Copy/Pasting America

Recently, there was news that the Indian government wants to write its own operating system (OS) for use in national security contexts. The belief is that it would be proprietary and hence harder for hackers and terrorists to break into to steal data.

While there is no guarantee it will come through or be better at security than what’s in use today, it does raise interesting possibilities. America has a history of items developed for defense purposes that eventually got used in the civilian domain. The most famous example of that is the Internet itself which was designed as a structure/format using which American installations could communicate even after a Soviet nuclear attack.

Given India’s increasing tendency to copy/paste everything from the US (the good, the bad and the ugly), here’s hoping we too create similar spillover effects from military into civilian areas. Whether or not this OS effort succeeds.

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