Centre for Internet and Society

Proposal for Discussion

praskrishna — 2013-12-30T15:46:17Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/proposal-for-discussion.pdf

Promoting Online Content Through 'Wiki Malayalam'

praskrishna — 2016-05-06T15:35:14Z

Practical sessions on using Wiki Malayalam as a medium to preserve the language and promote digital media were held on Thursday, the final day of the two-day workshop on ‘Wiki Malayalam.’

The article was published by New Indian Express on May 6, 2016.

The event was organised jointly by Swadeshabhimani Media Study Centre in conjuction with Centre for Internet and Society and the Wiki Malayalam Fraternity. The sessions were promising, enriching and a big help for promoting online content through Wiki Malayalam which is still in its infancy, the participants said.

Rahimuddhim Sheik of Centre for Internet and Society, and Manoj Karangimadathil, Wikipedia Fraternity, led the sessions on Wiki technicals. It was followed by an interactive practical session wherein participants learned to be an editor and reporter in Wiki Malayalam. Participants were taught to create articles on sandbox through observation of articles published on Wikipedia.

Various aspects for making Wiki Malayalam presentable such as adding more images to the articles were imparted effectively.

Environmentalist Madhav Gadgil, speaking after inaugurating the two-day workshop,the other day, said, “Authenticity of the information in Wikipedia is often questioned but the discussion page offers the option to point out misleading information and to ensure true information and details.”

The introductory session by Madhav Gadgil incorporated various themes and ideas about the workshop, wikipedia commons, wikipedia projects, and its pillars and principles.

In his session he briefed about how wikipedia gives an in-depth information on particular material on a chronological order and various external references for further extensive reading. As an examples Madhav Gadgil discussed about the Athirapilly Hydroelectric Project in Wikipedia. It sets out a chance for anyone to start a new article on any subject.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/new-indian-express-may-6-2016-promoting-online-content-through-wiki-malayalam

Prometheus bound and gagged

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T04:47:46Z

Funny how a healthy person like me can collapse one day and end up in the hospital. The doctor who made me go through every lab test available, finally diagnosed the cause after a chat with me. Apparently, I collapsed because I’m getting angry, increasing my blood pressure. The only solution he said is to stop reading newspapers, as I’m getting agitated by headlines like ‘India can go the China way and block sites’, or by how the government says there’s no Internet censorship while all it’s actions point the other way.

The article by Adarsh Matham was published in the New Indian Express on 20 January 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.

Censorship is a word that is particularly abhorrent for someone like me, who grew up listening to tales of how people like Ramnath Goenka fought the censors during the Emergency. And to say that we’ll start blocking websites in India like China is doing, the most heart wrenching moment I’ve ever heard. While researching for this piece, I came across some information that is out in the open on the Internet, but which is not generating the level of debate it deserves. We seem to be immersed in discussing Kolaveri, while slowly sliding into an Orwellian nightmare. As an example, I didn’t know there are rules called ‘Intermediary Guidelines’ and ‘Cyber cafe rules’, and I bet you didn’t either. As Pranesh Prakash of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has pointed out in a blog post, these two rules alone, made up by the Department of IT in April 2011, give the government and citizens of India great powers at censoring the web by allowing them to get Internet firms to remove content that is ‘disparaging’, ‘doesn’t have rights to’, etc.

Killing freedom of speech is only the first crime of these rules as proved by the good people at CIS. To test these rules, they complained against some frivolous content to ISPs and Internet companies, which resulted in six out of seven listings being removed without informing posters or users. More alarmingly, of the 358 items the Government of India (and some states) has requested Google to remove, only eight were for hate speech, one for national security, and an astounding 255 for ‘government criticism’.

Since introducing these draconian rules, the tale only gets murkier. Not content with asking Internet firms to self-regulate, Kapil Sibal has introduced an amendment to the Copyright Act, which introduces section 52(1)(C ), that allows anyone to send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. While this sounds normal, the catch is that ‘the Internet company has to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious’. This amendment is before Rajya Sabha, and considering how our Parliament passes bills without a debate, it’ll become a law very soon.

Baleful rules and people behind them fail to realise that such efforts will lead to the Streisand effect, whereby attempts to hide any information will lead to it being publicised more widely. Yes more widely, because you can take out some content, but India’s youth will re-post it in a million places within minutes, like they do with pirated movies. We play a lot of cunning games just to live peacefully in India already. Please don’t let us play them online too.

The writer is a tech geek.
Email: articles@theadarsh.net

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/prometheus-bound-and-gagged

Project Tiger: Wikipedia ropes in locals to contribute articles in Indian languages

praskrishna — 2019-06-05T06:37:55Z

The project has generated content in Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, Odiya and Gujarati.

The article by Tushar Kaushik was published in Economic Times on May 29, 2019.

Hundreds of people from across the country are generating online content in local Indian languages and are even competing in ‘editathons’ that pit contributors of different languages against each other.

While online encyclopedia Wikipedia’s content might be exhaustive in English, its content in Indian languages is limited. Keeping this in mind, Wikipedia’s parent organization Wikimedia Foundation, and Google, roped in Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) - Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Wikimedia India Chapter in 2017 and started ‘Project Tiger’ aimed at generating more content in Indian languages. A pilot project was held from December 2017 to May 2018 and another phase of the competition is set to begin next month. The project has generated content in major languages such as Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, Odia and Gujarati.

The contributors are from varied age groups, some are also from remote, rural areas and they worked from different cities across the country. Two years ago, Durga Prasanna, a journalism student at Alva’s college in Karnataka’s Dakshina Kannada district, joined a group of contributors to Wikipedia as part of a requirement from the college. She got an opportunity to participate in ‘Project Tiger’ last year. She generated Wikipedia entries in Kannada and also in the regional languages of Tulu and Konkani. Apart from Durga, seven other students of her college together contributed over 70 articles in Kannada, and a few in Tulu and Konkani, during the ‘editathon’. “We were provided a long list of topics on which not much literature existed in the local languages and among them, we chose topics based on our interests. For example, I wrote articles on ‘psychologist’ and ‘medicinal plants’,” she said.

Another participant, Charan Gill, a 65-year-old former social worker from Patiala, Punjab, was the top contributor in Punjabi. “I wrote 432 articles in a span of two-and-a-half months.However, contributing is not new to me as I have written over 10,000 Wikipedia entries in Punjabi since 2012,” he says.

Gill now works with another Wikimedia project, translating literary classics into Punjabi. He is currently translating some works of 19th century Russian author Ivan Turgenev. Thanksto Gill’s contributions, the Punjabi community of contributors won the prize for producing the most articles — 1,320. In Tamil, 1,241 articles were contributed. A total of 78 articleswere produced in Kannada by eight members.

Gopalakrishna A, community advocate for Kannada language, CIS-A2K, said all written articles were evaluated by a Wikimedia team jury to check if they fulfilled all criteria beforebeing uploaded on Wikipedia set for the contest. Once they fulfil the criteria, the articles are eligible for the prizes. “The main idea was to create content in Indian languages. Thethings most Indian contributors required were internet and hardware support. So participants who had made significant contributions prior to the competition Wikimediaprojects were provided internet connections or laptops Chromebooks,” he said.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/economic-times-may-29-2019-tushar-kaushik-project-tiger

Project Loon

praskrishna — 2015-03-09T16:17:41Z

Billions of people could get online for the first time thanks to helium balloons that Google will soon send over many places cell towers don’t reach.

The article published in MIT Technology Review quotes Sunil Abraham.

You climb 170 steps up a series of dusty wooden ladders to reach the top of Hangar Two at Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California. The vast, dimly lit shed was built in 1942 to house airships during a war that saw the U.S. grow into a technological superpower. A perch high in the rafters is the best way to appreciate the strangeness of something in the works at Google—a part of the latest incarnation of American technical dominance.

On the floor far below are Google employees who look tiny as they tend to a pair of balloons, 15 meters across, that resemble giant white pumpkins. Google has launched hundreds of these balloons into the sky, lofted by helium. At this moment, a couple of dozen float over the Southern Hemisphere at an altitude of around 20 kilometers, in the rarely visited stratosphere—nearly twice the height of commercial airplanes. Each balloon supports a boxy gondola stuffed with solar-powered electronics. They make a radio link to a telecommunications network on the ground and beam down high-speed cellular Internet coverage to smartphones and other devices. It’s known as Project Loon, a name chosen for its association with both flight and insanity.

Google says these balloons can deliver widespread economic and social benefits by bringing Internet access to the 60 percent of the world’s people who don’t have it. Many of those 4.3 billion people live in rural places where telecommunications companies haven’t found it worthwhile to build cell towers or other infrastructure. After working for three years and flying balloons for more than three million kilometers, Google says Loon balloons are almost ready to step in.

It is odd for a large public company to build out infrastructure aimed at helping the world’s poorest people. But in addition to Google’s professed desires to help the world, the economics of ad-supported Web businesses give the company other reasons to think big. It’s hard to find new customers in Internet markets such as the United States. Getting billions more people online would provide a valuable new supply of eyeballs and personal data for ad targeting. That’s one reason Project Loon will have competition: in 2014 Facebook bought a company that makes solar-powered drones so it can start its own airborne Internet project.

Google’s planet-scale social-engineering project is much further along. In tests with major cellular carriers, the balloons have provided high-speed connections to people in isolated parts of Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Mike Cassidy, Project Loon’s leader, says the technology is now sufficiently cheap and reliable for Google to start planning how to roll it out. By the end of 2015, he wants to have enough balloons in the air to test nearly continuous service in several parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Commercial deployment would follow: Google expects cellular providers to rent access to the balloons to expand their networks. Then the number of people in the world who still lack Internet access should start to shrink, fast.

Balloon revolution

“HARMLESS SCIENCE EXPERIMENT.” That’s what was written on the boxes carried by the balloons that the secretive Google X lab began to launch over California’s Central Valley in 2012, along with a phone number and the promise of a reward for safe return. Inside the boxes was a modified office Wi-Fi router. The balloons were made by two seamsters hired from the fashion industry, from supplies bought at hardware stores.

Project Loon is now much less like a science project. In 2013, Google began working with a balloon manufacturer, Raven Aerostar, which expanded a factory and opened another to make the inflatable “envelope” for the balloons. That June, Google revealed the existence of the project and described its first small-scale field trials, in which Loon balloons provided Internet service to people in a rural area of New Zealand. In 2014, Project Loon focused on turning a functional but unwieldy prototype into technology that’s ready to expand the world’s communication networks.

Loon’s leaders planned to buy their own space on the radio spectrum so their balloons could operate independently of existing wireless networks. But Google CEO Larry Page nixed that idea and said the balloons should instead be leased to wireless carriers, who could use the chunks of the airwaves they already own and put up ground antennas to link the balloons into their networks. That saved Google from spending billions on spectrum licenses and turned potential competitors into allies. “Nearly every telco we talk to wants to do it,” says Cassidy.

Project Loon aims to change the economics of Internet access

Google has also made major improvements to its stratospheric craft. One of the most significant was developing a way to accurately pilot balloons across thousands of miles without any form of propulsion. The stratosphere, which typically is used only by weather balloons and spy planes, is safely above clouds, storms, and commercial flights. But it has strong winds, sometimes exceeding 300 kilometers per hour. Providing reliable wireless service means being able to guarantee that there will always be a balloon within 40 kilometers.

Google solved that aviation problem by turning it into a computer problem. Winds blow in different directions and at different speeds in different layers of the stratosphere. Loon balloons exploit that by changing altitude. As a smaller balloon inside the main one inflates or deflates, they can rise or fall to seek out the winds that will send them where Google wants them to go. It’s all directed by software in a Google data center that incorporates wind forecasts from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into a simulation of stratospheric airflow. “The idea is to find a way through the maze of the winds,” says Johan Mathe, a software engineer working on Loon’s navigation system. A fleet of balloons can be coördinated that way to ensure there is always one over any particular area.

The first version of this system sent new commands to Loon balloons once a day. It could find a way for a balloon launched over New Zealand, for example, to dawdle over land until prevailing winds pushed it east and over the Pacific Ocean. Then it would have the balloon ride the fastest winds possible for the 9,000-kilometer trip east to Chile. But that system could only get balloons within hundreds of kilometers of their intended target. For tests of Internet service in New Zealand and elsewhere, the company had to cheat, launching Loon balloons nearby to make sure they would be overhead. In late 2014, Google upgraded its balloon navigation system to give balloons fresh orders as frequently as every 15 minutes. They can now be steered with impressive accuracy over intercontinental distances. In early 2015, a balloon traveled 10,000 kilometers and got within 500 meters of its desired cell tower.

Google has also had to figure out how to make the balloons sturdier, so they can spend more time in the stratosphere. The longer they stay up, the lower the cost of operating the network. However, weight considerations mean a balloon’s envelope must be delicate. Made from polyethylene plastic with the feel of a heavy-weight trash bag, the material is easily pierced with a fingertip, and a stray grain of grit in the factory can make a pinprick-size hole that will bring a balloon back to earth after less than two weeks.

Preventing those leaks is the work of a squad inside Project Loon that has doggedly chased down every possible cause and come up with preventive measures. These researchers have studied balloons retrieved from the stratosphere, pored over video footage of others inflated to bursting on the ground, and developed a “leak sniffer” to find tiny holes by detecting helium. The leak squad’s findings have led to changes in the design of the balloon envelope, fluffier socks for factory workers who must step on the envelopes during production, and new machines to automate some manufacturing steps. Altogether, Google has introduced the first major changes the balloon industry has seen in decades, says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, who oversees manufacturing for Project Loon and previously worked on Apple’s manufacturing operations. Those changes have paid off. In the summer of 2013, Loon balloons lasted only eight days before having to be brought down, says Krishnaswamy. Today balloons last on average over 100 days, with most exceeding that time in flight; a handful last as long as 130 days.

Google has also made many improvements to the design of the Loon balloons’ payloads and electronics. But it still has problems left to solve. For example, Google needs to perfect a way of making radio or laser connections between balloons, so that they can pass data along in an aerial chain to connect areas far from any ground station.

But Cassidy says Project Loon’s technology is already at a point where stratospheric Internet service can be tested at a global scale. In 2015 he aims to evaluate “quasi-continuous” service along a thin ribbon around the Southern Hemisphere. That ribbon is mostly ocean, but it will require a fleet of more than 100 Loon balloons circling the globe, says Cassidy. “Maybe 90 percent of the time,” he says, “people in that ring will have at least one balloon overhead and be able to use it.”

Good signals

“It was just for some minutes, but it was wonderful,” says Silvana Pereira, a school principal in a rural area of northeastern Brazil. She’s thinking back to an unusual geography class last summer in which pupils at Linoca Gayoso Castelo Branco School could use the Internet thanks to a Loon balloon drifting, invisibly, high overhead. Internet service is nonexistent in the area, but that day’s lesson on Portugal was enhanced by Wikipedia and online maps. “They were so involved that the 45 minutes of a regular class wouldn’t be enough to satisfy their demand for knowledge,” says Pereira.

Her school is only around 100 kilometers from a metro area of more than one million people, but its location is too poor and sparsely populated for Brazil’s wireless carriers to invest in Internet infrastructure. Google’s goal is for Project Loon to change those economics. It should be possible to operate one Loon balloon for just hundreds of dollars per day, Cassidy says, and each one should be able to serve a few thousand connections at any time. The company won’t reveal how much it is spending to set all this up, or even how many people work on the project.

Cassidy is also confident that his balloons will be able to hold their own against Internet delivered by drones (both Google and Facebook are working on that) or satellites (an idea being pursued by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk). Those projects are less far along than Loon, and it’s expensive to build and power drones or launch satellites. “For quite some time, balloons will have a big cost advantage,” Cassidy says. Nevertheless, Google might be hedging its bets with more than just drones: in January it invested $900 million in SpaceX.

Technology is not the only thing keeping 4.3 billion people offline, though. For example, policies in India mandate that telecom companies provide coverage to poor as well as rich areas, but the government hasn’t enforced the rules, says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bangalore. He is also wary of Project Loon because of the way Google and other Western Internet companies have operated in developing countries in recent years. They have cut deals with telecoms in India and other countries to make it free to access their websites, disadvantaging local competitors. “Anyone coming with deep pockets and new technology I would welcome,” he says, but he adds that governments should fix up their patchy regulatory regimes first to ensure that everyone—not just Google and its partners—really does benefit.

Those working on Project Loon are confident the public good will be served. They seem as motivated by a desire to make people’s lives better as by Loon’s outlandish technology. Cassidy’s voice wavers with emotion when he thinks back to seeing the delight of Pereira’s pupils during their Internet-enabled geography lesson. “This is a way of changing the world,” he says.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/news/mit-technology-review-february-18-2015-project-loon

Progress

praskrishna — 2016-04-02T14:40:15Z

Progress

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy7_of_w1.jpg

Programme Booklet

praskrishna — 2013-11-20T04:30:25Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/programme-booklet.pdf

Program Associate at CSCS

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T04:24:07Z

word

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/programme-associate

Profit by Sharing: Anatomy of an Open Source Hardware Business

praskrishna — 2012-10-17T09:58:06Z

Ian Lesnet, founder of DangerousPrototypes will give a lecture on open hardware and open source at the Centre for Internet & Society office in Bengaluru on October 24, 2012, 3.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m.

Dangerous Prototypes

Dangerous Prototypes started as a hobby on a kitchen table, but now five team members develop new open source electronics projects every month. Open source hardware means every part of an electronic device design can be changed and reused in other projects. Despite giving everything away to users and competitors, open source hardware businesses still flourish. Learn how Dangerous Prototypes started, our development process, the underlying open source business philosophy, and how the business is structured today.

Key Concepts

Open hardware businesses grow by sharing. Companies share design information with customers, the customers create communities that give improvements and fixes back to the company. Sharing is mutually beneficial to the company and community.

An open development process is a further extension of open hardware. The company designs products publicly, with active support and input from the community. Sharing extends to design review, improvements, and even testing before the project is launched.

Ian Lesnet

Ian builds a new open hardware project every month at DangerousPrototypes.com. Copies of the projects are available from Seeed Studio's open hardware manufacturing service.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/anatomy-of-an-open-source-hardware-business