Centre for Internet and Society

Gujarati Media Coverage

praskrishna — 2012-12-07T10:21:00Z

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Guilty until Proven Innocent: Pirates, Pornographers, Terrorists and the IT Act in India

praskrishna — 2013-08-28T10:19:23Z

The Research Center of Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg organized the Summer School 2013 at Hamburg, Germany from July 29 to August 2, 2013. Dr. Nishant Shah was a panelist in the session on "Guilty until Proven Innocent: Pirates, Pornographers, Terrorists and the IT Act in India".

The Summer School Book of Abstracts/Information brochure can be downloaded here

This year’s Summer School offered by the Research Center of Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg picked up upon a crucial issue for current media development – a topic relevant to academia, media practice and media policy. In the age of digitisation, the landscape of media and communications is being increasingly influenced by phenomena that can be viewed as reappropriations of previously published media communications. The Summer School pursued central questions about the kinds of reappropriated media communications that were being developed and the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ shaping them. This repurposing was analysed from four different perspectives: repurposing as recombination, as reactualisation, as piracy and as plagiarism.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/repeat-remix-remediate-summer-school-2013

Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs)

praskrishna — 2016-02-05T14:01:32Z

Anubha Sinha attended this meeting organized by the Office of The Controller General, Patents, Designs & Trade Marks in Mumbai on January 12, 2016

Download the Meeting Notice

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/guidelines-for-examination-of-computer-related-inventions-cris

Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs)

praskrishna — 2016-02-05T13:58:56Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guidelines-for-examination-of-computer-related-inventions-cris

GSMA Partners Meeting

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T07:03:40Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/gsma-partners-meeting.pdf

GSMA Conference Invite

praskrishna — 2015-10-14T01:49:36Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/gsma-conference-invite.pdf

Growth of Telecom Industry in India (Poster)

praskrishna — 2013-09-26T10:38:59Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/growth-of-telecom-industry-in-india.pdf

Growth of Telecom Industry in India

praskrishna — 2013-06-03T09:59:12Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/growth-of-telecom

Growing Wikipedia: The India Chronicles

praskrishna — 2011-10-14T09:17:08Z

Tory Read, a professional researcher, writer and journalist was commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation to create a vivid description of its work in India. This was done in the interest of transparency and to ensure that it captured lessons from this new approach. Tory travelled for a couple of weeks across Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and some towns in Kerala — attending community meet-ups speaking with a host of individual community members in these cities. Tory has given a journalistic account and analysis, based on document review, interviews and observations conducted between November 2010 and June 2011, including 16 days in India in June 2011.The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wikimedia Foundation.

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society has been quoted in this report. The following are some direct quotes extracted out from this report:

"Feuding and flaming is an integral part of free software culture.” “You can’t imagine a mailing list without flaming." [The Chapter and the Community Tangle, page 16]

"The crisis on the mailing list was ultimately a great thing.” “There was conflict, dozens of offline conversations, private and public negotiation and airing of views and doubts, followed by a public commitment to work together for a shared purpose." [Necessity Breeds Collaboration, page 19]

"The Foundation’s job is having meetings and growing and holding the consensus." "It should be creating situations in which trust is gained, and you do this through radical transparency and participation. The point of the Foundation’s work is to build the community." [For the Foundation, page 24]

Download the entire report here [PDF, 2.9 MB]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-india-chronicles

Growing cyberspace controls, Internet filtering

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:36:26Z

OpenNet Initiative investigates, analyses filtering and surveillance practices, writes T Ramachandran in this article published in the Hindu on Sunday, February 20, 2011.

Governments in many parts of the world have been aggressively adopting a new generation of controls aimed at filtering and controlling information flow on the Internet, citing concerns such as cyber security, crime and terrorism, according to the OpenNet Initiative.

The OpenNet Initiative, which says it “investigates and analyses Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion,” in its updated study released last year titled, “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace,” said that it was fast becoming the global norm to control information flow on the Internet.

The OpenNet is a collaborative partnership between the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the Ottawa-based SecDev Group.

Asked whether the trend was likely to become more pronounced, given the recent developments in the Middle East, one of the contributors to the study, Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Centre, said, “In general, we see governments becoming more aggressive and more overt about their Internet filtering.”

The OpenNet has described the recent Internet blackout in Egypt as ‘just-in-time-blocking' - when information flow is brought to a halt during critical times such as political crises, elections, or social unrest. Discussions have resurfaced about the deployment of 'Internet kill switches,' a way in which nations could snuff out the Internet when such a crisis occurs.

“For all the talk of Internet kill switches, turning off the Internet is a relatively easy and unsophisticated thing to do. What is hardest to do is filtering on finer, more granular levels,” Mr. Zuckerman told The Hindu.

The first-generation controls were deployed primarily at Internet “choke points,” places in the network where Internet addresses that had been blacklisted by the authorities could be filtered and blocked. These were mainly the gateways run by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The number-based IP addresses connected to particular websites or domain names could be used for the blocking. Keywords could also be used in weeding out proscribed sites or pages.

Reports of watchdogs such as the OpenNet and Freedom House indicate that though not pronounced, selective filtering has been a part of the Indian Internet scene. Google's Transparency Report for the first half of 2010 also shows that India is among the nations from where a number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove or censor content emanate.

“As far as censorship of Internet goes in India it is still first generation in terms of blocking and filtering at the Internet choke points. However, the Indian government has made and is making several moves that continue to undermine privacy and anonymity on the Internet. This has a chilling effect on freedom of expression and information accessing behaviour on the Internet,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Second and third generation techniques of Internet filtering, as described in Access Controlled, are “more subtle, flexible, and even offensive in character,” often using legal regulations to supplement or legitimise technical filtering measures, extralegal or covert practices. These include the use of viruses to infiltrate computer systems, the launching of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and surveillance at strategic points in the Internet and telecommunications infrastructure. The DDoS attacks involve directing traffic of such large volume at targeted sites during a particular period, in order to crash them, or keep them largely inaccessible. Counter-information campaigns could also be mounted, supplemented by policy measures and other strategies, including legal ones.

Governments have also been assiduously building up capabilities for monitoring and intercepting the large volume of information that flows on the Internet, including email, which mostly flows through the infrastructure of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet exchange points. In the Indian context, the I.T. Act “along with the ISP licences allows for blanket surveillance and also data retention,” says Mr. Abraham.

It is difficult to say if this sort of monitoring and interception is really effective in countering terrorism and other national security threats, says Mr. Zuckerman. “I don't believe trading privacy for security is a fair trade.”

Read the original news in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/growing-cyberspace-controls

Grover

praskrishna — 2018-07-24T01:50:31Z

Gurshabad Grover

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

Group Photo of Participants

praskrishna — 2013-07-30T05:42:16Z

Group Photo of Participants

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Group Photo

praskrishna — 2013-07-16T11:22:21Z

Group photo of Telegu Wikipedians

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Ground Zero Summit 2014

praskrishna — 2014-12-05T00:42:17Z

Geeta Hariharan participated in this event organized by India Infosec Consortium on November 13 and 14, 2014 in New Delhi.

Living from the successes of last year and our recent conference in Colombo, Ground Zero Summit 2014, in its second year promises to be Asia's largest information security gathering and proposes to be the ultimate platform for showcasing researches and sharing knowledge in the field of cyber security. The event will feature a panel discussion on cyber diplomacy.

Click to read more about the event

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ground-zero-summit-2014

Ground Zero

praskrishna — 2014-12-05T00:35:49Z

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