Slashdot editors, going downhill, get off my lawn, grumblegrumble....
Re:Article summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, considering that English is not a native language, I'd say we aren't doing too bad on the whole, though there's always room for improvement.
It may not be a "native" language, but it is an official language of the country and it's been part of Indian society for nigh on 200 years. You'd think business people, at least, would be fluent -- and I say "business people" because TFA is obviously an advertisement for this obscure Indian company's contest, rather than anything of interest to the /. audience at large. (Damn, am I flaming Indians, Techgoss, or Slashdot? I can't even tell anymore!)
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Well, considering that English is not a native language, I'd say we aren't doing too bad on the whole, though there's always room for improvement.
It may not be a "native" language, but it is an official language of the country and it's been part of Indian society for nigh on 200 years. You'd think business people, at least, would be fluent -- and I say "business people" because TFA is obviously an advertisement for this obscure Indian company's contest, rather than anything of interest to the /. audience at large. (Damn, am I flaming Indians, Techgoss, or Slashdot? I can't even tell anymore!)
Part of a miniscule fraction of India's population, till just a couple of decades back. Like most other large countries, what the government does officially has little relevance to the reality across the country. Even now, the vast majority of those who know English are the first generation learners in their families, and thus lack much scope for practice. Outside the major cities and towns, schools in English medium are either rare or the quality of the teachers (with regards to English) are abysmal, since
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peeple in murka don ned no dang forin langwujes
we doin rel gud with spekin plan ol murkun
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I can order a cold beer in dozens of countries. I can ask about hot women in most of them too. What more does a guy need?
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I wonder how many Americans know a second language at all, never mind whether they're good or bad in it.
Why wonder, when the data is at your finger tips? Unless by "wonder" you actually mean "insinuate"?
According to Wikipedia, around 16% of Americans speak a foreign language fluently.
Also according to Wikipedia, around 11% of Indians speak English fluently.
And if you really mean it when you say "whether they're good or bad in it", then the number for Americans would be very high (I'd estimate 80%+) since high school students are required to take three to five years of training in a foreign language of their
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Three to five wasted years. What's the point of taking three to five years of French or German (usually the only two languages other than Spanish that are available in high school courses) so that you can speak the language for that one trip you save up for so you can spend two weeks in France in your entire life?
Being able to speak another language is terrific, but it's a real waste of time that could be spent on something else that you will actually use most of your life; not just forget by your mid twent
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That's comparing apples to oranges though, isn't it? I would think that many of those bilingual Americans are first/seconds generation immigrants. A more interesting stat would be "how many Americans speak a second language that isn't the native tongue of one of their close relatives".. :)
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I'm pretty sure English *IS* the native language of the Slashdot editors.
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Exactly what I was thinking, not planning to make an effort in understanding it at this point either. * closes page *
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It's called Hinglish
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Lawn? This patch of gravel with some weeds poking up? This is your LAWN?!?! FFS dude, take your decrepit old ass down to the hardware store, buy some grass seed, some fertilizer, and some garden hose. Hire a truck to dump about 10 (cubic) yards of topsoil before you start with the grass seed. There's a nice strain of Bermuda grass that only grows an inch of so high, so that you won't have to mow your yard all the time. I'll be back next year to see if you have a lawn yet. No way am I wandering into y
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Slashdot has editors? Where do you see signs of that?
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1) site offers 10 000 rs for photos of zuk-zuck in india.
2) site gets the photos.
3) profit
4) site offers 15 000 rs to get the id of the person responsible for harassing the open streetmaps operation.
5) ??
6) profit
zukz sk. presumably the guy is someone who thinks he'll lose his job if openstreetmaps is successful or some nutcase like that. the site offering the reward is a nerd scandal media site or some shit like that. probably they'll get lots of hits because of this and well, maybe even catch the idiot.
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I agree with you, so after reading all the links down as far as I could, here's the gist of it.
Back at the tail end of 2011 a company in Kenya started to get confusing calls from their customers. The customers were asking about promises to set up websites, which is something that the Kenya company doesn't provide. The company looked at their database and noticed that an IP address belonging to a Google offshoot was scaping their company contact database. So they modified their code to provide their own p
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It's basicly this:
An Indian Marklar offered 10000 Marklars to get Marklars of Marklar Zuckerberg wearing Marklars. Now they offer 15000 Marklars to find the Marklar who vandalized Marklar.
300 bucks (Score:2)
(Rs. 15,000 is one week's wages for a programmer at a top IT company in India).
aka about 300 USD
Also the forex abbreviation for their currency is INR not Rs. Its not important, it's one of those sociological study moments where the abbreviation you select tells a lot about your culture and history etc. I don't think Rs is offensive, but I don't know one way or the other for sure, so I'd stick with the known inoffensive INR
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Why Rs would be offensive?
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I know enough about India to know the forex "name" is INR which would presumably be completely inoffensive for all.
I don't know enough about India to avoid little cultural mistakes. Telling Irish people what their currency is will by definition offend either the northerners or the southerners unless you list both pound and euro, and probably once the EU inevitably breaks up, the Punt or whatever it was. The one true currency of the one true China is (oh wait do you mean mainland or what westerners call th
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What's forex got to do with it? Forex identifies the US currency as USD instead of $.
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Re:300 bucks (Score:5, Informative)
Rs is a symbol for currencies called 'rupee' much like $ is a symbol for most currencies called 'dollar' or 'peso' or £ is a symbol for most currencies called 'pound' or ¥ is a symbol for currencies called 'yen' or 'yuan'. It's not offensive, it was the main sign for the currency (and, if you read TFA, you'll see that the Indian website in question is where it came from in the first place.)
Apparently it was replaced in India in 2010 with a new symbol that Slashdot is filtering out (oh noes, Unicode!!) [wikipedia.org], although the fact that you can approximate the old symbol with two Latin letters (it has its own Unicode code point [wikipedia.org]) makes me think that the old one will never truly go away in informal typed use in English (and there are a hell of a lot of English speakers in India).
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Rs has actually been used here in india since forever. no reason for it to be offensive. only very recently we've made a sign of our own, and i dunno how to type it here in this field.
Who wants to be... (Score:2)
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Don't they say 'croreopati' or some such? (10-millionaire)
Ya, but the prize is just a tenth of a lakh (100,000).
Nice (Score:2)
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Whatever the merit of this "reward", I just learned about the existence of http://openstreetmap.org/# [openstreetmap.org], "free geographic data", nice project!
You just heard about openstreetmap? Boy, are you in for a treat! There are many similar great projects out there.
If you like openstreetmap, you're gonna love this. There is a completely free encyclopaedia out there, with free information on just about anything: http://wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org]
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Oh man. You are going to shit yourself when you find out about broadband and social networking.
ruddy heck old boy (Score:2, Informative)
This is being one most audacious chappie. Please do needful to find the same, IS URGENT!!!!
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Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! This is funny because people in other countries speak differently from me!!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!
Also: +4 Informative? Some poor modding going on here.
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Interesting that my comment was moderated Flamebait. Is it because pointing and laughing at poor stereotype-based attempts at humour is frowned upon, or because I criticised the modding* ? Whatever, my Karma is Excellent, I'll take the hit :)
* (which now seems to have been rectified)
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you can get that for free off of pastebin.com
Good idea (Score:1)
Crowd sourcing a criminal investigation, someone could make a lot of money at this idea if they implement it correctly.
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In America, this is called SEE SOMETHING; SAY SOMETHING, where you report anything suspicious, like a brown person walking around. But you don't do it for money. You do it because the lady on the television and at the checkout stand at Wallmart on the little video monitor demands that you do it FOR ZE MOTHERLAND.
Binspam (Score:2)