We are anonymous, we are legion

Internet Universality Indicators for a Safe, Secure and Inclusive Cyberspace for Sustainable Development

Admin — 2017-11-25T02:04:54Z

Amber Sinha attended an event organized by UNESCO in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India in the run-up to the 5th Global Conferene on Cyberspace (GCCS 2017) on November 17, 2017 at UNESCO Conference Room in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.

Agenda here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/internet-universality-indicators-for-a-safe-secure-and-inclusive-cyberspace-for-sustainable-development

Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?” – A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden

praskrishna — 2011-09-08T03:19:35Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, invites you to a public lecture by Caspar Bowden*, the Chief Privacy Adviser of Microsoft’s Worldwide Technology Office, on Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?

Abstract

In 2000, as Director of the independent think-tank, "Foundation for Information Policy Research", Caspar led a campaign to revise several aspects of a new comprehensive UK law governing electronic surveillance ("the RIP Act"). UK legislated in this area many years before most other countries, and the approach was widely criticized although some amendments were achieved. After a hiatus of a decade, many Commonwealth countries are now copying the RIP law (evidently unaware of the original controversies over its defects). Caspar will discuss the legal-technical intricacies of such legislation, the underlying policy dilemmas, the background context of the failed 1990s policy of “key escrow”, and the subsequent privacy catastrophe of blanket retention of the “traffic data” of all of the 500m citizens of the EU.

Caspar Bowden

Caspar Bowden is Microsoft's Worldwide Technology Officer for Privacy, providing advice on technology policy matters concerning privacy in over 40 countries, with particular focus on Europe and regions with horizontal privacy law. His goal is to ensure that users of Microsoft products and services are in control of their personal data and that fair information practices are respected. He is a specialist in data protection policy, privacy enhancing technology research, identity management and authentication.

Earlier he was the director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research and was also an expert adviser to the UK Parliament for the passage of three bills concerning privacy issues, and was co-organizer of the influential Scrambling for Safety public conferences on UK encryption and surveillance policy. His previous career over two decades ranged from investment banking (proprietary trading risk-management for option arbitrage), to software engineering (graphics engines and cryptography), including work for Goldman Sachs, Microsoft Consulting Services, Acorn, Research Machines, and IBM.

Who should attend?

This public talk aims to engage in a dialogue with anybody interested in questions of technology, surveillance, policy and the politics of Internet based governance. Students, research scholars, academics, practitioners, those in the business of technology development, design and study, are invited to attend the lecture that approaches the issue from different angles of technology, society and politics.

Entry: Free; Limited Seating

Registration recommended: prasad@cis-india.org

For additional info click here [PDF, 521 kb]

* Caspar is speaking in his private capacity and his remarks do not necessarily reflect any official Microsoft position

Videos

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/internet-surveillance-policy-lecture

Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy

akriti — 2019-04-01T16:38:54Z

The Centre for Internet & Society and the University of Munich (LMU), Germany are jointly organizing an international symposium at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on April 5, 2019

Click to download the agenda

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/internet-speech-perspectives-on-regulation-and-policy

Internet Shutdowns: A Modern-day Siege

Ayswarya Murthy — 2017-12-19T16:29:41Z

Strap: Technology activists, lawyers, politicians and NGOs weigh in on the spate of internet shutdowns in India in 2017.

Bangalore, Karnataka: For thousands of years, military sieges have been an effective means of depriving a population into submission. Attackers would surround the fort or city and simply wait for the food to run out. In today’s connected age, you can mount a successful siege remotely with a single signed order that can shut down the internet and practically bring life to a standstill.

So, it’s not surprising that inter-governmental organisations and NGOs around the world are starting to promote the idea that access to internet is a fundamental right, and watchdogs declare any deliberate interference to this access to be a violation of human rights. “In today’s modern digital world, shutting down mobile and internet networks is a drastic action that infringes on everyone’s rights and is inherently disproportionate. Internet shutdowns cut off everyone’s ability to speak and access information, regardless of whether they have done anything wrong. Considering the broad harm to rights that shutdowns can cause, government officials should certainly take them more seriously as a human rights violation,” says Cynthia Wong, senior internet researcher at Human Rights Watch.

But in India, there is no legal recourse yet against such decisions. In 2015, a Public Interest Litigation filed in the Gujarat High Court against a week-long internet shutdown was dismissed (as was a Special Leave Petition filed in the Supreme Court in 2016 challenging this decision). In fact, tech entrepreneur and Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekar attributes the dramatic increase in the number of internet blocks in 2017, which has doubled since last year, to this ruling. “This dramatic increase in the number of internet blocks can be attributed to the Supreme Court ruling in February 2016 which upheld the right of districts and states to ban mobile internet services for maintaining law and order .”

Typically, mobile internet bans were enforced under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure which can prohibit assembly of more than four people and is usually invoked by a district magistrate. “Indeed, mobs come together due to the spread of misinformation over internet services such as Facebook and WhatsApp,” says Chandrasekar. “However, internet shutdowns also disabled authentic news organisations who can dispel such misinformation. I have argued that governments and administrations do have the right to shut down internet or take down content consistent with the Constitution’s Article 19 guarantee of fundamental right to free speech being subject to reasonable restrictions. So, the debate is not whether the government has a right to temporarily shut down the internet or not, but does the government or administration use this right reasonably and with clear guidelines,” he warns.

Enter the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency of Public Safety) Rules that were released in August. The primary concern of tech activists is that these ‘Suspension Rules’ set a dangerous precedent because they legalise internet shutdowns where ideally there should be none. But these rules also received a wary welcome.

"Use of an archaic law like Section 144 of CrPC for shutting down the internet is not justified. The new rules seem to have been hastily put together without much forethought," according to Prasanth Sugathan, legal director at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). “There is no transparency on how these rules were drafted as there was no consultation with the stakeholders. These rules are not conducive to ensuring the right to internet access of citizens which is essential for the success of initiatives like Digital India. As regulations go, these aren’t particularly robust, giving central and state governments the power to shut down telecom services, without having to cite further reasoning than “public safety” and “national security”. In fact, the rules don’t even specify a maximum duration after which services must be restored."

Calling the whole deal shoddy, Sugathan says it seems like they were put out just to subvert the illegality of Internet shutdowns.

Chandrasekar also feels the process should have been more consultation-driven. “The rules can and must be improved to remove adhocism and arbitrary use. As I say repeatedly, these kinds of government policies run the real risk of straying from the reasonable restrictions acceptable to our Constitution to an infringement of the Right to Expression. Governments, especially political leadership, should be careful that bureaucratic lack of imagination or paranoia or simply laziness doesn’t cause that crossover from right to wrong.”

According to SFLC, which has been tracking internet shutdowns in the country over the past five years, authorities in India have shut down networks 60 times just in 2017, spelling a staggering cost to the economy beyond the incalculable harm to human rights. Brookings estimated that the 22 network shutdowns in India from 2015-2016 cost the country’s economy $968 million. It’s baffling that while the government is pushing citizens to embrace ‘Digital India’ on one hand, they are concurrently pulling the rug from underneath these same users with these total and partial internet shutdowns. “From the perspective of promoting India’s digital economy, if people learn they cannot rely on their mobile phone service because of arbitrary disruptions, they are less likely to adopt digital technologies. If the Indian government truly wants to be a global leader in the digital age, it should cease all arbitrary and overbroad restrictions on internet access,” says Wong.

Osama Manzer, founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), has an ever-expanding roster of people who were keenly affected by the shutdowns in their regions, irrespective of whether it last three days or three months. “One of the biggest impacts is that residents must live with is that their access to basic services becomes very limited. In Darjeeling, many state government employees were not paid their salaries because the banking system is online and centralised. The livelihood of sim card sellers and recharge shop owners, internet cafes and mom-and-pop shops that offer printing, scanning, online form filling services took a huge hit. It is especially detrimental to them since they rely on daily sales for their income,” he says.

While the economic impact of internet shutdowns has been documented, the social and psychological impact is just as crucial to investigate, says Manzer, especially in cases where these shutdowns are frequent and long term. DEF is in the final stages of releasing a report based on such a research. “We've found through our research that when shutdowns are ordered for a few days, residents can reason it out and some even find justifications for it. They may say the security and safety circumstances warranted it. But prolonged shutdowns have an acute negative impact on residents psychologically. Residents of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and J&K feel the impact of internet shutdowns acutely. They feel doubly isolated from the rest of the country and their faith in the government erodes. People we've interviewed have said they feel helpless and panicked. Some interviewees in Kashmir went so far as to question the democratic process and their right to it.”

Ayswarya Murthy is a Bangalore-based journalist and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.

Shutdown stories are the output of a collaboration between 101 Reporters and CIS with support from Facebook.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-shutdowns-a-modern-day-siege

Internet Shutdowns in 2016

japreet — 2017-04-28T13:50:09Z

An internet shutdown is an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information.

Download the report: PDF

There is no consolidated research on internet shutdowns worldwide and government policies relating to this phenomenon. Access, however, has been tracking instances of internet shutdowns here. According to this tracker, there were 56 internet shutdowns worldwide in 2016.

In this report, we have identified countries where shutdowns took place more than once in the past one year. We were able to identify these countries from the tracker that is being operated by Access. We have looked at the internet shutdown practices and government policies on shutdowns in these countries. The countries include Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey and Uganda.

We have greatly relied on media coverage of internet shutdowns in the aforementioned countries and reports by various organisations including Freedom House, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Article 19, Access, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Brookings Institution, Annenberg School of Communication, OSCE, Centre for Communication Governance, OONI and Dyn documenting and/or analysing internet censorship in these countries.

While documenting internet shutdown practices in the countries identified above, we have looked at the geographical coverage of a shutdown i.e. whether it was carried out nationwide or in specific regions and type of internet services that were restricted i.e. whether access was restricted to the whole internet, mobile internet services or specific messaging services and/or applications. In this regard, we have referred to a report published by the Brookings Institution, Internet shutdowns cost countries $2.4 billion last year that has analysed the economic impact of internet shutdowns. In this report, the author has identified six categories of disruptions: national internet, subnational internet, national mobile internet, subnational mobile internet, national app/service, and subnational app/ service. I have used this classification to understand and document internet shutdown practices in the aforementioned countries.

This report was featured on the website of the Keep Us Online campaign led by the Internet Freedom Foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-shutdowns-in-2016

Internet Shutdown Stories

ambika — 2019-09-03T09:57:40Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) has published a collection of stories of the impact of internet shutdowns on people's lives in the country. This book seeks to give a glimpse into the lives of those directly affected by these internet shutdown experiments. When seen in a larger context, we hope that the stories in this book also demonstrate that access to the internet and freedom of speech is not just about an individual’s rights, but are also required for the collective good. This is a project funded by Facebook and MacArthur Foundation, and the stories were provided by 101 Reporters. Case studies from the states of Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Telangana, West Bengal, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, and Uttar Pradesh have been highlighted in this compilation.

Read the report here: Download (PDF)

The report is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

Edited by Debasmita Haldar, Ambika Tandon, and Swaraj Barooah

Print Design by Saumyaa Naidu

Advisor: Nikhil Pahwa, Founder and Editor at MediaNama

Foreword

Aside from the waves of innovation that the digital revolution brought with it, the ever increasing pervasiveness of the internet has had a tremendous impact on empowerment and freedoms in society. We are seeing unprecedented levels of access to information, along with a democratization of the means of creation, production and dissemination of information to anyone with an internet connection. This in turn has greatly amplified, and in many cases even created the ability, particularly for those traditionally left in the margins, to more meaningfully participate in their global as well as local societies. Recognising the significance of the internet to the freedom of expression as well as for the development and exercising of human rights more broadly, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously passed a resolution confirming internet access being a fundamental human right.

Simultaneously however, we are seeing Indian states discover and experiment with their power to clamp down on these new modes of communication for a variety of reasons, ranging from the ill-intentioned to the ill-informed. An internet shutdown tracker maintained by the Software Freedom Law Centre, shows that the number of shutdowns in India is increasing every year, with 70 shutdowns reported in 2017,and 45 shutdowns already reported from 1st Jan, 2018 to 4th May, 2018. These shutdowns also come at a significant economic cost. A 2016 Brookings report estimates that India faced a loss of about $968 million due to internet shutdowns. However, the democratic harms we have been accruing are more difficult to quantify and demonstrate.

This book seeks to give a glimpse into the lives of those directly affected by these internet shutdown experiments. From Jammu and Kashmir to Telangana, from Gujarat to Nagaland, we have collected 30 stories from across the country for an up-close look at how the everyday lives of common citizens have been impacted by internet shutdowns and website blocks. From CRPF members posted in Srinagar who use the internet to connect with their family, to students who have been cut off from education resources for competitive exams; from the disruptions in day to day life brought about by non-functional bank services in Darjeeling, to stock brokers in Ahmedabad who faced costly slowdowns; the idea of a Digital India is facing severe setbacks with these continuously increasing internet shutdowns.

When seen in a larger context, we hope that the stories in this book also demonstrate that access to the internet and freedom of speech is not just about an individual’s rights, but are also required for the collective good. The diversity of perspectives and activities that a healthy democracy demands is not met by the versioning of dominant narratives, but by allowing for, if not directly encouraging, the voices and activities of the unheard, oppressed and marginalised. We hope that in the telling of these personal stories of the day-to-day of people affected by such internet shutdowns, this book joins in the effort to position the dehumanized internet kill switches more aptly as dangers to democracy.

Sunil Abraham
Executive Director
The Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-shutdown-stories

Internet services not to be affected as DNS servers undergo update

Admin — 2018-10-16T14:28:20Z

Internet services across the country are unlikely to be impacted over the next 48 hours even as the Domain Name System (DNS) servers undergo a security update coordinated by global regulator, Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The article by an HT correspondent was published in the Hindustan Times on October 12, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

“ICANN, the global certifying authority for DNS security, had taken a decision a year back to change the Trust Key. All ISPs were notified to update their configuration to the new key. Accordingly, the Internet Service Providers (ISP) have confirmed that they have already updated their DNS servers with the new key and the country does not carry any risk of impact on Internet services,” said National Cyber Security Coordinator Gulshan Rai in a statement on Friday. DNS servers are like the phone book for the Internet which translates human-friendly computer labels into their respective IP addresses. If the DNS servers become inactive, it will be impossible for users to access different websites in the absence of this translation.

The ICANN’s ongoing maintenance work over the next two days is to change the cryptographic key that helps protect DNS. This has been necessitated to counter the rising incidents of cyber attacks, ICANN said.

Rai had held a meeting with all ISPs in this regard on September 5. During which ISPs said that they had taken all necessary steps to update their systems in order to avoid any inconvenience to their users. Rai reviewed the situation again on Friday.

Sunil Abraham, founder, Centre for Internet and Society, said, “This security update is the responsibility of the management and network administrators at ISPs and telcos. Only time will tell what percentage of people have done their job. Its very likely that this number is very small, in case of people who haven’t updated their servers,” he explained.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-october-12-2018-internet-services-not-to-be-affected-as-dns-servers-undergo-update

Internet sceptic? Go get a life

radha — 2011-04-02T14:49:11Z

Fifty years down the line, generations will laugh off the paranoia about the Internet - an article by Nishant Shah in the magazine Down To Earth

If there is one thing the Internet can claim uniqueness for, it will be for the fact that never in human history has a technology been charged so much with being the object of obsessions, compulsions or psychological disorders. We have never really heard of a print addict. We do have bibliophiles and cultural gurus. The camera has been duly appointed the most effective form of preserving memories. Its presence at all occasions, or even in the ordinarily mundane, has been accepted as a protocol. Photographers might spend days in dark rooms and morphing memories for posterity but we haven’t yet heard of a camera addict who needs a rehab.

How does the Internet, then, achieve this dubious status of being heralded for generating the Internet Addiction Disorder? The term, coined as a hoax by Ivan Goldberg as a satirical comment on the easy ‘disorder-isation’ of practices by contemporary psychiatry, has unfortunately ended up becoming what it critiqued: pointless, devoid of meaning, and backed by questionable research and studies by groups with vested interests.

What is the Internet Addiction Disorder? The first set of answers that list physiological descriptions such as dry eyes, carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress injury shall be summarily dismissed because these are not specific to the Internet. They are associated with lifestyles, postures and lack of awareness among the users about their physical engagements with technology but cannot, in any way, be a part of the psychological disorder under scrutiny.

So, ask the question again. The answers we get are: gambling, watching pornography, inappropriate time spent on social networking and email, chronic dependence for information, shopping beyond limits, excessive gaming and recreation online and neglecting different parts of life, and work. The list continues, but leaves us slightly baffled.

Surely critiques must know people used to gamble—we have made a nation of TV audience watching people gamble their lives, dignity and relationships on the camera—way before the Internet. Are they naive enough to think pornography and adult sex industries were lying low before the Internet came into play? In the increasingly urbanized spaces that we occupy, the need for social networking is inversely proportional to the reduced mobility, time and spaces of social interaction. In such cases, social networking is a tool that fulfils the human need to know we are not alone.

Anybody who is making claims about the Internet leading to excessive shopping is confessing they haven’t been around since plastic money was invented. And if somebody is avoiding responsibilities, it is a problem that will persist with or without the Internet.

The Internet is only a gateway to these and other interesting (and sometimes disturbing) cultural products, trends and fashions. We have never called for banning print as a technology because people use it to publish sexual material. The TV is going strong with celebrities gambling their lives and choosing spouses in front of an audience. Digital cinema and portable media devices have ensured that movies can be seen almost anywhere.

The fact is we depend on technologies of the time. These technologies, like the Internet, offer us possibilities and potentials for expression, cultural production and dissemination, information and communication, and each technology has its own inherent potential for abuse. The anxiety about technology is not new. Carolyn Marvin’s fascinating account, When Old Technologies Were New, shows how the telephone was supposed to make our children more furtive, our women more gossipy, our men more promiscuous and our society more detached and less civil.

The editor of a Philadelphia newspaper in 1894 had cautioned his readers “not to converse by phone with ill persons for fear of contracting contagious diseases.” Ridiculous as it sounds to us who have grown up with universal telephone technology, these concerns were grave and important to the people in those early days of telephones. Fifty years from now, generations are going to look at the contemporary paranoia around Internet addiction in a similar way and wonder what the fuss was all about.

Link to the article in Down to Earth

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-sceptic-go-get-a-life

Internet Rights and Wrongs

pranesh — 2016-09-22T23:36:14Z

With a rise in PIL's for unwarranted censorship, do we need to step back and inspect if it's about time unreasonable trends are checked?

The article was published in India Today on September 1, 2016. The original piece can be read here.

Over the last few weeks, there have been a number of cases of egregious censorship of websites in India. Many people started seeing notices that (incorrectly) gave an impression that they may end up in jail if they visited certain websites. However, these notices weren't an isolated phenomenon, nor one that is new. Worryingly, the higher judiciary has been drawn into these questionable moves to block websites as well.

Since 2011, numerous torrent search engines and communities have been blocked by Indian internet service providers (ISPs). Torrent search engines provide the same functionality for torrents that Google provides for websites. Are copyright infringing materials indexed and made searchable by Google? Yes. Do we shut down Google for this reason? No. However, that is precisely what private entertainment companies have done over the past five years in India. Companies hired by the producers of Tamil movies Singham and 3 managed to get video-sharing websites like Vimeo, Dailymotion and numerous torrent search engines blocked even before the movies released, without showing even a single case of copyright infringement existed on any of them. During the FIFA World Cup, Sony even managed to get Google Docs blocked. In some cases, these entertainment companies have abused 'John Doe' orders (generic orders that allow copyright enforcement against unnamed persons) and have asked ISPs to block websites. The ISPs, instead of ignoring such requests as instances of private censorship, have also complied. In other cases (like Sony's FIFA World Cup case), courts have ordered ISPs to block hundreds of websites without any copyright infringement proven against them. High court judges haven't even developed a coherent theory on whether or how Indian law allows them to block websites for alleged copyright infringement. Still they have gone ahead and blocked.

In 2012, hackers got into Reliance Communications servers and released a list of websites blocked by them. The list contained multiple links that sought to connect Satish Seth-a group MD in Reliance ADA Group-to the 2G scam: a clear case of secretive private censorship by RCom. Further, visiting some of the YouTube links which pertained to Satish Seth showed that they had been removed by YouTube due to dubious copyright infringement complaints filed by Reliance BIG Entertainment. Did the department of telecom, whose licences forbid ISPs from engaging in private censorship, take any action against RCom? No. Earlier this year, Tata Sky filed a complaint against YouTube in the Delhi High Court, noting that there were videos on it that taught people how to tweak their set-top boxes to get around the technological locks that Tata Sky had placed. The Delhi HC ordered YouTube "not to host content that violates any law for the time being in force", presuming that the videos in question did in fact violate Indian law. They cite two sections: Section 65A of the Copyright Act and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act. The first explicitly allows a user to break technological locks of the kind that Tata Sky has placed for dozens of reasons (and allows a person to teach others how to engage in such breaking), whereas the second requires finding of "dishonesty" or "fraud" along with "damage to a computer system, etc", and an intention to violate the law-none of which were found. The court effectively blocked videos on YouTube without any finding of illegality, thus once again siding with censorial corporations.

In 2013, Indore-based lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani filed a PIL in the Supreme Court calling for the government to undertake proactive blocking of all online pornography. Normally, a PIL is only admittable under Article 32 of the Constitution, on the basis of a violation of a fundamental right (which are listed in Part III of our Constitution). Vaswani's petition-which I have had the misfortune of having read carefully-does not at any point complain that the state is violating a fundamental right by not blocking pornography. Yet the petition wants to curb the fundamental right to freedom of expression, since the government is by no means in a position to determine what constitutes illegal pornography and what doesn't.

The larger problem extends to the now-discredited censor board (headed by the notorious Pahlaj Nihalani), as also the self-censorship practised on TV by the private Indian Broadcasters Federation (which even bleeps out words and phrases like 'Jesus', 'period', 'breast cancer' and 'beef'). 'Swachh Bharat' should not mean sanitising all media to be unobjectionable to the person with the lowest outrage threshold. So who will file a PIL against excessive censorship?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-today-september-1-2016-pranesh-prakash-internet-rights-and-wrongs

Internet pour toutes

Isabelle Grégoire — 2019-09-20T15:01:56Z

Ambika Tandon was quoted in Canadian-French magazine L'Actualite, in an article on technology and women in India. In the quote, she explains the core research questions of the FIRN project, which is studying the digital intermediation of domestic work in India.

The article by Isabelle Grégoire was published in L'Actualite on September 11, 2019.

"Are women workers more or less exploited when they are recruited online? Can they evaluate clients and be defended if their rights are not respected? And most importantly, how do employers go about recruiting this workforce that usually does not have access to the Internet?

These are the kinds of questions that Indian researcher Ambika Tandon, a policy officer at the Center for the Internet and Society (CIS), a non-profit organization in Bangalore that conducts interdisciplinary research on the Internet and digital technologies, is trying to answer. To do this, she chose to look at digital platforms that provide housekeeping and home care services - trades mostly done by women.

"The idea is to compare the job opportunities and working conditions offered on these platforms with those of traditional placement agencies," says this graduate from the London School of Economics, and a member of the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) launched this year. Funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) in Ottawa, the network brings together researchers (a majority of women) from a dozen countries in Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. It is led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international organization, which contributed to the development of the 17 "feminist principles of Internet 2.0". Each of FIRN's eight research projects will be linked to one or other of these principles.

"Our goal is to increase the visibility of these issues in the public space, so that they become part of the discourse," says Namita Aavriti from India, who is co-responsible for setting up projects within the APC, "With special attention to online violence against women, which still needs to be recognized in many countries."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/l-actualite-magazine-isabelle-gregoire-september-11-2019-internet-pour-toutes

Internet opens doors to trillions more Net addresses with IPv6

praskrishna — 2012-06-14T05:12:25Z

The global Internet industry reached a key milestone on June 6 when a group of Web sites, Internet service providers (ISPs) and router manufacturers banded together to participate in the World IPv6 Launch.

This blog post by Aaron Tan was published in techgoondu. Nishant Shah is quoted in this.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo have flipped the switch to the new Internet addressing system, while ISPs such as Japan’s KDDI and India’s HNS will permanently enable IPv6 for a significant portion of their residential wireline subscribers. Home networking equipment manufacturers will also turn on IPv6 by default in home router products.

The World IPv6 Launch was organised by the Internet Society as part of its mission to ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible for everyone, including five billion people who have yet to connect to the Internet.

“The support of IPv6 from these thousands of organizations delivers a critical message to the world: IPv6 is not just a ‘nice to have’; it is ready for business today and will very soon be a ‘must have’,” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer of Internet Society in a statement Wednesday.

Last April, Asia-Pacific became the first region in the world to run out of IPv4 addresses. Europe will deplete its allocation of IPv4 addresses later this year, followed by the U.S. in 2013, and Latin America and Africa in 2014. With IPv6, the Internet can now support over 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses compared with 4.3 billion addresses for IPv4.

“Understanding the importance of IPv6, some governments in Asia Pacific have committed to enable IPv6 in their internal networks with set deadlines and, given that they run such large networks, having them on IPv6 is a big step in itself,” said Rajnesh Singh, regional director of the Internet Society’s Asia-Pacific bureau.

The Singapore Government, for instance, has spearheaded an initiative to make e-government services accessible via IPv6. The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has also started an IPv6 transition programme that offers grants and information for companies that intend to implement IPv6 on their networks.

With the launch of IPv6, consumers can expect to see applications and services that take advantage of IPv6′s features. Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system will also favour IPv6 connectivity over IPv4.

According to Nishant Shah, research director at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, IPv6 has an in-built security protocol called IPSec, which authenticates and secures all IP data. The data carrying capacity of IPv6 networks is also going to be higher.

“This means that more devices with more features will be able to work seamlessly through these networks. Despite the larger load of information, IPv6 packets are easier to handle and route, just like postcards with pincodes in their addresses are easier to deliver than those without”, Shah said in a joint statement with Tata Communications.

As an example, every aspect of the Beijing Olympics – from security surveillance to managing vehicles and media coverage – was done over IPv6. “The Chinese government, in fact, has already launched a ‘China Next Generation Internet’ project to build IPv6 networks which are going to radically change the face of high-speed internet in the country,” Shah revealed.

With all these benefits, why does IPv6 only command two percent of the world’s Internet traffic? Shah offers two clear reasons:

The first one is that of costs and infrastructure. The IPv6 platforms do not communicate easily with the IPv4 networks. We have the choice of a mammoth transition of all IPv4 websites and networks to new IPv6 protocols. This idea of abandoning IPv4 and moving to a new protocol is not only redundant; it is also futile, because IPv4 is already running the largest network in human history quite efficiently.

What we need are translators which will be able to speak to both the different versions and help our devices work through them seamlessly. Older, more successful technologies have been able to do this. So, television, for instance, whether it receives terrestrial data, satellite images or data transferred via cable, is able to translate and render them into images and sounds which we can consume with ease. However, the translators for the IPv4 – IPv6 are still expensive and we need more resources diverted towards making them affordable.

The second reason is linked to the first. In order for IPv6 to become popular, it needs a minimum threshold of service providers and users riding that network. As long as the deployment remains nascent, there will be no concentrated energy to actually try and make the bridges between versions 4 and 6. While global technology organisations like Tata Communications are ready for the transition, we are going to need a systemic change among all stakeholders to make IPv6 a reality, towards a faster, safer and more robust Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-opens-doors-to-trillions-more-net-addresses

Internet L@w

praskrishna — 2016-05-30T02:07:00Z

Vanya Rakesh will attend the Internet law course organized by the University of Geneva from 20 June 2016 to 1 July 2016 as part of the Geneva Summer School.

Study Internet Law in Geneva, where the World Wide Web was born!

Topics that will be covered include cybersecurity, digital privacy and online surveillance, free speech, consumer protection, legal issues of social media, dangers of cloud computing, Internet and telecom infrastructure, intellectual property, antitrust, and much more...

This is a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience in the framework of an Internet law clinic and to discuss cutting edge Internet law and policy issues with academics, practitioners, representatives of global policy makers, international organizations and leading institutions, including the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

For its first and second sessions (in June 2014 and 2015), the Internet l@w summer school welcomed participants from very diverse background and countries including Argentina, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Italy, Lithuania, Ukraine and the US.

Discover an international city in the heart of Europe. Participate in an exciting social programme, including excursions and social gatherings, and build a global network of new friends as well as of Internet law and policy experts.

A video testimony of participants to the 2014 edition is available here!

Equivalence of 6 ECTS credits.

Please note: Changes to the draft program may be made at any time prior to the start of the course.

More Info, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/internet-l-w

Internet Intermediary Liability: Towards Evidence-based Policy and Regulatory Reform to Secure Human Rights on the internet

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T05:51:47Z

Elonnai Hickok participated as a speaker at this event organized by Association for Progressive Communications at the Wedgwood, 75A 2nd Ave. Melville, Johannesburg, February 10-11, 2014.

Click to download the full details in this event brochure.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/apc-internet-intermediary-liability-towards-evidence-based-policy-and-regulatory-reform-to-secure-human-rights-on-the-internet

Internet Governance Round-table at British High Commission

praskrishna — 2014-04-01T10:32:04Z

A Internet Governance Round-table was hosted at the residence of the British High Commissioner in Delhi on March 4, 2014. Geeta Hariharan participated in the round-table.

The event aimed to bring together stakeholders from government, industry and the non-governmental sectors in India to discuss issues of Internet governance, and forms part of the UK’s commitment and interests in cyber-engagement with India.

The panel included the following members:

Julian Evans, the Acting British High Commissioner to India
Jonathan Cook, Second Secretary, Foreign Security Policy Team, British High Commission
Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India
Rahul Jain, Principal Consultant, Data Security Council of India
Vikram Tiwathia, Associate Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India
Dr. Govind, Senior Director heading the E-Infrastructure & Internet Governance Division, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India
Narayanan, NIXI
Dr. Sundeep Oberoi, TCS
M.P. Gupta, Professor & Chair, Information Systems and Centre for Excellence in E-Gov, IIT Delhi
Somnath Mitra, Xchanging
Mahima Kaul, Observer Research Foundation

The British government’s views on cyber-engagement and Internet governance were touched upon, voicing their support for a free, open and secure Internet, upholding human rights. The UK supports a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance. However, their position on the Sao Paolo meeting is as yet not officially clear.

Five broad issues were raised for discussion:

Balancing the role of government and non-government stakeholders, and the limits of governmental regulation Internet for development
Free speech and privacy v. security
Practical model of Internet governance (multi-stakeholder or multilateral)
India’s contribution, presence or expectations of the Sao Paolo meeting

The speakers raised concerns about the effectiveness of the multi-stakeholder model in light of international law built on the Westphalian model, where governments are effectively the only real law-makers and regulators. In considering whether non-governmental stakeholders (such as NGOs and think-tanks, industry and corporations, individuals) should have an equal voice in IG, concerns were raised about the representativeness of such actors, and accountability that they would have. In this regard, the future and desirability of the ICANN (and the US’ stake in it), and fora like the IGF and the UN-WGEC as platforms for participation were discussed.

While civil society involvement is imperative, government initiatives are necessary to create access to the Internet, and to ensure that the Internet is made safe and utilized for development. This obviously creates tensions between privacy and liberty, and security concerns; one of the speakers spoke of Snowden as the “elephant in the room”. Not only was a common concept of privacy non-existent at the international level, it would also be difficult to achieve (except a namesake ‘lowest common denominator’ definition), as states must account for their experiences with terrorism as well as cultural differences. For instance, the way the UK deals with privacy/security concerns in comparison with India would be very different. Finally, the possibilities and potential outcomes of the Sao Paolo meeting were touched upon without elaborate discussion on the same.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ig-round-table-british-high-commission

Internet Governance Plenary

praskrishna — 2012-10-01T14:14:07Z

Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Ang Peng Hwa, Paul Wilson, Duangthip Chomprang and Raul Echeberria at this event organised by APNIC on August 28, 2012. Kuo Wei Wu, CEO, National Information Infrastructure Enterprise Promotion Association (NIIEPA) was the moderator.

Theme: What mechanism works better to resolve the issues?

Objectives:

To discuss relevant Internet Governance Forum (IGF) related issues for the APNIC community.
Update APNIC Members about the IGF process, including recent national and regional IGF initiatives, such as the APrIGF 2012 in Tokyo, Japan.
Prepare for the seventh Annual IGF Meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan from 6-9 November 2012.

Panelists

Ang Peng Hwa, Director of Singapore internet Research Centre (SiRC) Presentation Slides
Paul Wilson, Director General, APNIC and MAG Member, IGF
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet Society, India
Duangthip Chomprang, Regional Affairs Manager, Internet Society
Raúl Echeberría, Executive Director/CEO, LACNIC and MAG Member, IGF

Click to read the Transcript
Watch the full video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/conference-apnic-net-aug-28-2012-internet-governance-plenary