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BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

theguardian.com

271–280 of 425 posts

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#271

For context, BBC is a propaganda/news platform operated by the same state that colonized India, looted an estimated $45T in wealth, committed genocide on its people, etc. BBC also has a consistent track record of blatant anti-India and anti-Hindu bais. BBC is not above India's laws.

Are you part of Modi’s psy-ops team?

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#272

Investigating the tax affairs of the BBC is like probing the sexual history of monks who've taken a vow of celebacy. It only demonstrates the "independance and impartiality" of the Indian Tax authorities.

Really is the BBC such an uncorrupt entity? A lot of NGOs in India get foreign funding to convert tribals into christianity. Everyone has an agenda. The former colonialists are not holier than thou.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because playing them on the screen involves demuxing audio and video, decoding audio and video, usually using two different but complex codecs, some which have extensive capabilities and features (think multilingual subtitles, interactive menus, etc etc). Oh surely your video player should allow you to pause and play with a remote control, right? More code surface. We probably need an ability to check for updates. An…

All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs. Applications shouldn’t be updating themselves at all; that’s the job of the operating system’s package manager. Really, a video player should be a dumb bit of glue code that wires together file open APIs with video playback APIs, and a few bits and bobs for saving preferences (API) and allowing remote control (another API). There’s no reason whatsoever for a…

neither video/audio decoders nor demuxers nor subtitle format parsing/rendering have OS APIs. hell, there's at least a few ways you can draw a rendered frame to the screen on any OS that will take different paths through either the OS's drawing APIs (if you're not on Linux) or graphics drivers. Even _if_ the OS supported taking video file data and playing it, it wouldn't support all of the codecs/containers/subs you'd want to play.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#274
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here And if you happen to be belong to the rest of the ~99.13% world population, you can grab it here: Episode 1 - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3C378A82CF67A1107523CA6C647077403A1EF74D&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E01+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A…

Ha there is no way that 99% of the world population know what to do with those links / hashes / whatever they are.

They are pretty obviously magnet links, which are used for torrenting. I expect lots of people are familiar with them.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#275

For context, BBC is a propaganda/news platform operated by the same state that colonized India, looted an estimated $45T in wealth, committed genocide on its people, etc. BBC also has a consistent track record of blatant anti-India and anti-Hindu bais. BBC is not above India's laws.

Agreed the BBC is a propaganda machine of Britain similar to global times of China. Now that India's general elections are coming, they will try their best to slander Modi and the current government. India is right to be cautious of foreign media agencies.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overflows

No, what I’m asking is: why does the operating system allow the video player to do anything other than what it needs to do to play videos? If the video player suddenly starts trying to access files on its own (anything not explicitly chosen by the user through system file dialog) or trying to access the internet then the user should be prompted to give permission. We have this kind of API permission (capability) syst…

both of those examples happen within normal usage

file system for finding external subs (or like, playing the video)

internet for streaming

and then oh look, it has the permission

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#277
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was riding bikes to the store we had dialup and floppies were giving way to CDs. It’s been over a decade since I’ve used BitTorrent and I didn’t know magnet links were still popular. I hate seeding and there was also a lot of malware hidden in public trackers. Once I switched to Usenet I never looked back. P2P file sharing has never been a good experience for me.

How does one get malware from playing a .mkv or .mp4 video file?

Media decoders are often rather complicated and often involve parsing data directly into large and constantly changing memory buffers. A huge chunk of Android vulnerabilities have been from vulnerabilities in media libraries, even JPEG parsing has been known to lead to vulnerabilities in Linux.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because playing them on the screen involves demuxing audio and video, decoding audio and video, usually using two different but complex codecs, some which have extensive capabilities and features (think multilingual subtitles, interactive menus, etc etc). Oh surely your video player should allow you to pause and play with a remote control, right? More code surface. We probably need an ability to check for updates. An…

All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs. Applications shouldn’t be updating themselves at all; that’s the job of the operating system’s package manager. Really, a video player should be a dumb bit of glue code that wires together file open APIs with video playback APIs, and a few bits and bobs for saving preferences (API) and allowing remote control (another API). There’s no reason whatsoever for a…

> All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs.

"Standard APIs" isn't some silver bullet to never have any security vulnerabilities. There can absolutely be vulnerabilities in "standard APIs".

ffmpeg is a pretty standard media utility, and it gets lots of CVEs. Decoding complicated media is complicated and often done in unsafe languages in attempts to squeeze more performance.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-3611...

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#279
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer is twofold: China isn't a dictatorship, and you can't reason about all countries using this dictatorship-vs-democracy dichotomy. Can I complain about the man in charge? If I go to social media and I post that I hate the bear, what happens? :-) For comparison purposes, on a daily basis, Klaus Iohannis (the Romanian president) can fill his fridge with meat, as we say in Romanian (I'll let you figure out fr…

The ability to criticize the president is not what's important here, and in fact a focus on that as being some sort of golden metric is also another hurdle in properly understanding China. This is part of the typical "dictatorship-vs-democracy" dichotomy thought that I'm criticizing for not being a good fit for China. Concretely: yes in China there is censorship, and yes you can't just criticize the president. Howeve…

[deleted]

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capone was guilty of tax fraud because the money laundering part of his criminal enterprise was the part that was the least well organised. Nothing wrong with that. Somehow I doubt the BBC is laundering billions in bootlegging money. I don't know anything about the German guy.

The BBC office in Delhi at the Hindustan Times building employs 200+ people, including many UK staff on temporary attachment. It massively expanded in 2016 but it dates back far longer. I wouldn't be confident that every piece of equipment in that office was obtained legally in the country, let alone being able to prove it. For example someone whose mobile phone got lost/smashed/blownup last time they were in Kabul,…

I understand, but looking for one tiny irregularity for political goals is not the same as jailing a mafioso for it who is a money launderer and murderer on a huge scale.

I was arguing with the OP that Capone's sentence was not political but this thing is.

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