We are anonymous, we are legion

Global Censorship Conference

praskrishna — 2012-03-30T11:34:07Z

The Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School is holding a conference on global censorship from March 30 to April 1, 2012, at Yale Law School. The programme is sponsored by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and Thomson Reuters.

"This conference is the first major event for the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and it brings together an exciting group of thinkers from law, political science, computer science, business and the non-profit sector to discuss the lessons of the past few years,” explained Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin, director of the Abrams Institute and the Information Society Project. “We think the study of free expression in the digital age should be international and interdisciplinary."[1]

Rishabh Dara, Google Policy Fellow who worked at CIS office in Bangalore on freedom of expression and internet-related policy issues is participating in the event as a speaker in the panel on Case Studies of Censorship. The panel will explore recent instances of censorship in the United States, Egypt, Syria, Brazil, and India and the common themes and important differences that emerged.

This conference will consider how censorship has changed in a networked world, exploring how networks have altered the practices of both governments and their citizens. Panels will include discussions of how governments can and do censor and how speakers can command technical and legal tools to preserve their ability to speak. The conference will conclude with a discussion of new controversies in censorship, including laws designed to prevent online bullying and intellectual property infringement.

Agenda

Friday March 30, 2012

2:00	Begin Registration
3:15 – 4:45	The Means of Change, Familiar and New (co-sponsored by Sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights) In the popular story of the political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, information technology stands out as the new factor that was critical to rapid mass mobilization for demanding change. The media have been credited with making popular demands for change contagious. Enthusiasts for the potential of technology to foster progressive change have labeled these apparently sudden developments a Facebook revolution. Governments responded by seeking to curtail the use of mobile phones and the Internet. What role has technology played in igniting, sustaining and shaping recent political changes in the Arab world? Anupam Chander, Professor of Law, University of California, Davis and Director, California International Law Center Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation John Pollock, journalist
5:00– 6:30	Keynote Lecture (co-sponsored by Sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights) Irwin Cotler, Canadian Parliament, former Attorney General of Canada
6:30– 9:00	Reception for Panelists of the Global Censorship Conference

Saturday March 31, 2012

9:00 – 10:00	Registration and Breakfast
10:00– 11:30	Panel One: Old and New Forms of Censorship Years ago, activists met in person to plan protests and quietly shared subversive texts. Now, events can be planned over social networking sites, and arguments for change are posted online. How have governments responded to these changes? How have activist practices and governments’ reactions changed the way we conceptualize censorship? Jack Balkin, Yale Law School Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School Navid Hassanpour, Yale Political Science Deptartment Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
11:45 – 1:15	Panel Two: Technical Architectures of Censorship There are a number of choke points across the Internet and a number of different censorship mechanisms that can be deployed at various points across the network. Censorship can be executed at the router level, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level, the Internet Content Provider (ICP) level, or the device level. Additionally, countries can employ a number of different technologies at each level. This panel will explore the many technical options for censorship and the strategic value of different choices. Laura DeNardis, Associate Professor of Communication at American University, and Affiliated Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School Nagla Rizk, American University in Cairo Hal Roberts, Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Technology Ashkan Soltani, Independent Researcher and Consultant on Privacy and Security
1:15 – 2:15	Lunch
2:15 – 3:45	Panel Three: Case Studies of Censorship In the wake of censorship both domestically and abroad, many questions emerged about how the censorship was executed, what effects it had, if and how activists were able to route around the it, and how, if it all, it was eventually stopped. This panel will explore recent instances of censorship in the United States, Egypt, Syria, Brazil, and India and the common themes and important differences that emerged. Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director and the Kahle/Austin Promise Fellow at Public Knowledge Lina Attalah, Journalist, Managing Editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm Anas Qtiesh, Blogger, Editor of Global Voices Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, Vice-Coordinator of the Center for Technology & Society (CTS) at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School Rishabh Dara, Researcher at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
4:00 – 5:30	Panel Four: Technical Methods of Circumventing Censorship New technology may provide governments with new tools to censor, but it also creates opportunities for speakers and “hactivists” everywhere. How can individuals evade identification online and access blocked content? Can activists circumvent attempts to shut down the internet during periods of political unrest? What new methods are being developed to preserve free speech online? Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project Peter Fein, Telecomix Alex Halderman, University of Michigan, Dept. of Computer Science Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Initiative Director, New America Foundation Wendy Seltzer, Senior Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School
6:00 – 9:00	Dinner for Speakers

Sunday, April 1, 2012

9:00 – 9:30	Breakfast
9:30 – 11:00	Panel Five: Legal Solutions to Censorship Given the way censorship technologies have slowly crept into acceptable use because of concerns like piracy, child pornography, or national security, there is much debate about the role and capacity of law in combatting these new, digital forms of government censorship, domestically and internationally. This panel will discuss if and how legal solutions to censorship can be deployed most effectively. Derek Bambauer, Brooklyn Law School Jim Dempsey, Vice President of Public Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology Molly Land, New York Law School Linda Lye, ACLU Northern California Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
11:15 – 12:45	Panel Six: New Controversies in Censorship Does new technology change the appropriate scope of free expression rights? Can policing intellectual property infringement burden free speech interests? Does surveillance ever have a censoring effect? This panel will wrestle with whether a variety of government activities constitutes inappropriate censorship or necessary actions to protect the public interest. Rebecca Bolin, Fellow at Information Society Project, Yale Law School Mark MacCarthy, Vice President for Public Policy, Software and Information Industry Association; Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology Program, Georgetown University Preston Padden, Senior Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center and an Adjunct Professor at the University Of Colorado's Law School and Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program David Post, Temple University, Beasley School of Law Christopher Soghoian, Graduate Fellow, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Indiana University
12:45	Bagged Lunch Available

[1].Global Censorship Conference to be Held March 30-April 1 at Yale Law School | Yale Law School, last accessed on March 30, 2012, http://www.law.yale.edu/news/15140.htm

Read the original posted in Yale Law School website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/global-censorship-conference

Data protection experts slam state for sending mass SMSes

praskrishna — 2012-03-27T03:46:00Z

Experts in the field of data protection, privacy law and media have criticised the West Bengal government's mass SMS sent to individuals, companies and media houses through private mobile networks last Friday. Lara Choksey reports this in an article published in the Statesman on March 25, 2012.

The government's use of private data in order to spread political messages is ethically dubious and dangerous, say some. The SMS indirectly refers to The Telegraph's publication of the Poonam Pandey tweet, warning against the transmission of “provocative and indecent photographs for hurting the religious sentiments of people and disrupting communal harmony.” It urges recipients to “frustrate the designs of … unscrupulous people and maintain peace and communal harmony,” and is signed by “Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister”.

Speaking to The Statesman on Saturday, Mumbai-based media lecturer Ms Geeta Seshu identified two issues with the government sending out political messages through mobile phone networks.

Firstly, from an ethical standpoint, the unchecked freedom of mobile phone companies to hand out private data is “completely wrong”, she said.

Secondly, the use of government funds for such dissemination needs to be transparent. If the state government has used public funds to distribute its message through a mobile phone network, then this information should be readily available, said Ms Seshu.

The Telecom Regulation Authority of India's (Trai) unsolicited commercial communications regulations allow unsolicited advertising through mobile phone networks.

Mr Apar Gupta, partner of Delhi-based law firm Advani and Co., explained, “The regulations are not wide enough to prohibit communications from a political party.” He observed, “Using SMS messages is a very efficient propaganda tool because so many people have access to mobile phones.”

Mobile phone networks such as Vodafone make it clear in their privacy policies that the personal data of its customers “may be used for inclusion in any telephone or similar directory or directory enquiry service provided or operated by us or by a third party” (source Vodafone website).

Any third party ~ governmental or corporate ~ can therefore access the company's directory of private mobile numbers at the discretion of the network in question.

It is not yet clear which government department coordinated the SMS, or what funds were used to cover the costs. Representatives from the ministry of information and cultural affairs were not able to shed a light on the matter. “I know that a message was sent out,” said the I & CA director Umapada Chatterjee, "But it was not sent from this department. I do not know that information.”

Some commentators did not condemn the government's SMS. Delhi High Court lawyer and cyber law expert, Mr Praveen Dalal, criticised the publication of the Poonam Pandey tweet on the grounds of it violating the due diligence guidelines of the Cyber Law of India. He commented, “If casual and careless publications … continue, there would be no other option left for the government but to regulate their affairs in a more intrusive manner.”

However, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Mr Sunil Abraham, called the state government's use of unsolicited SMS a “clear abuse of the powers afforded by elected office.” Mr Abraham explained that elected representatives would be justified in such measures, and in utilising public funds, in the event of a disaster, or when public order, public health or national security are compromised.

“However in this case, the government is abusing the provisions of the law and using this incident as a pretext to threaten media professionals with surveillance and to intimidate for the purposes of reigning in free speech,” he told The Statesman. The chief minister was unavailable to make a comment on the matter.

Read the original published in the Statesman

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/data-protection-experts-slam-state-for-sending-mass-smses

Statutory Motion Against Intermediary Guidelines Rules

pranesh — 2012-04-03T09:35:41Z

Rajya Sabha MP, Shri P. Rajeev has moved a motion that the much-criticised Intermediary Guidelines Rules be annulled.

Motion to Annul Intermediary Guidelines Rules

A motion to annul the Intermediary Guidelines Rules was moved on March 23, 2012, by Shri P. Rajeeve, CPI(M) MP in the Rajya Sabha from Thrissur, Kerala.

The motion reads:

"That this House resolves that the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011 issued under clause (zg) of sub-section (2) of Section 87 read with sub-section (2) of Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 published in the Gazette of India dated the 13th April, 2011 vide Notification No. G.S.R 314(E) and laid on the Table of the House on the 12th August, 2011, be annuled; and

That this House recommends to Lok Sabha that Lok Sabha do concur on this Motion."

This isn't the first time that Mr. Rajeeve is raising his voice against the Intermediary Guidelines Rules. Indeed, even when the Rules were just in draft stage, he along with the MPs Kumar Deepak Das, Rajeev Chandrashekar, and Mahendra Mohan drew Parliamentarians' attention to the rules. Yet, the government did not heed the MPs' concern, nor the concern of all the civil society organizations that wrote in to them concerned about human rights implications of the new laws. On September 6, 2011, Lok Sabha MP Jayant Choudhary gave notice (under Rule 377 of the Lok Sabha Rules) that the Intermediary Guidelines Rules as well as the Reasonable Security Practices Rules need to be reviewed. Yet, the government has not even addressed those concerns, and indeed has cracked down even harder on online freedom of speech since then.

Fundamental Problems with Intermediary Guidelines Rules

The fundamental problems with the Rules, which deal with objectionable material online:

Shifting blame.

It makes the 'intermediary', including ISPs like BSNL and Airtel responsible for objectionable content that their users have put up.

No chance to defend.

There is no need to inform users before this content is removed. So, even material put up by a political party can be removed based on anyone's complaint, without telling that party. This was done against a site called *CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com". This goes against Article 19(1)(a).

Lack of transparency

No information is required to be provided that content has been removed. It's a black-box system, with no one, not even the government, knowing that content has been removed following a request. So even the government does not know how many sites have been removed after these Rules have come into effect.

No differentiation between intermediaries.

A one-size-fits-all system is followed where an e-mail provider is equated with an online newspaper, which is equated with a video upload site, which is equated with a search engine. This is like equating the post-office and a book publisher as being equivalent for, say, defamatory speech. This is violative of Article 14 of the Constitution, which requires that unequals be treated unequally by the law.

No proportionality.

A DNS provider (i.e., the person who gives you your web address) is an intermediary who can be asked to 'disable access' to a website on the basis of a single page, even though the rest of the site has nothing objectionable.

Vague and unconstitutional requirements.

Disparaging speech, as long as it isn't defamatory, is not criminalised in India, and can't be because the Constitution does not allow for it. Content about gambling in print is not unlawful, but now all Internet intermediaries are required to remove any content that promotes gambling.

Allows private censorship.

The Rules do not draw a distinction between arbitrary actions of an intermediary and take-downs subsequent to a request.

Presumption of illegality.

The Rules are based on the presumption that all complaints (and resultant mandatory taking down of the content) are correct, and that the incorrectness of the take-downs can be disputed in court (if they ever discover that it has been removed). This is contrary to the presumption of validity of speech used by Indian courts, and is akin to prior restraint on speech. Courts have held that for content such as defamation, prior restraints cannot be put on speech, and that civil and criminal action can only be taken post-speech.

Government censorship, not 'self-regulation'.

The government says these are industry best-practices in existing terms of service agreements. But the Rules require all intermediaries to include the government-prescribed terms in an agreement, no matter what services they provide. It is one thing for a company to choose the terms of its terms of service agreement, and completely another for the government to dictate those terms of service.

Problems Noted Early

We have noted in the past the problems with the Rules, including when the Rules were still in draft form:

Other organizations like the Software Freedom Law Centre also sent in scathing comments on the law, noting that they are unconstitutional.

We are very glad that Shri Rajeeve has moved this motion, and we hope that it gets adopted in the Lok Sabha as well, and that the Rules get defeated.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/statutory-motion-against-intermediary-guidelines-rules

Is your facebook page your mini resume?

praskrishna — 2012-03-26T07:27:43Z

As privacy debates heat up across the world, Bangaloreans reveal the trend of employers asking job aspirants for their Facebook IDs and passwords has caught on here too. When Adil Pasha, 24, revealed at an advertising job interview that his main strength was creativity, his interviewers asked for his FB password to check his latest updates.

This was published in IBNLive on March 26, 2012 . Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

They rejected him, as he was going through a break-up and had put up song lyrics as his status message. On the other hand, Sukanya Srinivasan, 19, got an internship chance at a leading IT firm solely based on her FB photo albums.

“A company recently rejected my application after looking at the number of people I’d blocked on my chat list. They thought I didn’t have good interpersonal skills. I might be a friendly, harmless flirt, but the company might think I could sexually harass women employees. If they see my photos at a party, they might think I’m an alcoholic,” said Kiran Giridhar (name changed), who has attended over 12 interviews in the last two months, where his social life mattered more.

Recently, Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan said they had seen a distressing increase in reports of employers seeking to gain access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information.

“The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidents of employers asking prospective or actual employees to reveal their passwords,” she wrote on the website’s privacy page. The controversy is now being fought on moral and ethical grounds.

"This is a privacy infringement but there is no provision in the law (IT Act-2008) that prohibits employers from asking for personal information. This is happening with the willingness of potential candidates. If a person finds it unacceptable, he/she shouldn’t share the password. Background checks are common as some companies deal with sensitive information. So it’s not illegal, but intrusive. I think some power relationships can be abused if they cross the social networking barrier — like a boss-employee and teacher-student relationship. Corporate policy should prevent such things," explained Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/facebook-page-mini-resume

Why your Facebook Stalker is Not the Real Problem

nishant — 2012-03-21T05:02:16Z

We live in networked conditions. This is a statement that can now be taken at face-value, and immediately explains our highly connected, inter-meshed environments finds Nishant Shah in this article published in FirstPost on March 20, 2012.

Especially within the digital world, the World Wide Web has become synonymous with social networking systems, where increasingly all our access, communication and interaction is located within a series of interconnected networks.

From the imagination of the web as a complex network, we have evolved to looking at the web as facilitating networks where different relationships, transactions and connections can be mapped and managed. This is why we often have romantic imaginations of networks as free, open, collaborative, shared spaces of interaction and expression.

However, we have reached a stage where this idea of a network as a liberatory space is under threat. Even as I write this, Internet Service Providers are now planning to set up sophisticated, automated systems that will do a deep-spy on your data transfer to see if you are sharing files (sometimes also called piracy) using the Internet.

These systems will now keep track of all your digital transactions and will monitor what you consume, who you talk to and determine whether you are a good ethical subject who is only using the Internet in ways that the powers to be want you to.

For me, this particular networked condition of being constantly monitored and watched is scary. And it surprises me that this invasive process is less in public attention than Google’s recently changed privacy policies or the TOS-in-progress nature of privacy on Facebook.

This is because the ubiquitous presences of networks in our lives have made them transparent to us – we do not think of the networks themselves as entities but as spaces where interactions with other objects is possible. Hence, if I ask you, right now, to name the top 5 entities that you interact with the most on Facebook, I am sure you will be able to name them. More probably than not, these top 5 entities with people that you have formed strong Facebook Friendships with.

In fact there are platforms designed to let you know who you are talking with most on your networks. Network influence measurement indices by services like Klout are able to tell you not only who you talk to but also what are your key areas of influence. This is a way by which the network becomes invisible to us. It hides the fact that the thing that talks to you the most on Facebook is Facebook itself.

The marketing of Facebook might tell you that you are talking to other human beings, but reality is that the network is more than the sum total of all human beings on the system. Just look at the amount of information Facebook produces on your behalf and to you. Notifications for adding friends, for liking people, for people writing to you, for people commenting on your walls and posts, form more than 50% of the information traffic on Facebook or social networking systems.

This information is produces and shared by scripts, coded bots, algorithmic applications, and non-human entities that not only support and sustain the network but are also significant members of the networks.

This is the actual networked condition – where the processes and entities that make the networks possible, produce an illusion of seamless communication and interaction, while performing and extraordinary amount of information and for you.

This blindness to our own ‘networkedness’ has crucial ramifications for our online activities because it makes us oblivious to questions of privacy, control, safety and trust. We have privacy settings to protect us from human entities on Facebook. There is very little concern about the non-human entities who store, distribute and use the data that we produce. If we don’t even know what these watchers are, how do we protect ourselves from being watched? What happens when between you and your ‘friend’, is a series of silent interceptors who are recording and using your data without your knowledge?

Being in a network is like being in a glass-house. We cannot see the walls and hence, we presume that we need our privacy from the other inhabitants of the same house. However, in that, we forget that the walls are watching, and that there are invisible watchers beyond the walls, who are in control.

It is time to make our networks visible again. It is time to realise that what we really need to be afraid of, on social networking systems, is the social network itself, and not the mythical stranger who wants to stalk us or that unwanted friend you want to exclude from your information sharing.

Privacy and safety are not merely compromised at the interface, where information might leak and travel into zones outside of your knowledge and control. The real questions of being safe are actually in the protocols and designs of the network itself.

We need to start looking at larger invasive policies exercises by the different invisible actors like the ISP, ICT ministries, corporate policies, design choices and architecture of interception that sustain the networks we so gladly embrace.

Nishant Shah is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society and recently edited a 4 volume book on youth, technology and change, titled ‘Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?’

Read this in FirstPost

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/facebook-stalker-is-not-real-problem

Click, Play, Watch

praskrishna — 2012-03-20T12:52:44Z

Filmmakers are casting the net for viewers and opting for online releases to reach out to a wider audience, finds Rinky Kumar in this article published in MidDay on March 18, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

Till some time ago, the movie-going experience was a means for people to spend quality time with their loved ones. An evening planned in detail (right from booking the tickets to buying snacks), followed by dinner was de rigueur. Today, however, that has been replaced by an evening indoors where you can watch a commercial film or a critically-acclaimed documentary within the confines of your home, thanks to online releases.

A growing phenomenon

Take the case of Marathi movie Jana Gana Mana, which released online as well as in theatres on January 26. It wasn't the only one. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ashvin Kumar released his documentary Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror free of charge on YouTube on the same day. The very next month, debutant director Adeeb Rais released his film Kuch Spice To Make It Meetha, starring Purab Kohli, online on February 29.

Jana Gana Mana was the first commercial Marathi film to see an online release

Director Amit Abhyankar's Jana Gana Mana, which revolved around a teacher's relationship with the kids of the Faasi Pardi tribe in rural Maharashtra, garnered as many as 2,000 views within four days of its online release. He says, "We tied up with geodesi.com, which owns filmorbit.com, and ensured that viewers could log on to the site, select Jana Gana Mana and watch the film. While Indian viewers were charged Rs 30, people abroad had to pay $2.99. Surprisingly, only 30 per cent of the audience comprised Indians, the remaining 70 per cent were expatriates from far-flung countries like Tanzania and Israel."

A still from Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror, which was released online by director Ashvin Kumar to bypass censorship that his previous two films faced

In fact, Abhyankar has been flooded with requests to screen his movie abroad. He claims that apart from the Maharashtra Mandal of Los Angeles, which approached him to screen the film, 28 shows of the movie have been lined up in various parts of the world till May 5.

Kuch Spice To Make It Meetha recently received the YouTube Bronze Award for Most Trending Video

Likewise, Kumar's documentary, which sees Kashmiris open up about the brutality they suffer at the hands of militants and the Indian state alike, was supposed to become pay-per-view after the first 24 hours. "But when I saw the overwhelming response (over 50,000 views in three days), we kept it free for over a week. These figures are quite impressive since it's an 80-minute film and it's a known fact that India doesn't boast speedy Internet connections. But the fact that people had the patience to watch the film is heartwarming. Also, we didn't promote the film at all, I only posted about it on Facebook," enthuses Kumar.

Rais's film got as many as 1 million hits within three days of its release. Recently it also received the YouTube Bronze Award for the Most Trending Video. This medal is given to videos that have gained huge attention over a certain span of time and are currently seeing exceptional growth in viewership.

A new medium

Why are filmmakers choosing the online medium to release their movies? Some say it gives them an opportunity to showcase their work to the audience without shelling out a lot of money, while for others it is a way of making a statement. After his two earlier films, Inshallah Football and Dazed in Doon were banned, Kumar chose the Internet to screen Inshallah Kashmir to bypass the censor authorities, take a stand against them as well as give viewers the real picture of what is happening in the strife-torn valley. "There were several reasons why I uploaded the film online. Firstly, I wanted to make a statement that pre-censorship of any art form is unnecessary in this age of the Internet when everything can be accessed easily online. Secondly, viewers didn't have to pay for watching it, and that way more people saw what was actually happening in Kashmir," he explains.

For Abhyankar, the primary motive was to reach out to a larger audience. "It's well-known that distribution of Marathi films isn't great. I was very clear that my movie should reach out to more people and shouldn't just be limited to a theatrical release." Twenty-something Rais realised that releasing Kuch Spice To Make It Meetha on the Internet was the only way for him to showcase his work as well as reach out to a large audience. "Since it is a 25-minute short film, I didn't have the option of releasing it commercially. Either I could release it online or screen it at film festivals. The movie is a quirky take on a young commitment-phobic man, so I didn't think it was a good fit for the festival circuit."

According to Rais, he understood that it wasn't an easy task to make an impact in the online world, given the sea of videos that are uploaded every minute. So he decided to market his film well. He explains, "Because the movie was made on a limited budget, I had to seek sponsorship. I tied up with around 17 or 18 brands, including Tata Housing, Bharat Matrimony.com, Miss Malini.com and Upper Crust to market the film through online contests."

Sociological change

What has led to this phenomenon? Sunil Abraham, Executive director of Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, explains, "The times are changing. Earlier, creative artistes depended on intermediaries like studios, TV channels and theatres to screen their work and connect with viewers. Now, they are looking at the online medium to connect with the audience directly."

Kumar couldn't agree more. He opines that he had uploaded Inshallah Kashmir with an open mind and accepted the bouquets and brickbats with equal aplomb. "The Internet is a fairly democratic medium. Your audience shares views, opinions and abuses. While some loved the movie, others called me an Islamic fundamentalist. But I didn't mind as it was their honest opinion."

According to Abhyankar, the online medium is a boon for filmmakers as it is the only way for them to earn a considerable profit individually without sharing it with other entities. "When your movie is screened at theatres, apart from paying the satellite agencies for beaming the film, you have to incur expenses for screen prints and advertising. Later, you have to recover your money from exhibitors, which can be a long-winded process. In case of an online medium, the money is transferred directly to your account. Apart from converting the film into a format that can be viewed by everyone, you don't have to invest too much money."

Filmmakers also love that there is no pre-screening process involved online. "Only after the movie is uploaded and a user comments against objectionable or defamatory content, can it be removed from the website," informs Abraham.

Looking ahead

With the expanding reach of the Internet, filmmakers believe this trend will only grow. On their part, they are looking to explore it further. Enthused by the response to Jana Gana Mana, Abhyankar is now planning to make it available offline too. He shares, "Right now we are in talks with a company that has a unique technology whereby you don't have to visit the site and stream the movie. The technology enables viewers to get offline copies of the movie, which you can copy onto your pen drive. Once you connect your pen drive to the computer, the software will automatically connect you to the site and you have to just make the payment. In a few months time, we are also looking at releasing ad-supported versions of the film wherein viewers don't have to pay to watch the movie but will have to see it along with all the ads." As Rais, who is working on another project, Beyond Hatke, which will have an online release in October this year, says on a parting note, "Today people no longer have to go to theatres to watch a film, they can see movies on their laptops, mobile phones, while doing household chores and travelling to work. The Internet is definitely a boon for everyone."

The history of online releases

Rajshri Films released its Shahid Kapoor-Amrita Rao-starrer Vivah simultaneously in cinema halls and on the production company's official site -- Rajshri.com in 2006. The site served one million streams within seven days of its release. Each stream was priced at $9.99 approximately and the company managed to earn Rs.4.5 crore in the first week itself.
Siddharth-starrer Striker had a theatrical release in India and premiered exclusively for its foreign audiences through YouTube in 2010. While the movie was available for rent on YouTube in the US, in other foreign countries, people could view it for free on Studio18's YouTube channel.
After selling the film's soundtrack exclusively through the digital medium, the makers of F.A.L.T.U, released their movie simultaneously in Indian theatres and on the online medium for foreign audiences in 2011. Viewers had to pay a booking fee of $2.89 in order to watch the stream on www.zeetv.com/faltu.

Read the original published in MidDay

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/click-play-watch

Save Your Voice — A movement against Web censorship

praskrishna — 2012-03-13T11:44:27Z

‘Save Your Voice (SYV)’ is a movement against Web censorship and its main demand is the repealing of the Information Technology Act, said SYV founders, Aseem Trividi, a cartoonist, and Alok Dixit, a journalist, on Monday.

DNA Correspondent covered a press conference held on March 12, 2012 in Bangalore. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the story.

Trivedi’s website — www.cartoonistagainstcorruption.com — was banned during Anna Hazare’s movement. Trivedi said: “Mumbai police banned the website without any prior notice and cases of ‘treason’ were also filed. The website was banned without a judicial order and I haven’t received an explanation about the crime committed.”

Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, said the private sector does not protect the freedom of expression.

Read the original published by Daily News & Analysis on March 13, 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/save-your-voice-2014-a-movement-against-web-censorship

India’s Big Bet on Identity

praskrishna — 2012-03-07T05:44:12Z

The world’s largest biometric authentication system reaches its first major milestone, but lots of challenges remain, writes Joshua J. Romero in ieeespectrum. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this story which was featured in March 2012 edition.

Driving around Bangalore, it’s immediately clear that the infrastructure hasn’t kept up with the IT boom in this once-sleepy South Indian city. Auto rickshaws, scooters, and motorcycles squeeze into a tight phalanx at each red light and choke the air with exhaust. Construction, such as the concrete supports of the new metro rail line that looms overhead, causes detours everywhere, and in spots the entire road abruptly disintegrates into gravel.

But something miraculous happens as you make your way south, past the outer ring road. A ramp lifts a select few vehicles out of the weaving traffic and onto an elevated tollway, where you suddenly have a bird’s-eye view of the urban landscape. This is the road to Electronic City, an oasis of glass and steel high-rises overlooking pristine black asphalt paths that snake through the perfectly manicured lawns of tech companies like Wipro, IBM, and Infosys Technologies.

“If you can have such good roads in the Infosys campus, why are the roads outside so terrible?” That’s the common question foreign visitors would ask Nandan Nilekani, one of the company’s cofounders. “Politics” was his usual reply, according to Nilekani’s 2008 book, Imagining India. Now the man who has been called the Bill Gates of India has jumped into politics to try to use what he learned at the IT giant to transform the dysfunctional country that lies beyond the borders of Electronic City.

Since July 2009, Nilekani has been a cabinet minister, leading hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs as chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). By the most conservative estimates, at least a third of the country’s 1.2 billion citizens live below the poverty line and outside the formal economy. The UIDAI is expected to connect those hundreds of millions of people to government programs, save public money, reduce fraud and corruption, and foster new business opportunities—all by creating an unprecedented biometric system and outside the formal economy. The UIDAI is expected to connect those hundreds of millions of people to government programs, save public money, reduce fraud and corruption, and foster new business opportunities—all by creating an unprecedented biometric system.

“On the one hand, within India and across the world, people of Indian descent have done some remarkable work,” says Nilekani. “And on the other hand, here is a country that needs to solve some very basic problems. This project marries these two worlds.” UIDAI plans to use fingerprints and iris scans to assign every person in the country a unique 12-digit ID number that can be verified online. It’s one of the biggest IT projects in the world, and getting bigger: By early February, the UIDAI had issued 130 million ID numbers, and it can issue up to a million more IDs every day. The agency has set up 36 000 enrollment stations staffed by 87 000 certified enrollment operators. In India the project is called Aadhaar, which means “foundation” or “support,” because it’s meant to be a fundamental technology platform that will enable dozens of new public and private services to be created.

That’s if it all works. It’s easy to list major challenges: How exactly do you collect biometrics from every single person in the world’s second most populous country, especially those living at the margins? How do you keep bad data from getting into the database in a country rife with corruption? And how can you build the entire system around online authentication in a country where fewer than one in 20 people have access to the Internet?

The answers to these questions are getting more than the usual amount of scrutiny, because a lot of political fortunes are riding on the UIDAI.

The program has been heavily supported by the ruling Indian National Congress party; Nilekani was appointed by the prime minister himself, Manmohan Singh. But Singh and his Congress party have had a difficult time enacting many of their biggest policy goals, and the UIDAI has increasingly become the target of criticism.

Earlier this year, the whole scheme seemed in imminent danger of collapse, when a parliamentary committee killed the bill that would have given the program statutory authority, and a political turf war erupted between the UIDAI and the National Population Register, another government project collecting biometrics for the national census. But by late January the two sides had reached an agreement to share biometric data collection, and Aadhaar is once again moving full steam ahead with a new mandate and an estimated budget this year of 15 billion rupees [PDF] (about US $300 million).

Photo: Joshua J. Romero

EXISTING DOCUMENTS: A poster lists the variety of IDs a  person can use to register for an Aadhaar number.

To understand why the government has invested so heavily, it helps to know the current state of affairs in India. Aadhaar is meant to provide a form of identification that’s free, national, impossible to counterfeit—and available to everyone. “There’s an ID divide,” Nilekani explains, between people who have multiple official IDs and the hundreds of millions who have none. Only about 60 million people in India have passports, he says, and only about 100 million have photo ID bank cards. The most prevalent document is a voter ID card, which has been issued to about 700 million people, covering just over half of the country. But these and the rest of the official IDs created by the country’s vast bureaucracy all have shortcomings.

The primary reason for creating a biometric ID system is to give India’s poorest citizens better access to an array of welfare programs. India spends about 2 percent of its gross domestic product on social programs like the Public Distribution System, which provides subsidized rice, wheat, and other staples, and a rural employment scheme that guarantees 100 days of work. But all such programs suffer from severe “leakage”: According to the World Bank, corrupt officials and middlemen siphon away 59 percent of the money before it reaches the intended recipients. Eventually, the government hopes to provide funds directly to each person who needs them.

Most states issue ration cards, but they usually aren’t valid in other states. An official ID that can be used throughout the country is increasingly important as more and more people move away from their hometowns to follow employment, Nilekani says.

Complicating the problem further, existing ID cards are easy to duplicate. Some states have more names on their food ration lists than there are people living in the state. To fight counterfeiting, the Aadhaar team decided to use biometrics instead of issuing just another ID card. From the beginning, they consulted biometric experts, used existing standards when they could, and studied similar systems like the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

One thing the team realized early on is that a single biometric measurement wasn’t enough to guarantee uniqueness. In proof-of-concept studies, researchers determined that only by using all 10 fingerprints and a scan of both irises could error rates be kept manageable. Adding iris scans also makes the program more inclusive for people whose fingerprints have been worn down by manual labor.

Photos, clockwise from left: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times/Redux; Joshua J. Romero (2)
NECESSARY GEAR: Each enrollment station has the same basic set of equipment, including an iris scanner [top], a fingerprint scanner [bottom right], a webcam and light [bottom left], a laptop, a second monitor for the resident to view, and a scanner and printer to handle documents.

Getting an Aadhaar number is not a quick process. One Friday after midnight, I watch dozens of families wait patiently in a municipal building where only half the lights are on and there’s always a baby crying. While Anurodh Kanchan waits, he explains that he came at this hour because he’d heard the lines were even longer during the day. He’d already been once before to schedule this appointment. Now his 7-year-old daughter dozes on his wife’s shoulder as the whole family waits another half an hour for the enrollment agent to return from a break.

Hiring and training people to work as agents has been one of the project’s biggest logistical challenges. The UIDAI outsources enrollment to “registrars”—often state governments or banks—which in turn hire accredited agencies to actually set up and staff the centers. The agencies get paid a flat rate for each successful enrollment, as do the agents they hire. A coordinator for one of the largest agencies told me that his organization had significantly overestimated how many enrollments an agent could complete in a day. UIDAI says that an average station (see photos, “Necessary Gear”) can process each enrollment in under 10 minutes, but in the days I spent observing, it wasn’t uncommon for the process to take twice as long. And if you’re an agent looking at a line of people stretching out the door, it’s easy to see how you might begin to rush through your tasks.

That’s why enforcing quality is left to a piece of software known as the enrollment client, installed on each agent’s laptop. The program manages every step of the process and was developed jointly by engineers at UIDAI and MindTree, an Indian IT company. Because enrollment often takes place in remote locations with no Internet access, the client must be fully independent and be able to run off a single laptop. The developers also had to make sure that the enrollment client could work seamlessly with any of the 11 biometric devices from various manufacturers that had been certified for use. And the initial version had to be built fast: MindTree won the contract at the end of April 2010, and the UIDAI wanted to enroll the first resident by that August.

MindTree met the deadline, and the client it designed now manages to prevent and correct most errors an enrollment agent might make. In addition to a simple quality check, the software looks for self-consistency—for instance, verifying that each fingerprint isn’t coming from the operator or another recently enrolled resident and that all 10 fingerprints and two irises are distinct from each other. If something goes wrong in a biometric capture, the software tells the operator how to correct it—for instance, it can distinguish between a facial photo that’s too dark and one in which the person was photographed at the wrong angle.

Still, over the last 21 months, the software engineers have had to continually improve the program to address new challenges encountered in the field. For example, when the UIDAI began enrolling people in the Punjab region of North India, where many men wear long beards and large turbans, enrollment agents had a hard time taking a photo that the software considered acceptable: The turban would be interpreted as an unacceptable background, or the automatic cropping feature would crop around the turban instead of the face. The software team was able to quickly tweak the parameters and release a new version of the client so that enrollment could continue.

It isn’t just the biometric collection that’s tricky. A resident must also supply basic demographic data—name, age, gender, and address. Residents can fill out paper forms in any of the 16 official Indian languages, which agents must first transfer to the computer and then translate into an English version of the form. This is by far the most time-consuming part of the process, and MindTree has tried to speed it up by building transliteration into the client software. But Indic languages have many variations—some are written right to left, and many use unique character sets. Still, the agent is expected to check the results and clean up minor mistakes.

There are obviously both privacy and security concerns when you’re collecting personal data from more than a billion people. “You can’t change your biometrics,” points out Sunil Abraham, the executive director at the Center for Internet and Society, in Bangalore, so if they become compromised, it’s a difficult problem to fix.

Among the precautions the UIDAI takes is to encrypt all data as soon as they’re collected. The data can be decrypted only by UIDAI servers, so the records aren’t even accessible to the operator or enrollment agency that collected them. At the end of each day, all the encrypted enrollment data are stored on USB flash drives, and the drives are transported to a place with Internet access so the data can be uploaded to UIDAI’s servers. It’s in the best interests of the enrollment agencies to safeguard the data, because otherwise they won’t get paid.

From the enrollment centers the action moves to the racks of servers at the UIDAI Central Information Data Repository, which is also in Bangalore. Here is where deduplication—checking each new enrollment against every other record in the database—will arguably make this identity scheme rise above the rest. Ensuring that no person can get two numbers is key to making biometrics a worthwhile investment. A few years ago, one Indian state collected biometrics for everyone below the poverty line, but it didn’t have the technology or a plan to prevent duplicates. It ended up capturing 1.2 times the population, which resulted in a significant leakage of benefits.

Many critics, including members of Parliament, have doubted that it’s even possible to deduplicate records from the entire Indian populace. It’s certainly a big task. In order to issue 1 million Aadhaar numbers in a single day, the current maximum rate, the data center must conduct 100 trillion person matches. To improve this process, the UIDAI came up with an unusual arrangement. Rather than hiring a single firm for the job, it awarded the project to three contractors, each responsible for processing a portion of the enrollments, with the overlapping records used to compare performance between the systems. This arrangement lets the UIDAI know if a system isn’t working correctly and also gives the companies a financial incentive to improve their software—they’ll get to process more records, and get paid more, if their products perform better. The vendors were even required to use the same kind of hardware to build their systems, so the agency isn’t tied to any one company.

In late January, the UIDAI released a report [PDF] that for the first time detailed the results of this deduplication effort. There are two primary factors that determine the accuracy of a biometric system: the false-positive rate, which in this case is how often a newly registered person is incorrectly judged to be already enrolled, and the false-negative rate, which is how often true duplicates are not recognized as such. To measure the false-positive rate, the UIDAI tested 4 million unique records against a subset of the enrollment database containing 84 million records: Of the unique records, 2309 were falsely rejected, for a false-positive rate of 0.057 percent. The agency also tested 31 399 known duplicates. The system caught all but 11, for a false-negative rate of 0.035 percent.

The false-positive rate applies to the total number of records in the database. As that number grows, the rate should increase in a linear fashion, because there are more opportunities for false matches. The false-negative rate, on the other hand, applies only to the small minority of enrollments that really are true duplicates (the UIDAI estimates that these make up only 0.5 percent of all incoming enrollments). Because the false-negative rate doesn’t depend on the total number of records, it should remain steady unless more people try to enroll multiple times.

R.S. Sharma, the director general of UIDAI, says that preventing all duplicates with technology alone is impossible. There are some people who just can’t be uniquely identified through biometrics, because the data for them aren’t good enough—children under age 5, for instance, and people with multiple disabilities. That’s why the responsibility for accuracy and uniqueness isn’t all left up to the software. Several full-time employees manually review the roughly 0.2 percent of cases that the software can’t handle, resolving errors and looking for evidence of fraud.

Even if the system isn’t perfect, it’s likely to be much better than any existing alternative, simply because it will eliminate “ghost identities,” says M.R. Madhavan, who works at the Centre for Policy Research, in New Delhi. “At least people who died in 1995 or 2005 will not get into the system,” he says.

Photo: Joshua J. Romero

AUTHENTICATION TERMINAL: Widespread use of Aadhaar will  rely on biometric terminals, like this prototype at MindTree.

Now that the UIDAI has shown it can collect biometric and demographic data and eliminate duplicate enrollments, much of the attention will shift to the authentication system, where people can prove their identity with just the swipe of a finger. Such systems are still under development, so most residents I met weren’t clear about the benefits of the program. When I asked people why they were enrolling, they often had vague reasons: “It might make it easier to get my benefits,” said one middle-aged woman in Bangalore. “I heard you’ll need it to buy heating gas,” said another woman. “I think it’s mandatory,” an elderly man told me. Nilekani thinks that getting authentication services up and running will be the best way to demonstrate the power of the entire project.

Here’s how such a futuristic system might work: Walking up to a wirelessly connected terminal at a local shop, a person will type in his name and Aadhaar number, and then he’ll scan his fingerprints. The data will be sent to a central database, where the Aadhaar number will be used to locate his record. The submitted name and biometric data will be compared to those on file, and the software will determine whether they match.

The UIDAI imagines that such biometric terminals will eventually be ubiquitous. The first devices deployed will likely be micro-ATMs in rural shops. These machines process transactions electronically, just like a full-size ATM, except they don’t store and dispense cash—that gets handled from the shopkeeper’s till. The hope is that such systems will deliver financial services to the 40 percent of the Indian population who have never had bank accounts. When people enroll for Aadhaar, they simply need to check a box and an Aadhaar-enabled bank account will be created for them.

In January, the UIDAI began a pilot project in the state of Jharkhand, where workers in the rural employment program could collect cash payments by scanning their fingerprints at a micro-ATM. Another pilot program in Maharashtra transferred small amounts of money to individual Aadhaar numbers, showing that bank servers could be easily linked with the UIDAI system.

The authentication system is already available as an application programming interface (API), which means it won’t be limited to just government programs and banks. Private service providers could use it to verify new customers as well. Take India’s vaunted mobile-phone culture: Phone companies are currently required to collect and retain significant documentation for every person they sell a SIM card to, as I found out in the two days I spent collecting the photos and local references I needed to get one myself. “If you look at any service provider, they’re not going to offer the mobile-phone service unless they verify who you are,” says Bala Parthasarathy, an entrepreneur who worked in Silicon Valley but came back to India to volunteer on the project for a year. Parthasarathy says that using Aadhaar for identity verification could provide the telephone companies with major savings.

Still, setting up a nationwide network of biometric terminals has plenty of its own challenges. First, India will need better connectivity. Wireless voice networks now cover most of the country, but wireless data networks have trailed behind. Current penetration of 3G is mostly just in the cities, says Debabrata Das, an IEEE member and a professor of electrical engineering at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, who has been studying the network challenges of authentication as a technical advisor for the state of Karnataka.

The API will also need to be flexible enough to handle variations in the demographic data that are submitted. The system can’t enforce strict matches: Many Indians use initials in their names, and there is no guarantee that they will always spell their names the same way in English. Further, sometimes a married woman will use her father’s family name instead of her husband’s. Because of the ambiguity in names and addresses, the database must be able to perform partial and fuzzy matches. Eventually, Sharma says, the UIDAI hopes to be able to do database matching for all the Indian languages as well, so the API will continue to undergo revisions.

Now the UIDAI must wait for its partners to begin taking advantage of the system, and Nilekani admits that starting up such services is largely beyond his control. Cooperation with other agencies and industries is all part of Nilekani’s approach to how government initiatives should work. “The big thing to my mind has been, How do you create a model of change, and how do you carry a lot of people with it? How do you think this through in a way that everyone comes on board?” he says. In building the project to this point, he’s managed to bring, if not everyone, then certainly a pretty diverse crowd: technical experts; national, state, and local officials; banks and businesses; and all those millions who willingly wait in line for hours.

“Everyone puts their own aspirations on it…like Obama,” he jokes. But the downside of being so inclusive is that as the project matures, it may be difficult to keep all the interested parties happy, and there’s bound to be disappointment if the project fails to achieve all its lofty ambitions.

The project has made it this far by adapting quickly as problems arise. “Think of it as multigeneration, continuous improvement,” Nilekani says. “You launch and get feedback and you get criticism. You need to build a rapid feedback loop, which is what we’ve built.”

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/big-bet-on-identity

International Conference on Mobile Law

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T08:24:37Z

Pranesh Prakash spoke in the panel on Mobiles - Privacy and Social Media on March 1, 2012.

Draft Agenda

March 1, 2012

9:00am to 9:30am	Registration
9:30am to 10:45am	Inauguration Session
10:45am to 11:15am	Icml Tea
11:15am to 11:45am	Session I: Mobile law- An introduction
11:45am to 1:15pm	Session II: Mobile Revolution, Mcommerce and Crimes
1:15pm to 2:00pm	Icml Lunch
2:00pm to 3:15pm	Session III: Mobiles - Privacy & Social Media
3:15pm to 3:30pm	Icml Tea
3:30pm to 4:45pm	Session IV: Mobiles & Security
4:45pm to 6:00pm	Session V: Safe Harbour Protection for Mobiles Service Providers In India

March 2, 2012

9:30am to 11:00am	Session VI-Mobile Banking & Payments
11:00am to 11:30am	Icml Tea
11:30 am to 12:15pm	Session VII: Mobile Law Challenges in India
12:15pm to 1:30pm	Icml Lunch
1:30pm to 2:15pm	Session VIII: Mobile Governance
2:15pm to 3:30pm	Icml Tea
3:30pm to 3:45pm	Session IX: Internet Governance In The Mobile Ecosystem
3:45pm to 5:00pm	Session X : 2G Spectrum Allocation: Post Supreme Court Judgment- Challenges & Opportunities
5:00pm	Valedictory Function

Read the original here

Venue: ASSOCHAM House, 47, Prithvi Raj Road, New Delhi, India

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/intl-conferernce-on-mobile-law

Secure IT 2012 — Securing Citizens through Technology

praskrishna — 2012-04-28T04:06:47Z

The event is co-organised by DST and NSDI, Govt. of India in partnership with Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd. on March 1, 2012 at Claridges in New Delhi.

Draft Agenda

9.00 am – 9.30 am	Registration & Tea
9.30 am – 11.00 am	Inaugural Session

Securing Citizens through Technology

The SecureIT 2012 Inaugural Session would present an overview of the security scenario in the country, and place the use of ICT towards ensuring national security centrestage. The inaugural would also highlight the use that ICT is being put for in effective disaster management, minimising material as well as human loss.

The session would aim at identifying a policy roadmap towards making effective use of ICT for the purposes of national security, well-being of citizens and businesses in times of disaster and an uncertain external environment and identify the major policy objectives for the sector as a whole.

Introductory Remarks: Dr Ravi Gupta, CEO Elets Technomedia and Editor-in-Chief, egov
Welcome Address: Dr M P Narayanan, President, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies
Inaugural Address: Anil K Sinha, Vice Chairman, Bihar State Disaster Management Authority, Government of Bihar – Chief Guest, SecureIT 2012

Panel Discussion:

S Regunathan, Former Chief Secretary, Government of NCT of Delhi
R S Sharma, Director General, UIDAI
Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Defence, Government of India
Shambhu Singh, Joint Secretary (North East), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India
Ajay Sawhney, CEO, National e-Governance Division, Government of India
Major General (Dr) R Siva Kumar, Head, (NRDMS), Government of India

11. 00 am – 11.30 am	Networking Tea
11.30 am – 1.30 pm	Technical Session 1

Information Security – Securing Networks, Communications, Data and Applications

In the modern Information Age, knowledge is power like never before. A robust, secure communications network is not only desired, it is an absolute imperative in order to allow efficient functioning of the state. The communications networks have to be secured from state and non-state actors inimical to India. This session would highlight some major threats to the national communications infrastructure and the policies being adopted to counter these threats.

Chair: Ravi S Saxena, Additional Chief Secretary, DST, Government of Gujarat
Key Note Speaker: Dr Gulshan Rai, Director General, CERT-In

Distinguished Panellists:

S K Basu, Vice President, NIIT Technologies
Manas Sarkar, Head Pre-Sales (India & SAARC), Trend Micro
Ruchin Kumar, Principal Solution Architect, India and SAARC, Safenet India Pvt Ltd
Dr Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India
Rajan Raj Pant, Controller, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of Nepal
Prof. Anjali Kaushik, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon

1.30 pm – 2.30 pm	Lunch
2.30 pm – 5.00 pm	Technical Session 2

ICT in National Security and Policing

India faces a multiplicity of security challenges from within and without. Conventional responses to these challenges are no longer adequate and technology is being increasingly deployed to make the nation safer and more secure for residents, visitors and businesses. The legal framework has also been modified to incorporate modern technological advances.

The MHA has embarked upon a major project – Crime and Criminal Tracking System (CCTNS) that is expected to bring about a major overhaul of the policing system of the country. In this session, CCTNS and state adaptations of ICT in policing would be discussed along with an overview of technological advances in the field of security.

Chair: S Suresh Kumar, Joint Secretary (Centre-State), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

Distinguished Panellists:

NSN Murty, General Manager, Smarter Planet Solutions - India/ South Asia, IBM
Col Vishu Sikka, (Retd) General Manager – Defence, Aerospace & Public Security, SAP India & Subcontinent
Joachim Murat, Director of Sagem Morpho Security Pvt Ltd.
Hemant Sharma, Vice- Chair, BSA India Committee
Raj Prem Khilnani, DGP (Homeguard and Civil Defence), Maharashtra
Rajvir P Sharma, Additional Director General of Police, Bangalore Metropolitan Task Force
Loknath Behra, IGP, National Investigation Agency
Purushottam Sharma, IGP, State Crime Records Bureau, Madhya Pradesh
Ranjan Dwivedi, IGP, UP Police
Sanjay Sahay, IGP, Karnataka State Police

5.00 pm – 5. 30 pm	Networking Tea
5.30 pm – 7.00 pm	Technical Session 3

Managing Information for Safety and Security

In the modern age, ICT is deployed in a variety of ways for enhancing citizen safety and security. ICT is being widely used for disaster management, urban planning, census operations etc.

In this session, discussions would highlight some path-breaking uses of ICT for enhancing citizen safety in a number of diverse settings.

Chair: N Ravishanker, Additional Secretary, Universal Service Obligation Fund, DIT, Govt of India

Distinguished Panellists:

Sandeep Sehgal, IBM, VP, Public Sector, India and South Asia
Sanjeev Mital, CEO, National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG), Government of India
Dr R C Sethi, Additional Registrar General of India
Maj Gen R C Padhi, Assistant Surveyor General, Survey of India
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Center For Internet Society
V S Prakash, Director, Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, Karnataka
Rajiv P Saxena, Deputy Director General, National Informatics Centre, Government of India
Jay Kay Gupta, Fire Chief, Delhi Development Authority

7.00 pm onwards

Valedictory Session: Way Ahead High Tea

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/secure-it-2012

Privacy in India — An Early Draft

Natasha Vaz — 2014-02-28T05:05:21Z

Privacy India in partnership with Privacy International, UK, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore is pleased to bring you the draft chapters of its book on privacy in India. These include the Country Report, Telecommunication and Internet Privacy, E-Governance Identity and Privacy, Finance and Privacy, Health and Privacy, Transparency and Privacy.

Note: The chapters are an early draft which is in the process of being reviewed and updated. We greatly appreciate your comments and feedback.

Download the chapters below:

Country Report [PDF Document, 925 Kb]
Transparency and Privacy [PDF Document, 383 Kb]
Freedom of Expression and Privacy [PDF Document, 365 Kb]
Health and Privacy [PDF Document, 1146 Kb]
Finance and Privacy [PDF document 204 Kb]
E-Governance, Identity and Privacy [PDF Document, 554 Kb]
Telecommunications and Internet Privacy [PDF Document, 471 Kb]
Consumer Privacy [PDF, 390 Kb]
Law Enforcement, National Security, and Privacy [PDF, 422 Kb]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/privacy-in-india-draft-chapters

Unique ID System: Pros and Cons

Natasha Vaz — 2012-02-29T11:28:58Z

On September 16, 2011, the Citizen’s Voluntary Initiative for the City and Centre for Advocacy and Research organized a public consultation titled “Unique ID System: Pros and Cons” in Bangalore. The consultation was on the utility and impact of the UID system in India and featured a panel discussion with T. Prabhakar, public relations officer, e-governance, Ashok Dalwai, UIDAI regional deputy director, Somashekar V.K., managing trustee of Grahak Shakti and Col. Mathew Thomas, civic activist and retired army officer.

Col. Mathew Thomas began his presentation by a comparative analysis of the Indian and the British experience in providing a unique identity to its citizens. In Britain, this initiative was labelled as ‘intrusive bullying’ and ‘an assault on personal liberties’. Additionally, the government recognized that they must conduct their business as servants of the public and not as their masters. The project was terminated on the grounds that it could not achieve the claimed objectives, and it was dangerous costly.

Nevertheless, the unique identification (UID) system in India is being perscribed as a prestigious project that will eliminate identity fraud, financial exclusion, enhance accessibility for the poor, enable the government to better manage welfare schemes and target corruption in social programs such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the public distribution system (PDS), public health and financial inclusion.

Col. Mathew Thomas chronicled ID schemes. He explained that the advent and growth of information technology increased the availability of technology, which led to a commercial interest to exploit technology for profit. Technological solutions were heavily marketed, however, it is a mistaken belief that there is a technological fix to every problem (technology could solve any problem). Post 9/11 paranoia resulted in the notion that ID cards were the best possible counter measure to terrorism. “The inherent ridiculousness of this notion is that militants do not come with ID cards, but with AK-47s, and possession of ID cards or citizenship does not prevent one from becoming a terrorist”, says Mathew Thomas. National ID cards do not stop or deter terrorist actions.

India’s history with the UID project can be traced to the recommendations made by the Kargil Review Committee chaired by K. Subrahmanyam.The Committee recommended the issuing of ID cards to people in border areas to prevent infiltration and extend the system to the whole country to combat terrorism. Consequently, in 2003 the Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended by the NDA Government so as to compulsorily register all citizens into a “National Population Register” (NPR) and issue a Multi-purpose National Identity Card (MNIC). The NPR database will be inked to the UID. Subsequently, the UPA Government promoted the UID, as a pro-poor project.

Col. Mathew Thomas discussed the various questionable aspects of the UID project: its legality, financial prudence, ethics and its uses and abuses.

UID and Legality

Firstly, there is no law governing the functioning of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The illegal implementation of the UID is a complete insult to the Parliament and citizens, considering that the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010 was drafted long after the implementation of the UID commenced.

UID and Financial Prudence

The high-level of apprehension surrounding the UID project stems from the fact that a project of this magnitude, cost and impact on the entire population would be undertaken without a feasibility study and a cost-benefit analysis. There exist two studies: one by the London School of Economics, regarding the UK project, and another by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, on UID in India. Both have concluded that such schemes are unworkable and too costly.

UID and Ethics

Ethical questions related to the UID are regarding its history, participation and ubiquity. Firstly, the UIDAI website is silent on the history prior to 2006. It fails to mention the significant historical roots of the UID, specifically, the Kargil War and the National Population Registry. Second, the UID has been promoted as a pro-poor project, whereas huge possibilities for commercial exploitation exist. Lastly, the UIDAI asserts that enrollment for the UID is ‘voluntary’. Although participation in the UID scheme is supposed to be voluntary, service providers can make it compulsory, thereby making it ubiquitous. A subtle campaign is being carried on, hinting at denial of benefits and services to those without UID.

Uses and Abuses

UID claims to transform governance, make ‘Bharath’ part of the growth process, plug ‘leakages’ & ‘slippages’ in welfare schemes, bring about all round prosperity and put India on a ‘fast-track’ growth by becoming the pivot around which all anti-poverty measures will rotate. One can conclude that UID is a panacea or a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Mathew Thomas questioned how these ambitions can be achieved by fingerprinting and scanning the irises of 1.2 billion people and storing the data for use by agencies responsible for the delivery of services.

These claims revolve around the assumptions that a lack of identity denies people welfare benefits; denies access to opportunities and services; and that a unique identification and de-duplication using biometrics would prevent “leakages”, “slippages” and in effect, all corruption. These assumptions need to be tested and verified so as to ensure validity.

The Public Distribution System and UID

Col. Mathew Thomas examined the PDS to analyze the use and claims of UID. He described the supply and demand of the PDS. The ‘supply’ side involves the fixing of minimum support prices, procurement by the centre and state governments, transport to FCI and state storages, distribution by centre to states and distribution by states to fair-price (ration) shops. All of the stages are affected by corruption and surprisingly UID beneficiaries have no role in any of the aforementioned stages.

‘Leakages’ in the supply process could potentially occur during the fixing of the minimum support prices (if deals exist with large farmers), during procurement (if they lift less quantity than what was paid for) and during accounting and storage (if they write off larger quantities than the actual damage; write off against bogus ration-cards; and show more quantity in storage and shops than is actually there).

The ‘demand’ process of the PDS system requires for state governments to decide on the eligibility of BPL people, issue ration cards, allocate ration-card holders to specific ration shops and requires the ration-card holders go to designated shops and collect entitlements. Corruption is possible, probable and happens in this discretionary decision-making. However, the only stage at which UID would find some use, if at all, is when ration-card holders collect rations.

Col. Mathew Thomas provided an excellent example of the government’s lopsided priorities. He describes the UID in PDS as the story of the ‘fence eating the corn’. The ‘fence’ then says, “let’s brand the cattle to find who is stealing the corn!”

The practicality of utilizing UID for authentication in the PDS system is a huge conundrum. Considering that the process to authenticate at ration shops requires all shops to have scanners (approximately six lakhs) which must be connected to a network and power at all the time.

Another problem surrounds the collection of ration. Ration-card holders do not always go to collect rations. There could be occasions where one family member goes for collection or one person collects rations for a number of families. The worst part of the UID application to the PDS system is that the procedure puts the BPL person at the mercy of the ration-shop keeper. He could simply deny rations, saying, “Authentication failed”.

The potential abuses of the UID could arise from the large collection of fingerprints that will be with various government officials and private agencies which could be used to foist false criminal cases against innocent people, forge title deeds, sale deeds, promissory notes wills, etc., and could target individuals and communities.

Col. Mathew Thomas concluded by explaining the main risks of any centralized database, it can be hacked and can crash. Professor Ian Angle, of the London School of Economics, has said that the UID will be "Olympic games of hacking", providing people with the biggest challenge to hack through.

Making a point: (From left) Public Relations Officer, e-governance, T. Prabhakar; UIDAI Regional Deputy Director Ashok Dalwai; Managing Trustee of Grahak Shakti Somashekar V.K.; and civic activist Mathew Thomas at a panel discussion in Bangalore on Friday. — photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy.

Photo Source: From the Hindu, September 17, 2011, http://goo.gl/gCnqK

Note: Unfortunately, the other presentations were conducted in Kannada and could not be understood by the author of this blog.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/unique-id-system-pros-and-cons

Digitisation is making e-learning simple

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T10:05:20Z

Though the computer literacy in India is low, some companies are effectively spreading education using digital contents riding on the Internet.

This article by Shayan Ghosh was published in the Deccan Herald on February 13, 2012. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this.

The business of education is all set for a transformation in the country as the government, recently, announced that it will purchase some 100,000 low-cost Aakash tablets from Datawind, the Canadian company that has developed this equipment.

These tablets would then be distributed to schools and colleges in India, where students would get them for free. This move of going the e-way and the limitations the low cost tablet has revealed has seen a lot of criticism all over, however, the e-learning industry in India is going to be one of the biggest game changers in recent times.

E-learning service provider Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) CEO Sanjaya Sharma recalls his experiences when he began his company in 1990. “There was no e-learning then. It was computer-based training along with multimedia training that existed,” says Sharma. However, times changed slowly as TIS began getting clients. One of its first clients was the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) with whom it did a project involving VGA monitors. This product was later sold to 32 other organisations.

Now, the company has many Fortune-500 customers to itself and is also conducting business with universities and publishers abroad. Sharma is very optimistic about the present Indian e-learning market, though he believes that it has just begun to take shape. “Adoption happened much earlier abroad, than in India,” Sharma added.
TIS is coming big on the e-learning in schools with their Tata ClassEdge, a solution for interactive teaching in schools.

Tata ClassEdge is an innovative and comprehensive educational solution from TIS, designed to help teachers deliver quality instruction, with an effective blend of classroom activities and interactive multimedia demonstrations.

For this purpose, the company would be providing its services to partially government-aided schools apart from private schools. Study estimates that there are around 80,000 government schools; 150,000 partially-funded schools and 105,000 government schools in the country. TIS is also going to reach out to government schools soon with a different pricing model within a couple of years.

Through ClassEdge, teachers will have access to lesson plans that they can use to make their classes engaging and memorable. The plans are customised for students and it provides tips to elicit student participation, including reinforcement activities for struggling learners and challenging assignments for high achievers.

Teachers can use animations to explain difficult topics. They can engage children through stories that teach. They could use interactive games to get students to interact with the medium and have fun while learning.

Sharma strongly believes that the education sector in India is going to take advantages of technology in the coming years and will improve in the process. “I definitely feel that technology should be available to every individual,” adds Sharma.
Meanwhile, another institute AVAGMAH (avagmah.com) is making good business with its online learning platform deemed for the higher education space. AVAGMAH offers UGC-recognised degrees for MBA (Global) in sales & marketing, HR management and banking & finance. The education platform is entirely online and the student must attend classes on the Internet.

“The faculty conducts a class and students sit at home, taking lessons. That was my aim and that’s what AVAGMAH offers,” says AVAGMAH Online School CEO Karthik K S. The platform for this online school was developed in 2007 and it had also won an award for innovation from Nasscom, the same year. However, the content generation took another two years and only in 2009, was AVAGMAH ready to deliver education online and commence its first batch. The institute now has more than 6,000 students to its name and the number keeps growing with each passing day.

The ease of access, they feel, is drawing people towards online education as they can log into their classes after their day’s work and have a quick session with the faculty. “Internet can reach places where prevalent education systems cannot. We have students logging in from places like Palanpur in Gujarat and also from places like Guwahati,” explained Karthik. He also says that the content can be delivered on low bandwidth Internet connections making it easier for narrowband users to access it. On the cost factor of such courses and how viable it would be for the not-so-rich sections of India, he pointed out that AVAGMAH offers two-year MBA courses for Rs 40,000 per year.

“Online education is going to drastically change the learning space in India as technology becomes more accessible,” added Karthik.

Karnataka, the state with the most developments happening in the IT space, is no doubt heralding the e-learning spree in India with various initiatives to bring this form of education to all. In the year 2009, NIIT had announced a partnership with the Government of Karnataka (Department of Social Welfare - DSW), the Karnataka Vocational Training & Skill Development Corporation Ltd (KVSTDC) and the Department of Employment and Training (DET) to provide e-learning to young under-graduates residing in DSW hostels.

The vision of this project is to enable the students in the government hostels to use their free time to enhance their skill sets by acquiring some of the soft skills and life skills that are required in most job areas, and in the process, providing the latest learning technologies at the student’s doorstep.

IT major Intel India and the Karnataka Government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, last year, launched ‘Computers on Wheels’, an e-learning pilot programme, in five districts of the state.

The pilot programme includes digital instruction materials from ‘Educomp’, an education solutions provider. The programme enables teachers to utilise a variety of learning strategies and tools to cater to the diverse learning styles and abilities of students, making education more engaging and inclusive for all. Under the ‘Computers on Wheels’ approach, netbooks are housed in a cart and can be moved between classrooms as needed.

Not only has the Internet found a newer way in traditional courses, but it has also made advances in supplementary education. Atano, a Mumbai-based company, has come up with a unique idea of providing e-books for vocational courses on its website. Imagine living cities like Meerut, Shimla, Jaipur, Guwahati, Indore, Cochin or even in the metros, one can download a supplementary e-Book at a click of a button. Supplementary education books can be downloaded on the individual’s Windows PC, Android platform, or even Mac (iPads).

Cost-effective option

Industry experts are of the opinion that this sector has a huge potential and more so, in a country where education finds it tough to reach remote places.

“The country needs e-learning as it is the best way to reach out to millions and moreover this sector is very promising,” says head of IT & ITeS Practice at KPMG, Pradeep Udhas.

He adds that not only in traditional courses, but also in vocational courses, e-learning will be the trend-setter.

Another initiative by Manipal Global Education Services, EduNxt enables interactive learning environment which includes small group mentoring, virtual classrooms, simulation, self-study content, recorded presentations and shared browsing.
Launched by Sikkim Manipal University-Distance Education in 2009, it helps all the Distance Education students through their online platform.

The university believes that it develops a sense of togetherness among the members and different stakeholders of the huge community within the platform.

The platform has functionality which provides a student to interact with 65 core faculty and 6,500 supporting faculty counselors in order to utilise the varied expertise and vast experience of this community.

“We may have progressed from just computer-based learning to technology-enabled solutions in the classroom, but the objective has remained intact, improving the learning experience by making it more engaging,” said Pearson Education Services COO Srikanth B Iyer.

Iyer adds that in their current avatar, e-learning solutions are not seen as replacements for teachers, but aids which will help teachers deliver lessons better, thereby increasing the quality of the learning experience.

However, Centre for Internet & Society Executive Director Sunil Abraham feels that learning should not be restricted to the Internet and interactive classroom sessions but should be made available on mobile phones through audio files as mobile penetration is much higher compared to Internet reach.

“Audio files can also be productive and a learning experience for people who can’t afford the Internet,” explained Abraham.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/digitisation-is-making-e-learning-simple

India debates limits to freedom of expression

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T09:50:37Z

From Google to Facebook, from world-famous author Salman Rushdie to a little-known political cartoonist, it has become increasingly easy in recent months to offend the Indian government, and to incur the wrath of the censor or even the threat of legal action.

This article by Simon Denyer was published in the Washington Post on February 13, 2012. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this.

In the world’s largest democracy, many Indians say freedom of expression is under attack, and along with it the values of pluralism and tolerance that have bound this nation of 1.2 billion people together since independence from Britain more than 64 years ago.

India’s democracy is nothing if not raucous. The huge array of newspapers and 24-hour television news channels are often vociferous in their criticism of politicians. But the media’s determination to root out corruption in the past two years has prompted a backlash. Talk of more stringent regulation is mounting.

At the same time, artists say their creative freedom has been steadily eroded. Even Jay Leno managed to offend Indian Sikhs — and prompt an official government complaint — with a satirical reference to their holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, in a joke about Mitt Romney’s vacation homes.

At fault, many say, is a thin-skinned government that gives in to the demands of violent mobs, ostensibly to make political gains but in fact to suppress its critics.

“For a country that takes great pride in its democracy and history of free speech, the present situation is troubling,” said Nilanjana Roy, a columnist and literary critic. “Especially in the creative sphere, the last two decades have been progressively intolerant.”

Targeting authors, artists

Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” was banned in India in 1988, was forced to cancel appearances at the Jaipur Literature Festival last month after threats of violence from Muslim groups and a warning about a possible assassination attempt — information he said was probably fabricated by authorities to keep him away.

Wary of alienating Muslim voters in ongoing state elections, not a single Indian politician spoke out in favor of Rushdie’s right to be heard.

Last month, the screening of a documentary on Kashmir was canceled at a college in the city of Pune after right-wing Hindus objected, and an artist was beaten in his gallery in Delhi for showing nude paintings of actresses and models that his attackers claimed were an insult to the country.

The release of the latest book by Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen was canceled in Kolkata after Muslims protested, and Aseem Trivedi, a 25-year-old political cartoonist, was charged with treason and insulting India’s national emblems in drawings inspired by activist Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement.

But perhaps the most shocking episode for advocates of freedom of expression has been the government’s attempt to muzzle Facebook and Google — and prosecute the companies’ executives — for content posted on their sites deemed to be offensive. “Like China, we can block all such Web sites,” warned the judge hearing the case in the Delhi High Court.

The government cites images insulting to one or another of India’s religions, content it says could provoke unrest. It is up to social media sites, the government says, to manually screen and censor all potentially offensive content or face prosecution.

“No freedom can be absolute,” said the chairman of the Press Council of India, Justice Markandey Katju. “The hold of religion is very strong in India, and you have to respect that. You can’t go insulting people.”

Katju’s concerns are perhaps understandable in a country whose birth was scarred by the mass murder of Hindus and Muslims at the time of independence in 1947. But the effect, critics say, is to give the mob the power of veto and take away a fundamental right in a free society: the right to offend others.

Sunil Abraham at the Center for Internet and Society says the government’s proposals on Web censorship would kill the vibrancy of the Internet in India. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales warned that they would scare off investors and crush the country’s potential to become a true leader in the Internet industry.

The irony, according to critics, is that the concern over religiously offensive content was little more than an excuse: What appears to have really offended the ruling Congress party were defamatory images of their idolized leader, Sonia Gandhi.

“The myth that is spread is that the government is acting against hate speech and obscenity. But when the government acts to control information on the Internet, it is usually defamatory or potentially defamatory content against people and politicians,” Abraham said.

Almost a year ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the media were undermining the nation’s self-confidence by harping on official corruption. Since then, talk of tighter media regulation has grown louder.

And despite the vibrancy of India’s mainstream English-language media, the country’s ranking on the press freedom index of the journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has dropped, from 105th in 2009 to 131st last year.

An optimistic view

Arnab Goswami, the editor and anchor of the Times Now television channel, points to television’s dramatic success in exposing official corruption in the past two years to argue that there is plenty to be optimistic about.

Courts in India generally have a better record than do politicians of defending freedom of expression. And there are people in government, including Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni, determined to resist the temptation to take a harder line.

“The pressure was enormous, to control the media, to clamp down on the media,” she said. “But I did withstand the pressure.”

Soni said she sees self-regulation by the media rather than official regulation as the way forward. She maintains that, for example, the debate about Rushdie has not necessarily done India any harm.

“That’s the strength of Indian society,” she said. “You have discussed it, everyone has had their say on the matter, the government has had its share of criticism, yet we’ve moved on.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-debates-limits-to-freedom-of-expression

Developing location-based services

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T09:31:50Z

For mapping enthusiasts, geeks and neogeographers in Bangalore, here's something to look forward to. Cartonama, a workshop that offers intensive hands-on training on tools to build and manage location data for location-based services, will be held in the city on March 2 and 3.

The article was published in the Hindu on February 26, 2012

This workshop, being organised by city-based tech event management firm HasGeek, is open to developers, neogeographers and entrepreneurs working on location-based services who want to understand how to use advanced tools to manage and represent their geographic data.

The workshop will be conducted by Mikel Maron and Schuyler Erle, both from the OpenStreetMap project. The event is being held at the Centre for Internet and Society in Domlur.

For more on this, log on to workshop.cartonama.com or contact sajjad@hasgeek.com

Cloud 20/20: online technical paper contest

Unisys India announced the results of Cloud 20/20 Version 3.0, the third edition of one of India's largest technical paper contests, designed to encourage innovative ideas and recognise emerging technical talent from among the country's leading engineering colleges.

Following several rigorous rounds of evaluation, the judges selected Dharmesh Kakadia from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, as the first prize winner for his entry on ‘Network Virtualisation and Cloud Computing'. The runner-ups were Sridhar S. from Anna University, Chennai, and Poornima J.R. from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology.

A system to protect confidential data

Xerox and computer security firm McAfee have teamed up to design a security system to help companies protect against threats to confidential data, a release from McAfee stated.

This involves integrating embedded McAfee software into Xerox technology. The two companies plan to use a whitelisting method that allows only approved files to run, offering significantly more protection than traditional blacklisting tactics, where a user has to be aware of and proactively block viruses, spyware and other malicious software.

Additionally, the solution provides an audit trail to track and investigate the time and origin of security events, and take action on them, the release added. The companies claim that the decision to partner on this was a result of a survey commissioned by the two firms that found that 54 per cent employees in India do not follow their company's IT security policies, even fewer (33 per cent) are aware of these policies.

Automating healthcare and insurance

IT major Wipro Infotech announced that it has successfully implemented the digitisation of the Employees' State Insurance Corporation's (ESIC) Project, Panchdeep, the healthcare administration programme that automates healthcare services to over six crore beneficiaries across the country.

This is the largest e-governance programme in this sector, providing online facilities to employers and insured people for registration, payment of premium and disbursement of cash benefits.

It also automates medicare services to all insured people, and an estimated 75,000 people use this every day.

HP launches new press

Hewlett-Packard announced the launch of HP Indigo W7200 Digital Offset press for the Indian market. This has been installed at Bangalore-based printing press, the KolorKode digital press. With its robust productivity this new press offers the ability to address a wider range of long-run jobs. It will be able to deliver a broader range of jobs for a dynamic market place meeting the demands of monochrome to seven-color jobs, from spot to highlight color during a single run, without stopping or changing the settings, a press release from HP stated.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/developing-location-based-services