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We Tested 18 Government Apps, and Most are not Fully Accessible to the Disabled
When you wake up in the morning, the odds are one of the first things you look at is your phone. You might check WhatsApp, review the news, look at the day’s schedule, and book a taxi to work.
We Truly are the Product being Sold
WhatsApp has announced it will begin sharing user data such as names, phone numbers, and other analytics with its parent company, Facebook, and with the Facebook family of companies. This change to its terms of service was effected in order to enable users to “communicate with businesses that matter” to them. How does this have anything to do with Facebook?
3 Copyright Tips for Students and Educators
Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when it comes to online use of creative works, accidentally crossing the line between fair use and a copyright violation is easy. How do you know what is copyrighted? Recently Frederico Morando (Creative Commons, Italy) and I presented a training session on understanding copyright policies at Wikimania 2016, which was originally proposed by Wikipedian User:Jim Carter. We covered topics such as fundamentals of copyright, exclusive rights, Berne convention, copyleft, Creative Commons licenses, Public Domain, fair use, and copyfraud.
Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses
A campaign has been started to relicense Telugu-language books of several noted authors from "all rights reserved" to Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) license.
The Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India
This essay by Abhimanyu Roy is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author explores how the curious interplays between the arranged marriage market in India the rise of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com. The gravity of the impact that such web-based services have on the lives of users is substantially greater than most other everyday web-enabled transactions, such as an Uber ride or a Foodpanda order. From outright fraud to online harassment, newspaper back pages are filled with nightmare stories that begin on a matrimonial website. So much so that the Indian government has set up a panel to regulate matrimonial sites. The essay analyses the role of matrimonial websites in modern day India, and the challenges this awkward amalgamation of the internet and love gives rise to.
Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language!
The Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month.
CIS Submission to TRAI Consultation on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks
The Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) is grateful for the opportunity to comment on this Consultation Paper (“Paper”). The comments were prepared by Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode. Special thanks to Shyam Ponappa and Arjun Venkatraman for their inputs and feedback.
Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief
Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.
Preserving Languages and Cultures in India: The Birth of the Tulu Wikipedia
After eight years of effort and outreach, the Tulu language Wikipedia has gone live. Wikimedia contributors play a key role in preserving languages and cultures, and tools like the Wikimedia Incubator help new projects like the Tulu Wikipedia get started.
Policy Brief on the Report of the UN Group of Governmental Experts on ICT
In light of the complex challenges and threats posed to, and by, the field of information telecommunications in cyberspace, in 1998 the draft resolution in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly was introduced and adopted without a vote (A/RES/53/70) ]. Since then, the Secretary General to the General Assembly has invited annual reports on the issue.
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଓସିଆର: ଛପା ଲେଖାର ଛବିରୁ ଡିଇଟାଲ ଲେଖା
Though not an open source solution, Google's OCR works really well for Odia and other Indian languages. My column in the Odia daily the Samaja that was published last Saturday briefs about how the OCR works and has a step-by-step process to use it. There is also a little bit of background of Tesseract-based OCR that Debayan Banerjee worked in the past and Nasim Ali from the Odia Wikimedia community is currently working.
Training-the-trainer programme and Mediawiki training at Pune
A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building.
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome
India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: We, Men, Women: Collective Learning in Bridging Indic Wikipedia Gender Gaps
There is no denying that non-English Wikipedias are disproportionally underrepresented in scholarly focus despite the significant role of an open knowledge society can play in smaller linguistic groups – local collaboration and communication, knowledge dissemination, as well as preservation of local language resources.
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool
The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about Wikimedia projects and the contributor community, and at times, encouraging the audience to contribute.
US Copyright law faces constitutional challenge
In a major international development, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit to strike down the provisions on Digital Rights Management(DRM) in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this post, I discuss DRMs, the EFF lawsuit, and then draw upon the differences between the US and Indian copyright regime on DRM protection.
South Asia's Largest Wikimedia Conference Kicks Off in India
Wiki Conference India 2016, the largest gathering of the contributors of Wikipedia (the multilingual online encyclopaedia) and its sister projects called Wikimedia projects, begins August 5 in Landran, in the Indian state of Punjab.
Do I Want to Say Happy B’day?
When it comes to greeting friends on their birthdays, social media prompts are a great reminder. So why does an online message leave us cold?
Community digest: Konkani language speakers are separated by scripts but unite by Wikipedia; news in brief
Konkani-language Wikipedians on what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers who speak in different variations of the same language and write in different scripts.
Book Review: Apocalypse Now Redux
My review for Arundhati Roy and John Cusack's new book that captures their encounter with Edward Snowden, 'Things that can and cannot be said' is now out. It's an engaging, if somewhat freewheeling, political critique of the times we live in.
