If you happen to visit a mall here at Phoenix Mills this Tuesday, you may see D Sivanandan, the city’s Commissioner of Police, playing ‘snakes and ladders’ with some youth.
The game will, however, be played with a twist. Instead of numbers (1-99), the board (size of a table) will have captions like ‘Have you ever shared your online password with anyone?’. If the answer is ‘yes’, the player will go down the snake’s tail. This is just one of the multiple events being held for a whole week across this city by not only the police force, but also industry bodies like Nasscom, IMC, TiE, Ficci and government bodies like The Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC) and the Department of Information Technology, besides consulting firm KPMG (knowledge partner) — all in a bid to help raise awareness among the residents of this city about cyber crimes. State home minister R R Patil will be present at select functions.
For instance, if you miss the event at Phoenix, there will be two other malls across the city you can go to. Else, you may participate in a video chat with Sivanandan on Thursday. You only need to step into a Reliance Web World to do this. “We have already started by asking all industry associations and telcos to send out as many emails and SMSes as they can for the video chat,” says Vijay Mukhi, internet expert and part of the organising committee for some of the events. He adds that the committee will request cable and direct-to-home operators to either air the interview (since it’s a video feed) or relay the programme later. Reliance Communications (RCom) will take care of the backend.
Tomorrow, around 50 police officers will visit WNS “to sensitise themselves on how business process outsourcing (BPOs) centres or call centres work”. “Many police officers do not understand, for instance, why BPO employees work at night. This visit will help them understand that,” says Mukhi.
Even the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will participate in the event, by distributing around 9,000 comics on cyber crime in English, Hindi and Marathi. The objective is to make youth aware of why internet piracy should be taken seriously. C-DAC, on its part, will provide around 1,00,000 brochures and posters on the issue. “These will be distributed to the youth and housing societies to make them aware of how cyber crimes are perpetrated,” says Mukhi.
Also on the cards are interactions between the police force and chief information officers of companies so that “the police can understand the concerns stemming from social networking sites and find ways to deal with them”. Besides, on Wednesday, there will be a programme on ‘cyber terrrorsm’ conducted by RCom. KPMG will release a survey on how many Wi-Fi connections are not secured. Emails regarding the Mumbai attacks were sent on ‘unsecured or open Wi-Fi’ networks. “One survey will deal with ‘war driving’, wherein we have captured all ‘open Wi-Fi’ networks in the city”, says Nitin Khanapurkar, executive director of KPMG India.