h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One story which seems to have escaped BBC News today is a ‘Bandh’ or general strike in Bangalore, India. It’s all over a water-sharing dispute between two provinces, but it regularly flares up into tyre-burning and other forms of general protest. Today’s strike is a serious escalation, with closures of schools, public transport and, worst of all, the local film industry.

http://www.ibtimes.co.in/cauvery-water-row-how-karnataka-bandh-will-affect-bangalore-sept-9-692967

Bangalore is important to the global economy. It’s India’s Silicon Valley. It’s their third largest city (8.5m people), and provides a third of India’s annual $21 billion IT exports.

Most of Bangalore’s 750,000 IT employees will not be travelling to the office today. Those who can will work from home, but it’s a fair bet that a significant amount of productivity will be lost (they’ll be looking after their schoolkids too, not to mention the ones who want to man the barricades). As Bangalore provides key IT services to many of the world’s global businesses, this will be acutely felt, especially if there’s any kind of significant IT problem which coincides with it (you wouldn’t want to be fighting a DDOS attack or outage of your cloud platforms for example).

My advice to IT organisations using Bangalore is to perform a risk assessment of any changes you need to make to your IT systems today, and consider postponing them.

Noted. I'm not in an IT organisation, but I'll pass it on to a friend who runs a public service website.

If IT stands for Idiot technologist, then that's me.

My Indian contact tells me that protests were generally peaceful today and that no-one got hurt, which is a blessing.

That's good to hear. We'll try to be respectful and not have to make calls on our antivirus company or other customer service people, who from their accents all live in Bangalore.

Did agents of the various computer viruses have a hand in the unrest?

It sounds like a very unusual way to do it, but it's an interesting thought.

Viruses are very 'last year', though. These days you get people to download stuff from the internet by phishing scams and the like. The payload has changed too - you don't want to mess their computer up per se, but you might want to steal their personal data, or lock the machine with some sort of 'ransomware' product. Or both.

In the last few hours, the volence has flared up again in Bangalore. My colleagues report buses burning outside the office, and they're a bit besieged. The police have invoked 'unlawful assembly' section 144, which sounds a bit ominous.


http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/cauvery-water-dispute-violence-in-karnataka-tamil-nadu/article9099423.ece

This site gives regular updates - looks like they're sending the paramilitaries in...

http://www.ndtv.com/karnataka-news/cauvery-issue-live-massive-protests-section-144-imposed-in-bengaluru-1457718

This is getting almost no coverage in the US. Ironically we just celebrated Labor Day the previous weekend.

None here, either. It should be of concern for IT organisations, particularly. I suspect many Bangalore techies will not travel to work tomorrow.

I think things are relatively calm again this morning in Bangalore. Overnight, one protester was shot dead by police, and I think public transport is suspended today.

BBC News finally decided to mention it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-37346570

Ah... You know what? I was confusing this with an unrelated strike in India.

This was the strike that I was thinking of regarding lack of US news coverage over the labor day weekend.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/workers-strike-india-protest-economic-reforms-41819329

This one was directly over workers' rights and minimum wage for unskilled labor.

The one you're discussing is much bigger, and more about climate change and ethnic clashes.

And no, neither are getting any coverage here.