Centre for Internet and Society

How Can We Make Open Education Truly Open?

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:45:55Z

I have spent the last month being unpopular. I have been in conversation with many ‘Open Everything’ activists and practitioners. At each instance, we got stuck because I insisted that we begin by defining what ‘Open’ means in the easy abuse that it is subject to.

Dr. Nishant Shah's article was originally published in DML Central on November 22.

It has been a difficult, if slightly tedious exercise, because not only was there a lack of consensus around what constitutes openness, but also a collective confusion about what we mean when we attribute openness to an object, a process or to people. It was easy to define openness as opposed to a closed system – attributes of transparency, ownership, collaboration and a multidirectional panopticon were invoked in trying to understand the form, function and role of openness. However, it was quickly clear that even with people who are on the same side of the battle-lines around openness, there is a disjunction in their imagination of what an Open Society can mean. Hence, the ‘Open’ in ‘Open Government’ for instance, had very little cross-over with the ‘Open’ in ‘Open Education’. Apart from the larger infrastructure industry that supports the various implementations of Open systems ranging from participatory governments to Digital Humanities, there seems to be silos of openness that co-exist but do not converse.

One of the ways of doing away with the cultures of ambiguity that seem to have developed around Openness, where it is the object of inquiry, the process through which inquiries are made, the lens of critique and the aspiration of movements, perhaps need to be unpacked. And one of the ways of doing this would be to shift the focus from Open as an adjective to Open as a verb – to focus not on what it is, but what it works towards. This shift in thinking of Open as a verb, allows to produce a political critique of the Open paradigm, which is otherwise often missed out in the self-avowed goodness of Open movements.

This is probably a good space for me to declare that I am not an Openness dis-evangelist. I appreciate, endorse and celebrate the values of collaboration, engagement, participation, access and empowerment that Open movements work with and indeed belong to quite a handful of them. However, I do want to move away from the Open as self-explanatory and ask the more difficult questions – What is it that we are opening? Who are we opening it for? What is the Open working towards? In whose service and to what purposes? So when I look at ‘Open Education’, I don’t just want to look at how we open up education for mass access but also how do we make transparent the politics that surround the opening up of education.

Open as an Adjective vs Open as a Verb

One of the most celebrated accounts of open education has found its impetus in two distinct narratives – the first is that the University as we have inherited it is in ruins. The University has been described as inadequate, in desperate need of change to fit the requirements of the contemporary times we live in. The second is that education and learning are in a moment of crisis. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does entail the development of new pedagogic and technological structures which can construct new modes of engaging with knowledge practices. Both of these narratives are more or less taken for granted. There are staged battles between those who swear by MOOCs as the answer and those who swear at MOOCs as amplification of the problem; or between those who call for more public investment in education and learning and those who think that privatising education is the way forward. But in all these debates, which often take the tones of sombre zealots who argue over the nature of the divine, there is almost no questioning of the idea that the university is in crisis. Thus, when it comes to Open Education disputants, they never question the narrative of the university in crisis, but merely in how to resolve this crisis.

Sharmila Rege, a Dalit-feminist and an educator at the Pune University in India, who had made it her life work to critically intervene in debates around education and its intersections with social and political processes, suggests that what we need to do is reverse engineer the generation of this crisis. While the University seems to be ubiquitously crumbling across the globe – despite the fact that an historically unprecedented portion of the global population is enrolled in education programmes – this narrative of ruin is not new. Indeed, nor is the narrative of Openness. In Rege’s material history of education and gender in India, she invokes the figure of Savitribai Phule, the icon of India’s modernity, who, as an educated woman dedicated her life to ‘opening up’ education for those who were underprivileged and broken. Along with her husband, a modernist and a social reformer, Phule was the prototype feminist and development worker who radically opened up the modern education system in Maharashtra to those who were the intended beneficiaries but more often than not, excluded from the benefits that the system promised. In fact, as Rege shows us, in Phule’s account of the world, the university was essentially a system that justified its existence through the principles of openness and inclusion which we have now separated from it. While it might be a fallacy to claim these visions for a universal education system, it is still worth recognising that in different forms and formats, the establishment of the public education system has necessarily been one of openness.

When then, did this open system suddenly become closed? When did the university, which was a response to the closed education systems that were limited to the upper castes and classes of India, enter a state of crisis? In India, especially with the huge public discourse around affirmative action, quotas and reservations for different underprivileged communities, and the continued investment in public education infrastructure – the number of private universities, when you compare them with the developed North, is ridiculously low – we really need to figure out what it is that the university failed to do in its visions of openness for itself. Rege suggests that the generation of the crisis narrative for the university is actually a response to the university as an open structure. In the 1990s, with the renewed focus on universal education in the country, especially after the epoch marking agitations against affirmative actions which included massive mobilisations of upper class and caste students against the recommendations of the Mandal Commissions for continued reservation of seats for women and dalits, the university was at its open best. Both in terms of infrastructure, public policy and regulatory mechanisms, we had created universities that invited participation and presence of bodies which were otherwise systemically excluded from education processes.

Over the next two decades, the university then, has become a more inclusive space. It is populated with unexpected bodies and subjects. It has been de-gentrified and has been heralded as one of the few public institutions where a critique of sectarian and preferential politics has emerged. According to Rege, it is this very opening up of the University to women and Dalits, and the ‘vulgarization’ of education that led to the engineering of a crisis in the narratives around the university. This crisis, propelled equally by a neo-liberal development agenda and the need to create exclusive and exclusionary spaces for the elites of the country who did not necessarily want to find their privilege by escaping to the Ivy League universities in the North-West, sustains the idea that the university is in shambles and hence proposes the new Open Education movements, of which the MOOCs and the private universities are the two key embodiments. In a country that is starkly divided across linguistic and technology access lines, it is clear that both these structures, which are the key advocates of Open Education and learning, are in the service of those who can afford it. Or in other words, it is clear that the new openness movements, while they propose to be in the service of mass, distributed and universal education, are actually very urban, Anglophone, and available to a very small fraction of the society that already had privileged access to different and varied education resources historically.

These Open Education policies now offer alternatives to the public education model by suggesting that it is in crisis and thus finding viable options. These alternatives further demand that the Public University, becomes a professionalised space that produces workers and skilled labour for the new information and knowledge industries, while the more privileged sites of critical philosophy, thought and art move on to safer havens where those with rights of entitlement can study them in peace. The open Digital Humanities projects or the institution of private and satellite university campuses, which continue with their ad hoc, de-skilled, meritocratic logic of working with adjuncts and temporary knowledge workers, invest more in the technological development which is again a masculine domain of privilege even in countries like India where we witness massive mobilisation of people being trained to work in the IT industries.

This reverse engineering of what Open Education can mean in a country like India probably has similar narratives of the context and generation of the crisis across different geographies and time-zones. Openness, with the euphoria and the promise of radical transformation often produces this ellipsis that fails to see the larger structures that inform and shape the open education policies and regulations. In its closeness to the Big Data proponents, it even makes us believe that open education is about data and information management, forgetting that these practices have a direct implication on the material conditions that have been historically shaped. Just like we have developed a critique of well-intentioned development agendas that are purportedly pro-poor but eventually only benefit the wealthy by depositing more power in their coffers, openness in education and in governance needs to be re-examined more closely. Yes, Openness has some fantastic virtues that we need to aspire towards. But to open something, it first needs to be closed. And especially when it comes to the modern education system, we need to question the closeness that is easily attributed to and presumed for the public university. It is time to not only implement open education, but also see the larger constellations of privilege and inequity that often get elided in the blanket acceptance of the Open as necessarily the good or the desirable.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-nishant-shah-november-22-2013-how-can-we-make-open-education-truly-open

Home Alone

praskrishna — 2012-07-06T08:34:26Z

Digital Natives newsletter, April 2012 issue.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/alone-together.pdf

Hits and Misses With the Draft Encryption Policy

sunil — 2015-09-26T16:46:53Z

Most encryption standards are open standards. They are developed by open participation in a publicly scrutable process by industry, academia and governments in standard setting organisations (SSOs) using the principles of “rough consensus” – sometimes established by the number of participants humming in unison – and “running code” – a working implementation of the standard. The open model of standards development is based on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) philosophy that “many eyes make all bugs shallow”.

The article was published in the Wire on September 26, 2015.

This model has largely been a success but as Edward Snowden in his revelations has told us, the US with its large army of mathematicians has managed to compromise some of the standards that have been developed under public and peer scrutiny. Once a standard is developed, its success or failure depends on voluntary adoption by various sections of the market – the private sector, government (since in most markets the scale of public procurement can shape the market) and end-users. This process of voluntary adoption usually results in the best standards rising to the top. Mandates on high quality encryption standards and minimum key-sizes are an excellent idea within the government context to ensure that state, military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies are protected from foreign surveillance and traitors from within. In other words, these mandates are based on a national security imperative.

However, similar mandates for corporations and ordinary citizens are based on a diametrically opposite imperative – surveillance. Therefore these mandates usually require the use of standards that governments can compromise usually via a brute force method (wherein supercomputers generate and attempt every possible key) and smaller key-lengths for it is generally the case that the smaller the key-length the quicker it is for the supercomputers to break in. These mandates, unlike the ones for state, military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, interfere with the market-based voluntary adoption of standards and therefore are examples of inappropriate regulation that will undermine the security and stability of information societies.

Plain-text storage requirement

First, the draft policy mandates that Business to Business (B2B) users and Consumer to Consumer (C2C) users store equivalent plain text (decrypted versions) of their encrypted communications and storage data for 90 days from the date of transaction. This requirement is impossible to comply with for three reasons. Foremost, encryption for web sessions are based on dynamically generated keys and users are not even aware that their interaction with web servers (including webmail such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail) are encrypted. Next, from a usability perspective, this would require additional manual steps which no one has the time for as part of their daily usage of technologies. Finally, the plain text storage will become a honey pot for attackers. In effect this requirement is as good as saying “don’t use encryption”.

Second, the policy mandates that B2C and “service providers located within and outside India, using encryption” shall provide readable plain-text along with the corresponding encrypted information using the same software/hardware used to produce the encrypted information when demanded in line with the provisions of the laws of the country. From the perspective of lawful interception and targeted surveillance, it is indeed important that corporations cooperate with Indian intelligence and law enforcement agencies in a manner that is compliant with international and domestic human rights law. However, there are three circumstances where this is unworkable: 1) when the service providers are FOSS communities like the TOR project which don’t retain any user data and as far as we know don’t cooperate with any government; 2) when the service provider provides consumers with solutions based on end-to-end encryption and therefore do not hold the private keys that are required for decryption; and 3) when the Indian market is too small for a foreign provider to take requests from the Indian government seriously.

Where it is technically possible for the service provider to cooperate with Indian law enforcement and intelligence, greater compliance can be ensured by Indian participation in multilateral and multi-stakeholder internet governance policy development to ensure greater harmonisation of substantive and procedural law across jurisdictions. Options here for India include reform of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process and standardisation of user data request formats via the Internet Jurisdiction Project.

Regulatory design

Governments don’t have unlimited regulatory capability or capacity. They have to be conservative when designing regulation so that a high degree of compliance can be ensured. The draft policy mandates that citizens only use “encryption algorithms and key sizes will be prescribed by the government through notification from time to time.” This would be near impossible to enforce given the burgeoning multiplicity of encryption technologies available and the number of citizens that will get online in the coming years. Similarly the mandate that “service providers located within and outside India…must enter into an agreement with the government”, “vendors of encryption products shall register their products with the designated agency of the government” and “vendors shall submit working copies of the encryption software / hardware to the government along with professional quality documentation, test suites and execution platform environments” would be impossible for two reasons: that cloud based providers will not submit their software since they would want to protect their intellectual property from competitors, and that smaller and non-profit service providers may not comply since they can’t be threatened with bans or block orders.

This approach to regulation is inspired by license raj thinking where enforcement requires enforcement capability and capacity that we don’t have. It would be more appropriate to have a “harms”-based approach wherein the government targets only those corporations that don’t comply with legitimate law enforcement and intelligence requests for user data and interception of communication.

Also, while the “Technical Advisory Committee” is the appropriate mechanism to ensure that policies remain technologically neutral, it does not appear that the annexure of the draft policy, i.e. “Draft Notification on modes and methods of Encryption prescribed under Section 84A of Information Technology Act 2000”, has been properly debated by technical experts. According to my colleague Pranesh Prakash, “of the three symmetric cryptographic primitives that are listed – AES, 3DES, and RC4 – one, RC4, has been shown to be a broken cipher.”

The draft policy also doesn’t take into account the security requirements of the IT, ITES, BPO and KPO industries that handle foreign intellectual property and personal information that is protected under European or American data protection law. If clients of these Indian companies feel that the Indian government would be able to access their confidential information, they will take their business to competing countries such as the Philippines.

And the good news is…

On the other hand, the second objective of the policy, which encourages “wider usage of digital Signature by all entities including Government for trusted communication, transactions and authentication” is laudable but should have ideally been a mandate for all government officials as this will ensure non-repudiation. Government officials would not be able to deny authorship for their communications or approvals that they grant for various applications and files that they process.

Second, the setting up of “testing and evaluation infrastructure for encryption products” is also long overdue. The initiation of “research and development programs … for the development of indigenous algorithms and manufacture of indigenous products” is slightly utopian because it will be a long time before indigenous standards are as good as the global state of the art but also notable as an important start.

The more important step for the government is to ensure high quality Indian participation in global SSOs and contributions to global standards. This has to be done through competition and market-based mechanisms wherein at least a billion dollars from the last spectrum auction should be immediately spent on funding existing government organisations, research organisations, independent research scholars and private sector organisations. These decisions should be made by peer-based committees and based on publicly verifiable measures of scientific rigour such as number of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals and acceptance of “running code” by SSOs.

Additionally the government needs to start making mathematics a viable career in India by either employing mathematicians directly or funding academic and independent research organisations who employ mathematicians. The basis of all encryptions standards is mathematics and we urgently need the tribe of Indian mathematicians to increase dramatically in this country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-26-09-2015-sunil-abraham-hits-and-misses-with-draft-encryption-policy

History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks

nishant — 2014-01-08T07:56:16Z

In this module Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the Internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.

Introduction: Understanding the Internet

Let’s begin at the beginning. Before we get into the history of the Internet, it might be a good thing to try and figure out what the Internet is and what exactly are we talking about when we say ‘Internet’. Let’s take a moment and figure out what the Internet is. If you pause right now, and try and define the Internet it is going to be tricky. However, if you look at other media and communication technologies you realise that the same is true for all the other technologies that you daily deal with. Try and define what a book is. Or, what is a film? It is one of the signs that a technology has become internal, personal and ubiquitous that it becomes transparent. It doesn’t require us to think about how it works. Almost like magic, the technologies just ease our way into life and perform crucial tasks of everyday living, without really making their internal mechanics transparent. So it is highly possible that unless you are trained in technologies, you have a vague idea of what the Internet is and how it works.

At a very basic level, the Internet is a network of computers that are able to talk to each other using a protocol that is popularly known as the TCP/IP suite. That is it. At a most cursory level, that is all there is to the Internet. An extensive network – even a network of network – that makes it possible for billions of users across the globe, to exchange information using digital data, in asynchronous and distributed forms. And this has been historically the case. The origins of the Internet are in military and state funded research in the United States of America in 1960s, where they were developing robust communication networks that could account for redundancy – which is to say that they wanted a network which would function even when particular nodes fell out of service, or certain flow-lines within the network were blocked. A history of the Internet then, will be a history of its technological development – the different protocols, programmes and innovations that allowed for this network to grow out of the defense research labs in the 1960s, be used extensively in American and European academia in the 1980s and then made available to the public in the 1990s. So that is one history that we might need to look at. It is a technological history of the Internet, that allows us to understand what the challenges, strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Internet technologies have been and how we have constantly innovated to meet these problems and aspirations.

However, as you can imagine, that is a technical history of technology which is well documented, well, on the Internet. A look at the page on Wikipedia[1] will show you all the different technological, institutional and digital innovations that have shaped the Internet from its early days residing on the ARPANET to the global phenomenon that we know now. It is a history of facts and dates, names and numbers and it is easily accessible to anybody who wants to look at the different institutions, technologies and conversations shaped what we understand as the Internet today. You might also want to look at these three different accounts of that history to get the facts,[2] anecdotes[3] and stories[4] in order.

You will realise from the sources that the Internet is the backbone of our digital experience. It hosts a vast range of services, like peer-2-peer networks, voice and text chats, hypertext documents, and indeed, the most prominent of them all – the World Wide Web. We need to understand that the Internet is thus larger than the World Wide Web and what we have access to, using the WWW, is a very small subset of this larger global digital network. To know the structure of the internet, how it is governed, what are the different inequities, vulnerabilities and problems it creates are important to study because they give us an entry point into understanding how the technological and technical choices that are made affect and impact our everyday concerns around questions of privacy, identity, access, usage, affordability, accessibility etc. These are questions that often get addressed under the rubric of Internet Governance[5] and will be dealt with in the subsequent sessions for this Institute that expand upon the Infrastructure and Institutions that govern the Internet[6] In the meantime, I want to begin with the personal. Instead of beginning with the technological, I want to begin with our everyday experiences on the Internet, and particularly of this thing that we call cyberspace.

Pinning down Cyberspace

Let’s take a pause and try and answer a hard question: What is Cyberspace? If you thought that defining the Internet was tough, you will quickly realise that defining Cyberspace is going to be even tougher. We know when we are on cyberspace. We use it across a variety of devices and interfaces. We think of ourselves as connected and online for most of our waking (and sleeping) hours. Cyberspace is right there – You will be able to point to it, give examples, even talk about what it facilitates. For example, cyberspace is a virtual space created by digital communication and connection. Or cyberspace is a repository of information that people create globally using computing technologies. Or cyberspace is a space where people manage their social networks. These are all different instances of cyberspace and indicate the wide variety of things that we do when we are online, but they don’t necessarily tell us what cyberspace is.

Like all good things, the origins of the word cyberspace are actually in Science Fiction. William Gibson in his iconic cyberpunk novel ‘NeuroMancer’ (1984), first coined the word cyberspace and defined it thus:

Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

While there are several critiques of Gibson’s description of the word, we must remember that it is fiction and look at it to see what are the conceptual complexities that Gibson is throwing up that are now being discussed in contemporary debates. I want to highlight three things that Gibson’s definition brings up, which might be important to understand how deal and engage with cyberspace.

Consensual hallucination – This is probably one of the strongest and the strangest ways of talking about cyberspace. A hallucination is something that happens in your head. It is a space of virtuality. It is an event that nobody except for the one individual who claims it, can verify. It is thus, categorically the non-real. However, a consensual hallucination is a mystifying thing.

Let’s say that you propose that from this moment on, you are a dog (even though, as the cartoon famously says, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog). If you were to stand up in your social circles and announce that you are a dog, it would lead to some strange reactions. If you persisted in acting like a dog and responding only to a dog, chances are that you might be put into a mental asylum to be treated of this hallucination. However, if everybody else in the room consented that you are a dog, and indeed, they are all, also dogs, then your hallucination becomes real. It gains valence. It has legitimacy. It becomes a norm.

Gibson, in positing cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’ is reminding us that this is indeed, the very way in which our reality is constructed. For instance, think of the colour blue. Now try and figure out how the blue that you are thinking about and the blue that I am thinking about is the same blue. We can’t verify that we are all talking about the same blue. And yet, there is a consensus among us that there is a blueness to the colour blue that we all refer to when we think of the colour blue.

Reality is a process of consensual hallucination. So is Cyberspace. Which mean that instead of making the distinction between the real and the virtual, or trying to figure out what is real and what is not, it is more fruitful for us to engage with the idea that the virtual is a part of the real. There are various processes – social, cultural, political, economic, and governmental – that structure and validate our reality. And hence, reality is always changing. The science fiction futures that were dreamt in the last century are the present times that we live in. The idea of consensual hallucination, takes us away from a debate about Virtual Reality and Real Life (VR – RL) that has been endemic to the conversations around cyberspace. Following Gibson’s lead I would encourage us, not to think of cyberspace in terms of the virtual or the unreal, but as a constitutive and generative part of our reality.
A graphic representation of abstracted data: The use of the term ‘space’ is often bewildering in Gibson’s coinage because it does not really seem to appear in the definition. Space, as we understand it, is a location metaphor. It refers to spatial dimensions of a thing. It gives us a sense of fixity. However, these are all expectations of physical space. The ‘space’ in cyberspace has more in common with the abstract concepts of space in mathematics and metaphors rather than in terms of geography and location.

We need to understand that even in geographical terms, space is an abstraction of sorts. Space is the virtual or perceived usage, volume and experience of place. If you have a piece of land, that is the place of that land. The place is geographically present. It can be materially touched and located. However, the space is what you attribute to that piece of land. It is defined by the intentions and aspirations, by what is allowed and what is not. Space is a philosophical concept. Which is why, in everyday talk, when you say, ‘I need some space’, you don’t necessarily mean that you need geographical isolation, but often refers to the head-space that is less tangible.

Similarly, the space in Cyberspace, even though it has been often used to talk about the space on the network that connects different webpages, or the immersive environments that role playing games offer, or the virtual communities on social networking sites like Facebook, it is important to remember that space is an abstraction. And cyberspace thus is not the actual mechanics and nitty-gritties of technology but what is built because of those interactions.

Bruce Sterling, in his introduction to The Hacker Crackdown quite evocatively explains this: ‘Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. [...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.”
Non-space of the mind: In the cyberpunk universe of the novel Neuromancer, Gibson makes a difference between cyberspace and meat-space. There is a definite privileging of cyberspace, which is the world of seduction, adventure, excitement and entertainment. The meat-space, where our biological bodies survive and live, is in a state of collapse and disrepair. This bleak vision of the biological as disintegrating and the digital as becoming the primary mode of existence has been espoused by various science fiction and fantasy narratives. For all of us who have seen The Matrix, we are familiar with this idea that slowly and singularly, we are moving towards creating digital lives which are gaining precedence over our ‘real’ lives.[7] Especially when it comes to the discourse around digital objects, this hierarchy of dismissing the biological and the real over the virtual and the digital is often reinforced. However, Gibson was already reminding us, with the ‘non-space of the mind’ that the digital and the biological are not as separate or discrete as we would have liked to imagine. Let us look at what the ‘non-space’ can mean. For this, we might have to look at two different conceptual moves in philosophy.

The first is a distinction between the brain and mind. It is obvious that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain is the biological organ in our cranial cavity. It is made up on cells and neurons, flesh and blood, so to speak. It is what the artificial intelligence scholar Andy Clark calls ‘a skin bag’. The brain performs various functions that keep our body alive and sapient. The mind, is an abstraction of the brain. The mind is our thoughts, memories, associations, feelings, and all the other things that make us human. The brain might support the mind but they are not the same. I hope that this is beginning to sound familiar to us – that the brain-mind relationship is the same as we have mapped out for Internet-Cyberspace. Just like cyberspace is an abstraction of data that we have consented to be real, the mind is also an abstraction that encapsulates the interiority of our selves.
The second is an understanding of binaries and opposites. We are designed, as human beings (even though we attribute this to the digital machines) to think in binaries. Black-White, Good-Bad, Day-Night. This is the way in which our cultures have been built. We think of the positive and the negative and create a spectrum in between to understand our world. These binaries are often confused with being opposites. So we would say that the opposite of Black is white. Or that the opposite of Day is Night. However, in the study of Logics, we are taught that the binary is not the same as opposite. All the way back in history, Aristotle had already posited that it is a fallacy to mistake a binary for an opposite. So, for instance the binary opposition of ‘day’ might be ‘night’, but the logical opposite of ‘day’ is ‘non-day’. Or to make it simpler, the binary opposition of the colour ‘black’ is ‘white’. However, the logical opposite of ‘black’ is ‘non-black’ and hence every other colour that is not black, is its logical opposite. We go through this to realise that in the brain-mind mapping, the brain is the place. The mind is the non-brain, or the space. And then the non-space of the mind, is the brain all over again. Gibson does this recursive negation to remind us that the things that happen in cyberspace have direct consequences on meatspace. What happens in cyberspace directly affects the non-space of our bodies, our lived realities and experiences.

Cyberspace and Everyday Life

It is important to begin with the definition that Gibson offered because it informs a lot of the debates that happened historically, around cyberspace and how we understand it. However, it also allows us to side-step these debates because they are not fruitful. They reinforce the idea that the internet and cyberspace are removed from our reality, that they are technological concerns rather than human, social and political concerns, and they insist that the internet and cyberspace are in opposition to being human. These ideas produce accounts of the internet and cyberspace which, for me, are fruitless. The leads from Gibson’s definition, instead, allow us to understand the internet and cyberspace as deeply implicated in our conditions of being human, being social and being political. They offer us a different way of rewriting the history of the Internet, not merely as a linear narrative of the technological advancements, but as a rich and complex account of how the internet and cyberspace have shaped and been shaped by the social, cultural and political milieu that they have emerged in.

And so, we approach the history of the internet in a different way. Instead of looking at the Internet as a technology, we deal with the Internet in its many forms, through cyberspace and our everyday engagement with it. Or, rather, we formulate the history of Internet & Society, thus trying to look at the ways in which the emergence of digital technologies – Internet and cyberspace – have led to questioning the ways in which understand our personal, social and political lives, and how, in-turn they have been changed through the various contexts that we live in.

Why do we need the history of the Internet?

So here is the million dollar question. Why do we need to study the history of the Internet? And if we do, for what do we need to study the history of the internet? These are both important questions and this is where I am hoping we will be able to start a critical inquiry into our own engagement with the topic.

Let us begin by questioning the very structure of history writing. What does it mean to write the history of an particular object? If we were to write, let’s say, the history of a particular building. How far in time will we go? And in what minutiae shall we record it? Shall we begin by saying, how, once where the building stood, there was a tree. And on that trees, there were leaves. The first leaf fell. The second leaf fell. The third leaf fell. It could fill up pages documenting every leaf that fell, before we even come to the building. So we know that when we write the history of a particular object, person or phenomenon, there is a very clear notion of where the history began. But we also know that if, we had an interest in the ecological history of the building, we might have actually spent time looking at that tree and its falling leaves. Which means that what constitutes history also has to do with our intentions of writing it.

And then the last point about this brief capsule on history writing that I want to make, is that history of things does not mean that we focus only on the thing. If we were to look at the cultural significance of the building under question, for example, we would talk to the society that engages with it, the people who occupy it, and the ways in which it shapes the fabric of the space and time. So history is often a large canvas – it might keep one particular object in question, but it also weaves in the complex structure of processes and flows that surround that particular object of study.

There is a rich scholarship about the problems, structures and processes of history writing. But these three points are important for us to think through why we want to delve into the history of the internet. Where do we begin? What do we study? And why do we study what we study? The minute you put these questions out, you start realising that there can be no definitive history of the internet. There can definitely not be just one history of the internet. And that the history of the internet is as much about the world as it is about the technological, but the technological only becomes a lens or an entry point into unravelling the various questions that are a part of our personal and professional lives. So we are not looking at imparting the one authoritative history of the internet. Instead, I am proposing, for this module to introduce you to different ways of thinking about the history of the internet.

We are going to begin by looking at not the Internet – but cyberspace.

We are going to examine the intersections of cyberspace with three different objects and try and see how the debates at that intersection help us to define and entry point into the rich discourse around Internet & Society.

The body in cyberspace

Perhaps one of the most interesting histories of the cyberspace has been its relationship with the body. Beginning with the meatspace-cyberspace divide that Gibson introduces, the question of our bodies’ relationship with the internet has been hugely contested. There have been some very polarized debates around this question. Where are we when we are online? Are we the person in the chair behind an interface? Are we the avatar in a social networking site interacting with somebody else? Are we a set of data running through the atmosphere? Are we us? Are we dogs? These are tantalising and teasing questions.

Early debates around the body-technology questions were polarized. There were people who offered that the cyberspace is a virtual space. What happens in that make-believe, performative space does not have any direct connections with who we are and how we live. They insisted that the cyberspace is essentially a performance space, and just like acting in a movie does not make us the character, all our interactions on the internet are also performances. The idea of a virtual body or a digital self were proposed, thinking of the digital as an extension of who we are – as a space that we occupy to perform different identities and then get on with our real lives.

Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen, was the first one to question this binary between the body and the digital self. Working closely with the first users of the online virtual reality worlds called Multiple User Dungeons, Turkle notes how being online started producing a different way of thinking about who we are and how we relate to the world around us. She indicates three different ways in which this re-thinking happens. The first, is at the level of language. She noticed how the users were beginning to think of their lives and their social relationships through the metaphors that they were using in the online world. So, for instance, people often thought of life through the metaphor of windows – being able to open multiple windows, performing multiple tasks and identities and ‘recycling’ them in their everyday life. Similarly, people saying that they are ‘low on bandwidth’ when they don’t have enough time and attention to devote to something, or thinking about the need to ‘upgrade’ our senses. We also are quite used to the idea that memory is something that resides on a chip and that computing is what machines do. These slippages in language, where we start attributing the machine characteristics to human beings are the first sign of understanding the human-technological relationship and history.

The second slippage is when the user start thinking of the avatars as human. We are quite used to, in our deep web lives, to think of machines as having agency. Our avatars act. Things that we do on the internet perform more actions than we have control of – a hashtag that we start on twitter gets used and responded to by others and takes on a life of its own. We live with sapient technologies – machines that care, artificial intelligence algorithms that customise search results for us, scripts and bots that protect us from malware and viruses. We haven’t attributed these kinds of human agencies to machines and technologies in the past. However, within the digital world, there is a complex network of actors, where all the actors are not always human. Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science and technology, posits in his ‘Actor Network Theory’ that the emergence of these non-human actors has helped us understand that we are not only dependent on machines and technologies for our everyday survival, but that many tasks that we had thought of as ‘human’ are actually performed, and performed better by these technologies. Hence, we have come to care for our machines and we also think of them as companions and have intimate relationships with them. And the machines, even as they make themselves invisible, start becoming more personal.

The third slippage that Turkle points out is the way in which the boundaries between the interior and the exterior were dissolved in the accounts of the users’ narratives of their digital adventures. There is a very simplistic understanding that what is human is inside us, it is sacred and organic and emotional. Earlier representational technology products like cinema, books, TV etc. have emphasised this distinction between real life and reel life. No actor is punished for the crime they commit in the narrative of a film. It is not very often that an author claims to be the character in a book. We have always had a very strong sense of distinction between the real person and the fictional person. But within the virtual reality worlds, these distinctions seem to dematerialize. The users not only thought of their avatars as human but also experienced the emotions, frustrations, excitement and joy that their characters were simulating for them. And what is more important, they claimed these experiences for themselves.

Namita Malhotra, who is a legal scholar and a visual artist, in her monograph on Pleasure, Porn and the Law, looks at the way in which we are in a process of data-stripping – constant revelation of our deepest darkest secrets and desires, within the user generated content rubric. Looking at the low-res, grainy videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, which have almost no narrative content and are often empty of sexual content, produce all of us in a global orgiastic setting, where our bodies are being extended beyond ourselves. In the monograph, Malhotra argues that the Internet is not merely an extension but almost like a third skin that we wear around ourselves – it is a wrapper, but it is tied, through ligaments and tendons, to the flesh and bone of our being, and often things that we do online, even when they are not sexual in nature, can become pornographic. Conversely, the physical connections that we have are now being made photographically and visually available in byte sized morsels, turned into a twitpic, available to be shared virally, and disseminated using mobile applications, thus making our bodies escape the biological containers that we occupy but also simultaneously marks our bodies through all these adventures that we have on the digital infobahn.

Case Study: A Rape in Cyberspace
A contemporary of Sherry Turkle, Julian Dibbell, in his celebrated account of ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ [8] describes a case-study that corroborates many of the observations that Turkle posits. Dibbell analyses a particular incident that occurred one night in a special kind of MUD – LambdaMOO (MUD, Object-Oriented) – which was run by the Xerox Research Corporations. A MUD, is a text-based virtual reality space of fluid dimensions and purposes, where users could create avatars of themselves in textual representations. Actions and interactions within the MUD are also in long running scripts of texts. Of course, technically all this means that a specially designed database gives users the vivid impression of their own presence and the impression of moving through physical spaces that actually exists as descriptive data on some remotely located servers.

When users log into LambdaMoo, the program presents them with a brief textual description of one of the rooms (the coat closet) in the fictional database mansion. If the user wants to navigate, s/he can enter a command to move in a particular direction and the database replaces the original description with new ones, corresponding to the room located in the direction s/he chose. When the new description scrolls across the user’s screen, it lists not only the fixed features of the room but all its contents at that moment – including things (tools, toys, weapons), as well as other avatars (each character over which s/he has sole control). For the database program that powers the MOO, all of these entities are simply subprograms or data structures which are allowed to interact according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world.

Characters may leave the rooms in particular directions. If a character says or does something (as directed by its user), then the other users who are located in the same ‘geographical’ region within the MOO, see the output describing the utterance or action. As the different players create their own fantasy worlds, interacting and socialising, a steady script of text scrolls up a computer screen and narratives are produced. The avatars, as in Second Life or even on Social Networking Sites like Orkut, have the full freedom to define themselves, often declining the usual referents of gender, sexuality, and context to produce fantastical apparitions. It is in such an environment of free-floating fantasy and role-playing, of gaming and social interaction mediated by digital text-based avatars, that a ‘crime’ happened.

Dibell goes on to give an account of events that unfolded that night. In the social lounge of LambdaMoo, which is generally the most populated of all the different nooks, corners, dimensions and rooms that users might have created for themselves, there appeared an avatar called Dr. Bungle. Dr. Bungle had created a particular program called Vodoo Doll, which allowed the creator to control avatars which were not his own, attributing to them involuntary actions for all the other players to watch, while the targeted avatars themselves remained helpless and unable to resist any of these moves. This Dr. Bungle, through his evil Vodoo Doll, took hold of two avatars – legba and Starsinger and started controlling them. He further proceeded to forcefully engage them in sexually violent, abusive, perverted and reluctant actions upon these two avatars. As the users behind both the avatars sent a series of invective and a desperate plea for help, even as other users in the room (# 17) watched, the Vodoo Doll made them enter into sexually degrading and extremely violent set of activities without their consent. The peals of his laughter were silenced only when a player with higher powers came and evicted Dr. Bungle from the Room # 17. As an eye-witness of the crime and a further interpolator with the different users then present, Dibbell affirms that most of the users were convinced that a crime had happened in the Virtual World of the digital Mansion. That a ‘virtual rape’ happened and was traumatic to the two users was not questioned. However, what this particular incident brought back into focus was the question of space.

Dibbell suggests that what we had was a set of conflicting approaches to understand the particular phenomenon:

Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of *civility* … [R]eal life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any players life, limb, or material well-being…’

The meaning and the understanding of this particular incident and the responses that it elicited, lie in the ‘buzzing, dissonant gap’ between the perceived and experienced notion of Technosocial Space. The discussions that were initiated within the community asked many questions: If a crime had happened, where had the crime happened? Was the crime recognised by law? Are we responsible for our actions performed through a digital character on the cyberspaces? Is it an assault if it is just role playing?

The lack of ‘whereness’ of the crime, or rather the placelessness of the crime made it especially more difficult to pin it to a particular body. The users who termed the event as rape had necessarily inverted the expected notion of digital space as predicated upon and imitative of physical space; they had in fact done the exact opposite and exposed digital spaces as not only ‘bleeding into reality’ but also a constitutive part of the physical spaces. Their Technosocial Space was not the space of the LambdaMoo Room # 17 but the physical locations (and thus the bodies, rather than the avatars) of the players involved. However, this blurring was not to make an easy resolution of complex metaphysical questions. This blurring was to demonstrate, more than ever, that the actions and pseudonymous performances or narratives which are produced in the digital world are not as dissociated from the ‘Real’ as we had always imagined. More importantly, the notional simulation of place or a reference to the physical place is not just a symbolic gesture but has material ramifications and practices. As Dibell notes in his lyrical style,

‘Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VL facts alone can quite account for.’

The eventual decision to ‘toad’ Dr. Bungle – to condemn him to a digital death (a death only as notional as his crime) and his reappearance as another character take up the rest of Dibbell’s argument. Dibbell is more interested in looking at how a civil society emerged, formed its own ways of governance and established the space of LamdaMOO as more than just an emotional experience or extension; as a legitimate place which is almost as much, if not more real, than the physical places that we occupy in our daily material practices. Dibbell’s moving account of the entire incident and the following events leading the final ‘death’ and ‘reincarnation’ has now been extrapolated to make some very significant and insightful theorisations of the notions of the body and its representations online.

Exercise: Based on this case-study, break into small groups to determine whether a rape happened on cyberspace and how we can understand the relationship of our online personas with our bodies.

Cyberspace and the State
The history of body and technology is one way of approaching the history of the internet. However, as we realise, that more than the management of identity or the projection of our interiority, it is a narrative about governance. How does the body get regulated on the internet? How does it become the structure through which communities, networks, societies and collective can be imagined? The actions and transactions between the internet and the body can also help us to look at the larger questions of state, governance and technology which are such an integral part of our everyday experience of the internet. Questions of privacy, security, piracy, sharing, access etc. are all part of the way in which our practices of cultural production and social interaction are regulated, by the different intermediaries of the internet, of which the State is one.

Asha Achuthan, in her landmark work Re:Wiring Bodies[9] that looks at the history of science and technology in India, shows that these are not new concerns. In fact, as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when the architects of India’s Independence movements were thinking about shaping what the country is going to look like in the future, they were already discussing these questions. It is more popularly known that Jawaharlal Nehru was looking to build a ‘scientific temperament’ for the country and hoping to build it through scientific institutions as well as infrastructure – he is famously credited to having said that ‘dams are the temples of modern science.’ Apart from Nehru’s vision of a modern India, there was a particular conversation between M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, that Achuthan analyses in great detail. Achuthan argues that the dialogue between Gandhi and Tagore is so couched in ideology, poetry and spirituality that we often forget that these were actually conversations about a technology – specifically, the charkha or the spinning wheel.

For both Gandhi and Tagore, the process of nation building was centred around this one particular charkha. The charkha was the mobile, portable, wearable device (much like our smart phones) that was supposed to provide spiritual salvation and modern resources to overcome the evils of both traditional and conservative values as well as unemployment and production. The difference in Gandhi and Tagore was not whether the charkha – as a metaphor of production and socio-economic organisation – should be at the centre of our discourse. The difference was that Gandhi thought that the usage of charka, complete immersion in the activity, and the devotion to it would help us weave a modern nation For Gandhi, the citizen was not somebody who used the charkha, but the citizen was somebody who becomes a citizen in the process of using the charkha. Tagore, meanwhile, was more concerned about whether we are building a people-centred nation or a technology-centred device. He was of the opinion that building a nation with the technology at its core, might lead to an apocalyptic future where the ‘danava yantra’ or demonic machine might take over and undermine the very human values and ideals that we are hoping to structure the nation through.

If you even cursorily look at this debate, you will realise that the way Gandhi was talking about the charkha is in resonance with how contemporary politicians talk about the powers of the internet and the way in which, through building IT Cities, through foreign investment, through building a new class of workers for the IT industry, and through different confluences of economic and global urbanisation, we are going to Imagine India[10] of the future. Similarly, the caution that Tagore had, of the charkha as superseding the human, finds its echoes in the sceptics who have been afraid that the human is being forgotten[11] in the e-governance systems that are being set up, which concentrate more on management of data and information rather than the rights and the welfare of people.

This historical continuity between technology and governance, also finds theorisation in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s book The Cultural Last Mile[12] that looks at the critical turns in India’s governance and policy history and how the technological paradigm has been established. Rajadhyaksha opens up the State-technology-governance triad to more concrete examples and looks at how through the setting up of community science centres, the building of India’s space and nuclear programmes, and through on-the-ground inventions like radio and chicken-mesh wire-loops, we have tried to reinforce a broadcast based model of governance. Rajadhyaksha proposes that the earlier technologies of governance which were at our disposal, helped us think of the nation state through the metaphor of broadcast. So we had the State at the Centre, receiving and transmitting information, and in fact managing all our conversation and communication by being the central broadcasting agency. And hence, because the state was responsible for the message of the state reaching every single person, but also responsible that every single person can hypothetically communicate with every other single person, the last mile became important. The ability to reach that last person became important. And the history of technology and governance has been a history of innovations to breach that last mile and make the message reach without noise, without disturbance, and in as clean and effective a way as possible.

With the emergence of the digital governance set up, especially with the building of the Unique Identity Project,[13] we now have the first time when the government is not concerned about breaching the last mile. The p2p networks that are supposed to manage the different flows of information mean that the State is not a central addressee of our communication but one of the actors. It produces new managers – internet service providers, telecom infrastructure, individual hubs and connectors, traditional media agencies – that help us think of governance in a new way. Which is why, for instance, with the UID authorities, we are no longer concerned about the relay of state information from the centre to the subject. Hence, we have many anecdotal stories of people enrolling for the Aadhaar card without actually knowing what benefits it might accrue them. We also have stories coming in about how there are people with Aadhaar numbers which have flawed information but these are not concerns. Because for once, the last mile has to reach the Government. The State is a collector but there are also other registrars. And there is a new regime here, where the government is now going to become one of the actors in the field of governance and it is more interested in managing data and information rather than directly governing the people.

This historical turn is interesting, because it means that we are being subjected to different kinds of governance structures and institutions, without necessarily realising how to negotiate with them to protect us. One of the most obvious examples, is the Terms of Services[14] that we almost blindly sign off when using online platforms and services and what happens when they violate rights that we think are constitutionally given. What happens when Facebook removes some content from your profile without your permission because it thinks that it is problematic? Who do you complain to? Are your rights as a user or a citizen? Which jurisdiction will it fall under? Conversely, what happens when you live in a country that does not grant you certain freedoms (of speech and expression, for instance) and you commit an infraction using a social media platform. What happens when your private utterances on your social networks make you vulnerable[15] to persecution and prosecution in your country?

These are all questions of the human, the technological, and the governmental which have been discussed differently and severally historically, in India and also at the global level. Asking these questions, unpacking the historical concerns and how they have leap-frogged in the contemporary governmental debates is important because it helps us realise that the focus of what is at stake, what it means to be human, what we recognise as fair, just and equal are also changing in the process. Instead of thinking of e-governance as just a digitization of state resources, we have to realise that there is a certain primacy that the technologies have had in the state’s formation and manifestation, and that the digital is reshaping these formulations in new and exciting, and sometimes, precarious ways.

Cyberspace and Criminality
The history of the internet in India, but also around the world, is bookended between pornography and terrorism. While there has been an incredible promise of equity, equality, fairness, and representation of alternative voices on the internet, there is no doubt that what the internet has essentially done is turn us all into criminals – pornographers, pirates, terrorists, hackers, lurkers… If you have been online, let us just take for granted that you have broken some law or the other, no matter how safe you have been online, and where you live. The ways in which the internet has facilitated peer-2-peer connections and the one-one access means that almost everything that was governed in the public has suddenly exploded in one large grey zone of illegality.

Ravi Sundaram calls this grey zone of illegal or semi-legal practices the new ‘cyberpublics’. For Sundaram, the new public sphere created by the internet is not only in the gentrified, middle-class, educated people who have access to the cyberspaces and are using social media and user generated content sites to bring about active social and political change. More often than not, the real interesting users of the internet are hidden. They access the internet from cybercafés, in shared names. They have limited access to the web through apps and services on their pirated phones. They share music, watch porn, gamble, engage in illicit and surreptitious social and sexual engagements and they are able to do this by circumventing the authority and the gaze of the law.

On the other side are the more tech savvy individuals who create alternative currencies like Bitcoin, trade for weapons, drugs and sex on SilkRoute, form guerrilla resistance groups like Anonymous, and create viruses and malware that can take over the world. These cyberpublics are not just digital in nature. They erupt regularly in the form of pirate bazaars, data swaps, and the promiscuous USB drive that moves around the machines, capturing information and passing it on further. These criminalities are often the defining point of internet policy and politics – they serve as the subjects that need to be governed, as well as the danger that lurks in the digital ether, from which we need to be protected. For Sundaram, the real contours and borders of the digital world are to be tested in an examination of these figures. Because, as Lawrence Liang suggests, the normative has already been assimilated in the system. The normative or the good subject is no longer a threat and has developed an ethical compass of what is desirable and not. However, this ethical subject also engages in illicit activities, while still producing itself as a good person. This contradiction makes for interesting stories.

DPS MMS: Case Study
One of the most fascinating cases of criminality that captured both public and legal attention was the notoriously cases where the ideas of Access were complicated in the Indian context, was the legal and public furore over the distribution of an MMS (Multi-Media Message) video that captured two underage young adults in a sexual act. The clip, which was dubbed in popular media as ‘DPS Dhamaka’ became viral on the internet. The video clip was listed on an auction (peer-2-peer) website as an e-book and as ‘Item 27877408 – DPS Girl having fun!!! Full video + Bazee points’ for Rs. 125. This visibility of the clip on the auction site Bazee.com, brought it to the eyes of the State where its earlier circulation through private circuits and P2P networks had gone unnoticed. Indeed, the newspapers and TV channels had created frenzy around it, this video clip would have gone unnoticed. However, the attention that Bazee.com drew led to legal intervention.

Following the visibility of the video clip, there was an attempt to find somebody responsible for the crime and be held liable for the ‘crime’ that had happened. Originally, Ravi Raj, a student at IIT Kharagpur, who had put up the clip on Bazee was arrested for possessing and selling pornography. He was arrested and kept in police custody for at least three days and so was the male student who made the clip. They were both made to go through proceedings in juvenile court (though he was the last to be arrested). Both the students in the video were suspended from school after the incident. Eventually, the most high profile arrest and follow up from the DPS MMS incident was the arrest of the CEO of Bazee.com – Avnish Bajaj. However, Bajaj was released soon because as the host of the platform and not its content, he had no liability.

This is the beginning of a series of slippages where a punishable body in the face of public outcry had to be identified. We witnessed a witch-hunt that sought to hold the boy who made the video clip responsible, the student of IIT who attempted to circulate the clip and eventually the CEO of Bazee. The string of failed prosecutions seems to indicate that the pornographer-as-a-person was slipping through the cracks of the legal system. As Namita Malhotra argues, it is not the pornographic object which is ‘eluding the grasp of the court’ but that it seems to be an inescapable condition of the age of the internet - that the all transactions are the same transactions, and all users are pornographers.

We can see in the case that the earlier positions that were easily criminalised when it came to objects in mass media – producer, consumer, distributor of obscenity, were vacated rapidly in the DPS MMS case. We have a case where the bodies, when looked at through simplified ideas of Access, could not be regulated. The girl in the clip could not be punished because she was the victim in the case that could be read as statutory rape. In the case of the boy, a stranger argument was posed – ‘that in our fast urbanising societies where parents don’t have time for children, they buy off their love by giving them gadgets – which makes possible certain kinds of technological conditions...thus the blame if it is on the boy, is on the larger society’ (Malhotra, 2011).

Eventually, the court held that the description of the object and the context of its presence indicates that the said obscene object is just a click away and such a ‘listing which informed the potential buyer that such a video clip that is pornographic can be procured for a price’. There is a suggestion that there was nobody in particular that could be fixed with the blame. What was at blame was access to technology and conditions of technology within which the different actors in this case were embedded. Malhotra points out that in earlier cases around pornography, judgements have held pornography responsible for itself.

In the case of the DPS MMS, it seemed that technology – especially access to technology by unsupervised persons – has taken that role. The eventual directive that came out of this case was a blanket warning issued to the public that ‘anyone found in possession of the clip would be fined and prosecuted’. It is as if the attention of the court was on the ways in which the video clip was produced, circulated and disseminated, rather than the content. There was an anxiety around peoples’ unsupervised access to digital technologies, the networks that facilitated access to content without the permission of the state, and modes of circulation and dissemination that generated high access to audiences which cannot be controlled or regulated.

The State’s interest in this case, is not in the sexual content of the material but in the way it sidesteps the State’s authorial positions and produces mutable, transmittable, and transferable products as well as conditions of access. Such a focus on practices and behaviours around the obscene object, rather than the content itself, seems not to disrupt the law’s neat sidestepping of the force of the image itself. These different tropes of access to technology informed the State’ attempt at control and containment of technosocial practices in the country, giving rise to imaginations of the User as being in conditions of technology which make him/her a potential criminal. This idea of access as transgression or overriding the legal regulatory framework does not get accounted for in the larger technology discourse. However, it does shape and inform the Information Technology regulations which are made manifest in the IT Act. The DPS MMS case complicated the notion of access and posited a potentially criminal technosocial subject who, because of access to the digital, will be able to consume information and images beyond the sanction of the law.

The DPS MMS case shows how the ways in which public discourse can accuse, blame and literally hang technology seems to diverge from how the court attempts to pin down an offence or crime and prosecute by constructing a technosocial subject as the pervert, while also accusing pornography as a phenomenon. The court is unable to hold technology to blame but the accused is technology-at-large and modernity, which subsumes practices around technology and separates out the good and ethical ways in which a citizen should access and use technologies to rise from the potentially criminal conditions of technology within which their Technosocial identity is formed.

Summary

We started by making a distinction between Internet and Cyberspace to see how the two are separate objects of focus and have a relationship that needs to be examined in greater detail. It was argued that while the Internet – in material, infrastructural and technological forms – is important to understand the different policies and politics at the local, regional and global level, it has an account that is easier to follow. Cyberspace, on the other hand, because it deals with human interactions and experiences, allows for a more complex set of approaches into understanding our engagement with the digital domain. We began with the original definitions and imaginations of cyberspace and the ways in which it founded and resolved debates about the real-virtual, the physical-digital, and the brain-mind divides which have been historically part of the cybercultures discourse.

It was proposed, hence, that instead of looking at the history of the Internet, we will look at the history of cyberspace, and see if we can move away from a straight forward historical narrative of the Internet which focuses largely on the institutions, numbers, names and technological advances. The ambition was not to just produce a similar history of cyberspace but think of conceptual frameworks through which cyberspace can be studied. The proposition was that instead of just looking at history as a neutral and objective account of events and facts, we can examine how and why we need to create histories. Also, that it is fruitful to look at the aspirations and ambitions we have in creating historical narratives.

It was then suggested that instead of trying to create a definitive history, or even a personal history of the internet, it might be more fruitful to look at the intersections that cyberspace has with different questions and concerns that have historically defined the relationship between technologies and society. 3 different conceptual frameworks were introduced as methods or modes by which this historical mode of inquiry can be initiated.

The first framework examined how we can understand the boundaries and contours of the internet and cyberspace by looking at its relationship with our bodies. The ways in which we understand our bodies, the mediation by technologies, and the extensions and simulations that we live with, help us to understand the human-technology relationship in more nuanced fashions. Looking at the case-study of a rape that happened in cyberspace, we mapped out the different ways in which we can think of a technosocial relationship.

The second framework drew from historical debates around technology and governance to see how the current concerns of e-governance and digital subjectivity are informed by older debates about technology and nation building. Looking at the dialogues between Gandhi and Tagore, and then the imagination of a nation through the broadcast technologies, we further saw how the new modes of networked governance are creating new actors, new conditions and new contexts within which to locate and operate technologies.

The third framework showed how the technological is not merely at the service of the human. In fact, the presence of the technological creates new identities and modes of governance that create potential criminals of all of us. Through the case-study of the DPS MMS, and in an attempt to look at the grey zone of illegal cyberpublics, we saw how at new technosocial identities are created at the intersection of law, technology, governance and everyday practices of the web. The fact that the very condition of technology access can create us as potential criminals, in need to be governed and regulated, reflects in the development of internet policy and governance.

It was the intention of this module to complicate three sets of presumptions and common knowledge that exist in the discourse around Internet and Cyberspace. The first was to move away from thinking of the Internet merely as infrastructure and networks. The second was to suggest that entering the debates around human-technology everyday relationships would offer more interesting ways of looking at accounts of the technological. The third was to propose that the history of the internet does not begin only with the digital, but it needs larger geographical and techno-science contexts in order to understand how the contemporary landscape of internet policy and governance is shaped.

The module was not designed to give a comprehensive history and account of the internet. Instead, it built a methodological and conceptual framework that would allow us to examine the ways in which we approach Internet and Society questions – in the process, it would also help us reflect on our own engagement, intentions and expectations from the Internet and how we create the different narratives and accounts for it.

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

[2]. http:\www.sigcomm.org\sites\default\files\ccr\papers\2009\October\1629607-1629613.pdf

[3]. http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html

[4]. http:\www.internetsociety.org\internet\what-internet\history-internet\brief-history-internet

[5]. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Governing_the_Internet/Introduction_to_Internet_Governance

[6]. Recommended reading: Internet Governance: Infrastructure and Institutions eds. Lee Bygrave and Jon Bing http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Governance-Infrastructure-Institutions-Bygrave/dp/0199561133

[7]. Recommended watching material to look at some of these questions: 1. The final flight of the Osiris -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueiBYxI6Eqg 2. The Second Renaissance - part 1 - http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/n5vpzw/the-second-renaissance-part-i 3. The Second Ranaissance - part 2 - http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/va807i/animatrix-second-renaissance-part2

[8]. http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/

[9]. http://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc/view

[10]. http://www.amazon.com/Imagining-India-Idea-Renewed-Nation/dp/0143116673

[11]. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950

[12]. http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf

[13]. http://eprints.cscsarchive.org/532/

[14]. http://tosdr.org/

[15]. http://www.amazon.com/The-Googlization-Everything-Should-Worry/dp/0520258827

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/history-of-internet-building-conceptual-frameworks

Here is why government twitter handles have been posting offensive and partisan messages

praskrishna — 2016-10-16T03:24:45Z

You have failed us big time Mr Kejriwal, for your petty political gains you can become headlines for Pakistani press,” read a tweet on October 5 from @IndiaPostOffice, the official twitter handle of the Indian postal service.

The article by Danish Raza was published in the Hindustan Times on October 15, 2016. Nishant Shah was quoted.

It was a reference to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal urging the Prime Minister to counter Pakistan’s propaganda over surgical strikes.

Within hours, India Post tweeted an apology saying that the account was hacked.

This is the latest in a series of opinions and statements posted from official twitter handles of government departments and bodies. Of late, the Twitter handles meant to broadcast information related to government programmes have appeared like personal accounts tweeting slander and criticism.

Last month, the Twitter handle of Digital India tweeted a poem in Hindi calling on the Indian Army to persistently fire at protesters in Kashmir.

In August, the Twitter handle of Startup India retweeted a post suggesting that the Indian Army should ‘take care’ of #Presstitutes, a reference to sections of Indian media critical of the government.

The tweets expose loopholes in the government’s social media policy and raise questions about the norms followed in the recruitment of social media professionals for ministries and government institutions.

Work in Progress

The process of adopting new tools is work in progress. While the government agencies are trying to leverage social media to enhance citizen engagement, for the vast majority of government bodies, it is unexplored territory. Babus who have traditionally been dealing in paperwork and file notings are overwhelmed to see hash tags and trends. With a tech- savvy Prime Minister at the helm, every government department is trying to increase its digital footprint. At the same time, they face the challenge of reinterpreting existing work ethics and codes of conduct and applying them to the use of social media. Ministries such as the Ministry of External Affairs, Information & Broadcasting and the Prime Minister’s Office which have cohesive programmes and big mandate, have separate social media wings of their own with well- defined protocols. But these are exceptions.

Overall, the government bodies lack social media guidelines for their own efforts or which others can learn from. According to Chinmayi Arun, executive director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, mistakes are bound to happen given that everyone is new to social media. But it should be non-negotiable that when anything is said using an official governmental handle, the government should take more responsibility than just saying ‘oops’. “One of course is a clear and unequivocal statement apologising and taking back whatever was said. However, it should take pro-active measures to train and test people who handle its public-facing accounts and publish a clear monitoring and accountability mechanism by which they can be called to account. It should not be open to anyone to misuse the government’s official handles in this manner,” said Arun.

One of the areas where the lack of sensitisation is apparent is the usage of the same mobile device for multiple twitter handles – the most common reason for such goof-ups cited by social media consultants attached to various government departments. “I believe these were inadvertently posted by people handling these accounts. It may neither have been their mandate nor their intention. It happens when the person has configured multiple twitter handles from the same device and ends up posting from the wrong account,” said Amit Malviya, BJP’s National Convener, IT.

The majority of ministries and government departments do not give phones to members of the social media teams. It is up to the individual to use his personal device or get an additional one to manage the professional handle (s). A mistake will happen if a comment which was to be posted from the personal handle is posted from the official handle.

Twitter Goof-ups from GoI Accounts

“Because of the personalised and individual nature of social media, it is easy to forget that they are representing an institution and not themselves when using these handles. This also suggests the lack of public usage training in these organisations, and the need to educate our public actors in using social media with more responsibility as office bearers of an institution rather than a personal expression or an opinion,” said Nishant Shah, co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Another issue is that access to the account is given to multiple people. “Each one of them brings their individual personality and politics to their operation of the handle,” said Shah.

Hiring Issues

Part of the problem lies in the fact that there is no standard protocol on who can access the twitter handle of Indian government bodies and how this person or team is hired.

A few ministries (example: the ministry of railways) have a team comprising of government employees and staff of private agencies handling their account. Others have outsourced the job to agencies.

During the campaigning for the 2009 election, political parties got outside expertise to mark their presence online. The selection parameters of social media consultants – established public relations firms in some cases and individuals in others – was not uniform.

Unlike the traditional public relations officers who are from the Indian Information Services cadre, the social media consultants were selected based on their expertise in the field, political affiliation, and proximity to a party or leader.

Those who started handling social media accounts of political parties and leaders included trolls and social media influencers. “Parties got youngsters who were politically motivated and willing to work for political parties. They became cheaper alternatives for social media experts,” said Ishan Russel, political communication consultant.

After the NDA came to power, almost every ministry outsourced its digital expertise to agencies. Many individuals who were earlier directly working with leaders and parties got back with them via agencies. “If an agency is looking for people to handle the twitter account or Facebook page of a certain ministry in the BJP government, then those who are politically inclined towards the BJP will apply for the vacancies and their chances of getting hired are also much higher than someone who is neutral or known to be an AAP sympathiser,” said Vikas Pandey, 32-year-old software engineer, who headed the “I Support Namo” campaign on Facebook and Twitter, as a volunteer for the BJP.

Last year, the Prime Minister felicitated more than a dozen social media enthusiasts, including Vikas. The move raised eyebrows because many felt that the government was encouraging trolls. “It illuminates the fact that trolls have found gainful employment in the Government of India. Also that the entire edifice of the centre is being taken over by woefully undereducated bigots,” said Swati Chaturvedi, senior journalist and author.

Agency, the Soft Target

Till the time the government staff is well versed with social media tools, attributing the mistakes to an ‘outside agency’ appears to be the norm.

In the case of the twitter goof-up involving Startup India, Commerce and Industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman blamed a private agency that was managing the account of Startup India. “The retweets were done by an employee of the agency hired by the department of industrial policy and promotion. The person assigned by the agency for this particular job is not decided by the department and is the sole prerogative of the agency,” she said.

S Radha Chauhan, CEO of National e-Governance Division, attributed the controversial post from Digital India’s twitter handle to an agency called Trivone. “The person responsible had mistakenly tweeted from the official handle what he wanted to tweet from his personal account,” said Chauhan.

Those familiar with the functioning of the government’s social media verticals say that agencies are mentioned to cover up for mistakes often committed by someone from the government staff. “When in crisis, blame the agency, is the thumbrule the government follows. The fact is that each twitter post is approved by the client before it is posted,” said a senior executive with a digital marketing firm attached to a ministry which has recently earned lot of praise for its social media initiatives.

Nishtha Arora, social media and digital consultant in a reputed ad agency, was handling a political account till very recently. She said that the client required her to just randomly tweet or RT to be heard by the followers of a tech-savvy minister and be his digital mouthpiece. “I often had to draft tweets which looked like press releases,” she said.

“Digital faux pas is blamed on to someone who might be an expert in the field but yet has to bow down to the client pressure so that their agenda for the day is met and the said government body or ministry remains in the news,” she added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-danish-raza-october-15-2016-here-is-why-government-twitter-handles-have-been-posting-offensive-and-partisan-messages

Helping Institutions Embrace Open Access

Admin — 2017-11-27T15:11:34Z

World over, a large number of universities and institutions are making way for open access repositories. Why have Indian researchers shied away from it?

The article by Manupriya was published in the Wire on November 17, 2017

On October 28, 2017, a group of panelists in the faculty hall at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), discussed the framework of policies that can help academic institutions embrace open access in letter, spirit and action. The discussion was a part of week-long activities organised by DST Centre for Policy Research (DST–CPR) at IISc to increase awareness and acceptability for open access publishing in India.

The panel included Jayant Modak, deputy director, IISc, Satyajit Mayor, director of National Centre for Biological Sciences and inStem, Padmini Ray Murray, vice-chair, Global Outlook: Digital Humanities, N.V. Sathyanarayana, chairman and managing director, Informatics India Ltd and Madan Muthu, visiting faculty at DST–CPR at IISc. The discussion was anchored and moderated by Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society.

Open access is a form of publishing that makes the fruits of research, such as journal papers and other forms of data accessible to anyone interested in it, without a cost. World over, a large number of universities and institutions are beginning to give up the library subscription model of publishing to make way for open access, owing to the latter’s lower cost and higher visibility.

In India too, funding agencies like DBT and DST have laid out guidelines that require researchers to submit their research output in open access repositories. Ironically though, most researchers have shied away from submitting their work in the repositories. Which raises the question, why?

In fact, this was one of the first questions that the panelists debated upon. Abraham initiated the discussion by asking the panelists – What are the weaknesses of DBT–DST policy on open access? Why have a large number of scientists not followed the guidelines laid by the policy? Is it because the policy document does not talk about any punitive measures for scientists in the event of not depositing their work in the institutional repositories (IRs)? And, how can the policy be improved?

Modak opened the argument by saying that we as a nation are good at making provisions but bad with implementation. He agreed that scientists are yet to warm up to the idea of open access but was disinclined on using punitive measures to force scientists into submitting their work in IRs. Mayor, in agreement with Modak, said that the policy document is advisory in nature and sort of lacks ‘teeth’. However, he too was against the use of punitive measures.

Murray, the third academician on the panel said that though the policy talks about staying away from publisher-based metrics like impact factor to assess a scientist’s work, it does not provide any information about what alternative metrics can be used to measure it. She suggested that the accessibility of a scientist’s work and how much effort she has put in to make it easily available to non-scientists could be used as a metrics for measurement. She also drew attention to the fact that the policy completely bypasses the requirements of independent scholars and those working in languages other than English. “Which institutional repository should they deposit their work in?”

Sathyanarayana, the fourth panelist and a strong advocate of open access said, the policy document “lacks an aggressive strategy” to drive a disruptive and “fundamentally voluntary model” of adopting open access. He asked the other panelists and the audience, “why have repositories like ResearchGate become so successful and attractive for researchers? Why can’t open access IRs be modelled along the lines of such repositories? His argument was that the IRs can be fashioned in a way to make them a ‘convenient step in the process of research’”. One suggestion that he offered was that IRs can be structured as a paper submission platform. So that anybody who is interested in publishing their work first puts it up in the IR and only after that the process of going to a journal begins.

Muthu, the fourth panelist and a long-time crusader for open access in India said that scientists in India have stayed away from the open access publishing because they don’t fully realise that in traditional models of publishing, you surrender all copyrights of your work to the publisher. He added that more scientists can be encouraged to adopt the open access model of publishing by making IRs institute-managed, easier to use and as a mandatory step in the process of publishing.

Mayor added to this argument by saying that the idea of submitting (unpublished) work in an IR is quite similar to the concept of pre-print archives which are fast becoming a powerful way of sharing work. Almost all top journals accept work that has been published in a pre-print archive. In fact, in the physical sciences, people have been using pre-print archives for a long time and now slowly, even the biology community is warming up to it.

Murray emphasised on the need to talk to students about open access and making them aware of the ways to design their metadata so that it is amenable to open access repositories.

As the discussion inched closer to its final moments, it veered off towards the costs of open access publishing. Modak said that in the last year alone, the amount of money IISc has spent for publishing papers has doubled. If all researchers start opting for open access (OA) journals/hybrid-OA journals that charge the authors nearly double of what traditional journals do, then publishing papers will become unsustainable.

To this, Sathyanarayana said, it may appear that the cost of publishing in OA journals is high, but on a macro-level, when you consider the cost of publishing and accessing all the papers published in a year, then the OA model costs much lesser. He added that scientific publishing is the only business in the world where authors (creators of proprietary material) give away all their rights to publishers.”

Backing up the points made by Sathyanarayana, Murray said that in traditional models of publishing the publishers make close to 400% profits. We need to think about, “how much labour we as academics put in for publishers’ profits?”

It is authors’ inertia that is stopping open access from becoming the obvious model of publishing, said, Muthu.

In conclusion, Abraham summed up the arguments and acknowledged that there are many dimensions to open access and an institutional policy on OA cannot be framed in a vacuum. Common people need to participate in the debate to shape the direction the policy takes.

Apart from the panel discussion a poster competition and a quiz competition were organised as part of the OA-week activities. DST–CPR was joined by the student’s council at IISc, Centre for Contemporary Studies, JRD Tata Library and IndiaBioscience in organising the activities.

This article was originally published on IndiaBioscience. Read the original here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access

Healing self-inflicted wounds

Shyam Ponappa — 2011-12-05T09:10:20Z

A spate of dysfunctional actions and retrograde developments has led to an unimaginable mess for India. Can the damage to growth prospects be undone? Does it need to be? If so, how? Three areas are discussed below.

Some months ago, the spectre was of consoling ourselves with a reduction of two per cent in growth, from 9.5 to 7.5 per cent. That’s history. What looms ahead is a larger, more serious threat. This ominous tidal-wave-in-the-making comprises many separate currents converging to undermine India’s take-off yet again. The prospect is long-term growth hamstrung by policy stand-offs, foreign direct investment in retail being a case in point, and social tensions fuelled by high unemployment.

Those who think India has arrived should be aware that it will take another decade of eight to nine per cent growth to be able to fund reasonable basic infrastructure and necessities for everyone. Why should it matter if you live in a rich cocoon? At the very least, you’ll be able to go out without stepping into filth or smelling it, or seeing masses of people struggling to survive.

Instead of a high-growth trajectory, we may get six to seven per cent, with luck. These prospects are clouded by wasteful expenditure, such as the perpetuation of an ill-functioning public distribution system and its concomitant, ration-shop-mentality, instead of efficient direct retail subsidies through electronic transfers. The negativity is amplified by fractious social and political tensions, and shoddy infrastructure crippling productivity: power outages, low-speed communications and poor logistics. One can argue (ah, argument) that the tensions are justifiable as an antithesis to increasing levels of corruption from political, bureaucratic and corporate kleptocracy feeding off the land and people, or hardening sectarian interests competing for predatory control. But if there’s one thing we can learn from others’ experience, it is to work together for better outcomes, or suffer; in game theory parlance, collaborate to optimise, or settle for worse.

Undoing Sectarian Alignments

Undoing the fractious underpinnings of sectarian alignments of language, caste and religion is beyond the scope of this article. The unpleasant reality is that unless such structural social impediments are addressed, malfunctions will continue. So we have this reality where, at one level, India is wonderful in the way people stream and swirl together, and at another, it is horrible because our potential is not manifested in living standards, with people fed, clothed and housed properly, and clean streets.

To return to misapplied intelligence in the political economy, consider three areas: interest rates, airlines, and telecommunications.

Interest Rates

It seems only the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was unaware that the consequences of interest rate hikes since February 2010 would (a) not control inflation (short of an economic collapse), and (b) lead to a severe curtailing of growth. To be fair, some economists aided and abetted with remarks that interest rates must be raised because of high inflation.

By contrast, the accompanying charts for China and Germany (euro zone) show their negative real interest rates.

What we have to do is reduce interest rates, with selective credit controls to ensure that credit for speculation is constrained and costs are high, e.g., in certain real estate, commodities, stocks and derivatives. Implementation, likewise, has to be “intelligent”, with online tracking by exception, and not cumbersome or voluminous weekly or fortnightly reports that are manually compiled and/or analysed, filtered and then presented to committees for decisions.

Airlines

The structural anomalies in India’s taxes on aviation turbine fuel (ATF) and airport charges defy logic. For a decade, there has been talk of cuts in central and state taxes on ATF, but the problems continue. Consider the missed opportunity: India has a large domestic market and is well positioned for airlines to use this for establishing global leadership, as well as ubiquitous domestic services. Instead, the sector is bled for short-term government revenues, giving foreign airlines the advantage. ATF charges in India for international flights cost 16 per cent more than they do abroad, and local airlines pay over 50 per cent more because of taxes and additional charges. Consider the ludicrous stipulation that foreign airlines cannot invest in India, and the irrationality defies imagination. Add the illogic of a government-funded, loss-making airline undercutting private airlines, and we have the mess we are in.

Globally, airlines suffer from gratuitous free-market philosophies, the exceptions being airlines from strategically focused countries, e.g., in West Asia, Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand) and, of course, China. Wake up! Surely no one doubts that aviation is an integral aspect of logistics and transportation? The government needs to recognise this and build capacity, with policies like uniform, low state taxes. Also, as in telecommunications, aviation requires an oligopolistic structure with limited competition, which if ignored brings chaos and grief, because nothing else is sustainable.

Telecom & Broadband

The draft National Telecom Policy 2011 promises good things. Yet, like India’s potential, the promise will be realised only with convergent action. This iconic sector, which changed the way the country functions and is perceived, is on the verge of being ruined by dysfunctional intervention. For instance, the regulator and the government seem bent on applying retrospective charges for “excess spectrum”, taking the bottom out of the market. Worse, 3G services are hamstrung by government attempts to restrict services, while operators threaten litigation. Meanwhile, the bastions of “free market”, the US and the UK, are initiating shared spectrum policies. What good are our brilliant objective statements about excellent, affordable services if the government acts to achieve the opposite? And is it beneficial for India to hound solid companies like Telenor and Qualcomm (unless they commit transgressions), instead of taking a problem-solving approach?

If the confused doublespeak – of punitive charges, restrictive practices, PSUs building state-of-the-art networks, auctions and spectrum sharing, all in the same breath – continues, we may lose a decade or more because of instability and irrational policies. It is time for decisions on pay-for-use, open-access spectrum and networks. Incumbent network companies can be compensated along a downward-sloping power curve to give up their competitive advantage. We must start being reasonable and do things that make sense.

This article by Shyam Ponappa was published in Business Standard on 1 December 2011. Read the article at Organizing India Blogspot

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/healing-self-inflicted-wounds

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigence of STM Publishers

praskrishna — 2015-02-12T00:16:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose-the-intransigence-of-stm-publishers

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers

subbiah — 2015-02-12T00:28:14Z

A few commercial publishers dominate provision of access to scientific and technical information sought after by researchers around the world. Increasing subscription prices of journals at rates higher than general inflation caused librarians to think of forming consortia, but publishers started selling online journals as bundles, and libraries ended up with many journals their researchers have very little use for. Scientists and librarians adopted open access, but publishers came up with hybrid journals and article processing charges to beat any adverse effect on their profits caused by the fast-spreading open access movement. We compare the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India. We end with a few suggestions.

The article by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran was published in the Indian National Science Academy Journals, Proc Indian Natn SciAcad 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929.

Introduction

Scientists in India, as elsewhere, will be happy if their libraries provide them access to thousands of journals. Librarians, even in the most affluent institutions, have only limited budgets and they have to balance between journals on the one hand and books, monographs and reference material on the other, and can subscribe to only a limited number of journals. In the past decade and a half, thanks to generous funding by several government agencies (e.g., UGC, CSIR), librarians formed consortia so they could access online journals at more attractive prices and in large numbers. Also, during the same period, many open access (OA) journals became available and some subscription journals came forward to make articles OA if the authors paid a fee. There also came up a large number of repositories, both institutional (such as the ones at Indian Institute of Science and Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute) and subject-based central repositories (such as PubMed Central). As a result, scientists now have much easier access to a much larger volume of current literature. But, it appears that publishers seem to profit far more than scientists. They keep increasing the subscription prices at a rate higher than general inflation. Even affluent institutions like Harvard University are forced to cut down the number of journals they subscribe. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a group of about 125 research libraries in North America, is concerned about this crisis in scholarly communication (or ‘serials crisis’ as they call it) and is working to promote open access as one way to counter it. The publishers continue to make their unusually large profits unmindful of the hardship researchers are put to. In business circles, publishing scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals is considered to be one of the most profitable businesses. Efforts made by groups of researchers to make scholarly communication more cost effective have not met with expected success levels. For example, entire editorial boards of a few commercial journals resigned and started new journals in the same field. But this happened only in a handful of cases and not all of them succeeded. In this paper, we look at what is happening currently in India in the context of the unusually large influence wielded by journal publishers.

Click to download the full text article.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose

Handy Origins of the winds of change

radha — 2011-04-02T14:59:01Z

A seminar in Bangalore revealed how mobile technology is being harnessed across India to bring about development and social change, reports Shrabonti Bagchi - DNA (6th Sept, 2009)

The Internet, for all the celebrated changes it has made in our lives, still had limited penetration in our country with about 80 million, largely urban and prosperous users. This severely limits its viability as a vehicle of development and social change. The mobile phone, on the other hand, has 400 million users in the country, and has undoubtedly become the first mode of communication in India to gain almost universal reach, cutting across barriers of location, region, community and social classes.
“The mobile phone has unprecedented penetration into classes of society that were largely unconnected with the outside world till now,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, which along with Mobile Monday Bangalore, the Bangalore chapter of a global community of wireless industry professionals, organised a seminar, “Mobile Technology 4 Social Change”, in the city recently.
The idea for the event came from one of the co-organizers, Mobileactive.org, which is a network of NGOs interested in taking advantage of the mobile telephony revolution to bring about changes, informed Abraham.
Attended by NGOs, non-profit organisations, researchers, donors, and of course, mobile application developers, the seminar intended to throw open doors of communication between these varied groups of people.
Take the case of IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited (IKSL), for instance. This farmers’ co-operative formed under the aegis of fertiliser manufacturer IFFCO has tied up with cellular service provider Airtel to develop a special SIM card which enables users to receive voice and text messages everyday containing nuggets of information about various farming practices. It has around 2,75,000 subscribers in Karnataka alone, informs IKSL state manager G Raghunatha, and has made a huge difference to the lives of farmers.
A similar case is related by Subbaih Arunachalam who is involved with the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, which has tied up with Tata Tele-services and Qualcomm and telecom developer Astute to create special GPS-enabled mobile phones (costing less than Rs.3, 000) that helps fishermen track weather reports, send out emergency messages in case they are lost at sea, etc., and also engage in price-point discussions with local wholesalers.
Several NGOs have also been quick to utilise the advantage of the versatility and ease-of-use of the mobile phone to disseminate vital information. Sreekanth Rameshaiah, director of Bangalore-based NGO Mahiti, spoke of an endeavour started by his group in Calcutta called My SME News which targets small and micro enterprises, sending out customised information for 11 micro-industries through text messages in the local language. They also plan to launch a voice platform soon.
Mobile payments brand mChek started an initiative on similar lines in Bangalore. The company uses its SMS-based mobile payment technology, which is embedded on all new Airtel and Docomo SIM cards, to enable slum dwellers to access banking and explore micro-finance options through micro-finance institution Grameen Koota.
Valerie Rozycki, head of strategic initiatives at mChek, said, “Access to low-cost banking over the mobile and being enabled with safe ways to save and convenient ways to make payments is life-changing for these customers. This is a sustainable business model to serve the un-banked and under-banked. So, these services will continue to thrive."

Let’s raise our mobile phones to that.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/handy-origins-of-the-winds-of-change

Hacking, Modding & Making

praskrishna — 2012-04-09T09:51:41Z

Seeber's electronics laboratory is a room in a unit he shares with his mother. Every available space is taken up with teetering towers of electronic parts, writes Brendan Shanahan for GQ.

Like subprime lending or the line at the motor registry, patent and copyright laws control all our lives but no one really understands them. In the world of DIY Tech, however, it is not a subject that can be ignored.

" If they are infringing on patents then it's a question you have to ask within the individual jurisdiction," says Abraham. "In many jurisdictions design many not have protection. Whether it's legal or illegal is an open question."

At its heart Abraham's argument is pragmatic: the developing world, especially China, is too big to stop. Companies can fight patent wars in every world territory, hire private detectives, pressure governments and prosecute consumers who buy rip-off products, but, ultimately, they won't win. The genie is out of the bottle.

"If something has been made technologically possible, we cannot make it illegal and hope that everyone will now pretend that this is no longer technologically possible," says Abraham. "We can't have the government checking everyone's iPod and laptop. The better move is to change the model."

Abraham has many suggestions for making copyright law more flexible to benefit manufacturers and consumers. One thing is certain: in a world in which Amazon, not even five years after the launch of the Kindle, is now selling more e-books than all hard copy books combined, and technology such as 3D printing will soon be standard, it would be unwise to cling to old certainities. The music industry may come to be regarded as merely the canary in a digital coalmine of failed industries.

Read the full post here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/hacking-modding-making

Hacking without borders: The future of artificial intelligence and surveillance

maria — 2013-07-12T15:30:27Z

In this post, Maria Xynou looks at some of DARPA´s artificial intelligence surveillance technologies in regards to the right to privacy and their potential future use in India.

This research was undertaken as part of the 'SAFEGUARDS' project that CIS is undertaking with Privacy International and IDRC.

Robots or computer systems controlling our thoughts is way beyond anything I have seen in science fiction; yet something of the kind may be a reality in the future. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently funding several artificial intelligence projects which could potentially equip governments with the most powerful weapon possible: mind control.

Combat Zones That See (CTS)

Source: swanksalot on flickr

Ten years ago DARPA started funding the Combat Zones That See (CTS) project, which aims to ´track everything that moves´ within a city through a massive network of surveillance cameras linked to a centralized computer system. Groundbreaking artificial intelligence software is being used in the project to identify and track all movement within cities, which constitutes Big Brother as a reality. The computer software supporting the CTS is capable of automatically identifying vehicles and provides instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watch list. The software is also able to analyze the video footage and to distinguish ´normal´ from ´abnormal´ behavior, as well as to discover links between ´places, subjects and times of activity´ and to identify patterns. With the use of this software, the CTS constitute the world´s first multi-camera surveillance system which is capable of automatically analyzing video footage.

Although the CTS project was initially intended to be used for solely military purposes, its use for civil purposes, such as combating crime, remains a possibility. In 2003 DARPA stated that 40 million surveillance cameras were already in use around the world by law enforcement agencies to combat crime and terrorism, with 300 million expected by 2005. Police in the U.S. have stated that buying new technology which may potentially aid their work is an integral part of the 9/11 mentality. Considering the fact that literally millions of CCTV cameras are installed by law enforcement agencies around the world and that DARPA has developed the software that has the capability of automatically analyzing data gathered by CCTV cameras, it is very possible that law enforcement agencies are participating in the CTS network.

However if such a project was used for non-military level purposes, it could raise concerns in regards to data protection, privacy and human rights. As a massive network of surveillance cameras, the CTS ultimately could enable the sharing of footage between private parties and law enforcement agencies without individuals´ knowledge or consent. Databases around the world could be potentially linked to each other and it remains unclear what laws would regulate the access, use and retention of such databases by law enforcement agencies of multiple countries. Furthermore, there is no universal definition for ´normal´ and ´abnormal´ behaviour, thus if the software is used for its original purpose, to distinguish between “abnormal” and “normal” behaviour, and used beyond military purposes, then there is a potential for abuse, as the criteria for being monitored, and possibly arrested, would not be clearly set out.

Mind´s Eye

Source: watchingfrogsboil on flickr

A camera today which is only capable of recording visual footage appears futile in comparison to what DARPA´s creating: a thinking camera. The Mind´s Eye project was launched in the U.S. in early 2011 and is currently developing smart cameras endowed with ´visual intelligence´. This ultimately means that artificial intelligence surveillance cameras can not only record visual footage, but also automatically detect ´abnormal´ behavior, alert officials and analyze data in such a way that they are able to predict future human activities and situations.

Mainstream surveillance cameras already have visual-intelligence algorithms, but none of them are able to automatically analyze the data they collect. Data analysts are usually hired for analyzing the footage on a per instance basis, and only if a policeman detects ´something suspicious´ in the footage. Those days are over. General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in an intelligence conference that “Star[ing] at Death TV for hours on end trying to find the single target or see something move is just a waste of manpower.” Today, the Mind´s Eye project is developing smart cameras equipped with artificial intelligence software capable of identifying operationally significant activity and predicting outcomes.

Mounting these smart cameras on drones is the initial plan; and while that would enable military operations, many ethical concerns have arisen in regards to whether such technologies should be used for ´civil purposes.´ Will law enforcement agencies in India be equipped with such cameras over the next years? If so, how will their use be regulated?

SyNAPSE

Source: A Health Blog on flickr

The Terminator could be more than just science fiction if current robots had artificial brains with similar form, function and architecture to the mammalian brain. DARPA is attempting this by funding HRL Laboratories, Hewlett-Packard and IBM Research to carry out this task through the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) programme. Is DARPA funding the creation of the Terminator? No. Such artificial brains would be used to build robots whose intelligence matches that of mice and cats...for now.

SyNAPSE is a programme which aims to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology which scales to biological levels. It started in the U.S. in 2008 and is scheduled to run until around 2016, while having received $102.6 million in funding as of January 2013. The ultimate aim is to build an electronic microprocessor system that matches a mammalian brain in power consumption, function and size. As current programmable machines are limited by their computational capacity, which requires human-derived algorithms to describe and process information, SyNAPSE´s objective is to create biological neural systems which can autonomously process information in complex environments. Like the mammalian brain, SyNAPSE´s cognitive computers would be capable of automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations, as well as of finding correlations, creating hypotheses and generally remembering and learning through experiences.

Although this original type of computational device could be beneficial to predict natural disasters and other threats to security based on its cognitive abilities, human rights questions arise if it were to be used in general for surveillance purposes. Imagine surveillance technologies with the capacity of a human brain. Imagine surveillance technologies capable of remembering your activity, analyzing it, correlating it to other facts and/or activities, and of predicting outcomes; and now imagine such technology used to spy on us. That might be a possibility in the future.

Such cognitive technology is still in an experimental phase and although it could be used to tackle threats to security, it could also potentially be used to monitor populations more efficiently. No such technology currently exists in India, but it could only be a matter of time before Indian law enforcement agencies start using such artificial intelligence surveillance technology to supposedly enhance our security and protect us.

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

Remember Orwell's ´Thought Police´? Was Orwell exaggerating just to get his point across? Well, the future appears to be much scarier than Orwell's vision depicted in 1984. Unlike the ´Thought Police´ which merely arrested individuals who openly expressed ideas or thoughts which contradicted the Party´s dogma, today, technologies are being developed which can literally read our thoughts.

Once again, DARPA appears to be funding one of the world´s most innovative projects: the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The human brain is far better at pattern matching than any computer, whilst computers have greater analytical speed than human brains. The BCI is an attempt to merge the two together, and to enable the human brain to control robotic devices and other machines. In particular, the BCI is comprised of a headset (an electroencephalograph - an EEG) with sensors that rest on the human scalp, as well as of software which processes brain activity. This enables the human brain to be linked to a computer and for an individual to control technologies without moving a finger, but by merely thinking of the action.

Ten years ago it was reported that the brains of rats and monkeys could control robot arms through the use of such technologies. A few years later brainstem implants were developed to tackle deafness. Today, brain-computer interface technologies are able to directly link the human brain to computers, thus enabling paralyzed people to conduct computer activity by merely thinking of the actions, as well as to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. BCIs appear to open up a new gateway for disabled persons, as all previously unthinkable actions, such as typing on a computer or browsing through websites, can now be undertaken by literally thinking about them, while using a BCI.

Brain-controlled robotic limbs could change the lives of disabled persons, but ethical concerns have arisen in regards to the BCI´s mind-reading ability. If the brain can be used to control computers and other technologies, does that ultimately mean that computers can also be used to control the human brain? Researchers from the University of Oxford and Geneva, and the University of California, Berkley, have created a custom programme that was specially designed with the sole purpose of finding out sensitive data, such as an individuals´ home location, credit card PIN and date of birth. Volunteers participated in this programme and it had up to 40% success in obtaining useful information. To extract such information, researchers rely on the P300 response, which is a very specific brainwave pattern that occurs when a human brain recognizes something that is meaningful, whether that is personal information, such as credit card details, or an enemy in a battlefield. According to DARPA:

´When a human wearing the EEG cap was introduced, the number of false alarms dropped to only five per hour, out of a total of 2,304 target events per hour, and a 91 percent successful target recognition rate was introduced.´

This constitutes the human brain as a new warfighting domain of the twenty-first century, as experiments have proven that the brain can control and maneuver quadcopter drones and other military technologies. Enhanced threat detection through BCI´s scan for P300 responses and the literal control of military operations through the brain, definitely appear to be changing the future of warfare. Along with this change, the possibility of manipulating a soldier´s BCI during conflict is real and could lead to absolute chaos and destruction.

Security expert, Barnaby Jack, of IOActive demonstrated the vulnerability of biotechnological systems, which raises concerns that BCI technologies may also potentially be vulnerable and expose an individual's´ brain to hacking, manipulation and control by third parties. If the brain can control computer systems and computer systems are able to detect and distinguish brain patterns, then this ultimately means that the human brain can potentially be controlled by computer software.

Will BCI be used in the future to interrogate terrorists and suspects? What would that mean for the future of our human rights? Can we have human rights if authorities can literally hack our brain in the name of national security? How can we be protected from abuse by those in power, if the most precious thing we have - our thoughts - can potentially be hacked? Human rights are essential because they protect us from those in power; but the privacy of our thoughts is even more important, because without it, we can have no human rights, no individuality.

Sure, the BCI is a very impressive technological accomplishment and can potentially improve the lives of millions. But it can also potentially destroy the most unique quality of human beings: their personal thoughts. Mind control is a vicious game to play and may constitute some of the scariest political novels as a comedy of the past. Nuclear weapons, bombs and all other powerful technologies seem childish compared to the BCI which can literally control our mind! Therefore strict regulations should be enacted which would restrict the use of BCI technologies to visually impaired or handicapped individuals. Though these technologies currently are not being used in India, explicit laws on the use of artificial intelligence surveillance technologies should be enacted in India, to help ensure that they do not infringe upon the right to privacy and other human rights.

Apparently, anyone can buy Emotiv or Neurosky BCI online to mind control their computer with only $200-$300. If the use of BCI was imposed in a top-down manner, then maybe there would be some hope that people would oppose its use for surveillance purposes; but if the idea of mind control is being socially integrated...the future of privacy seems bleak.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hacking-without-borders-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-and-surveillance

Hackers Take Protest to Indian Streets and Cyberspace

praskrishna — 2012-06-18T04:02:21Z

First there was self-styled Gandhian activist Anna Hazare who took to the streets to protest corruption. Now a group agitating against censorship on the Internet has arrived in India.

This article by Shreya Shah was published in the Wall Street Journal on June 8, 2012 Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.

Only this time, the location is cyberspace and their modus operandi hacking.

In the last few months, Anonymous –a group of hackers, or hacktivists as they like to call themselves –has gone after Web sites of political parties, government sites and Internet service providers, the latest being MTNL, to protest censorship on the Internet.

The group says they are opposing laws including the 2008 Information Technology (Amendment) Act and the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules of 2011, which they say unfairly restrict Internet freedom.

On Saturday, the hackers will take their protest to the streets, with an Occupy Wall Street-style march called ”Operation Occupy India” planned in 17 cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Nagpur in Maharashtra and Kundapur in Karnataka. The group has requested all protestors to wear Guy Fawkes masks, the symbol of Anonymous.

“This time the common man wants to help us,” an “anon,” which is what members of the group call themselves, told India Real Time.

Anonymous, which has a global presence, catapulted to fame with its attacks on Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.

This is how the group attacks Web sites: It overwhelms them with thousands of requests from different computer systems simultaneously. The Web site is unable to handle the load and crashes.

The group intensified its attacks after Internet Service Providers like Reliance, MTNL and Airtel temporarily blocked file sharing sites like Vimeo, Dailymotion, Patebin and Pirate bay, citing a Court order.

But many question the method used by Anonymous.

“I don’t believe in defacing or hacking government Web sites to prove a point,” says Ankit Fadia, a cyber security expert. “You can’t hold the government ransom,” he adds.

In an open letter to the government, Anonymous India defended its actions. It wrote that traditional ways of protesting are losing meaning and this is a new method to pressure the politicians.

Members of the group say that like a regular protest on the street, they too block the infrastructure of their opponents. Except in this case, the infrastructure is located in cyberspace.

This is a “geek method of attacking,” said the anon who spoke to India Real Time. The group does not plan to attacks sites like that of the Indian railways, for instance, which is used by the masses, he explained.

But not everyone is convinced.

The group attacked the Web site of India’s Supreme Court even when it says it does not attack Web sites used by the common man, says Pranesh Prakash, Program Director of the Center for Internet and Society.

The IT Act is another reason Anonymous is protesting. The Act gives the government the power to remove content it finds offensive. The government can also restrict public access to a Web site.

Anonymous is also protesting the Intermediary Guidelines of 2011. According to this Act, a site that hosts offensive content will have to remove it within 36 hours of a complaint against it.

As a result, Web sites like Google and Facebook are facing criminal cases for hosting objectionable content on their site.

“This government does not stand for censorship; this government does not stand for infringement of free speech. Indeed, this government does not stand for regulation of free speech,” Kapil Sibal, the Communications and Information Technology Minister told the Rajya Sabha, or the upper house of the Indian Parliament, last month.

Pranesh Prakash, of the Center for Internet and Society told India Real Time that he does not believe that Anonymous will influence policy makers. He says that the main aim of a protest is to get media attention, and in turn get the attention of the people.

But he agrees that India’s cyber laws are “hopelessly flawed” and create a framework by which not only the government but everyone can censor.

He adds, “The laws are a greater threat than Anonymous.”

Photo Source: Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/hackers-take-protest-to-indian-streets-and-cyberspace

Guru-G Learning Labs and CIS A2K Institutional Partnership

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:52:06Z

Incorporated in 2013, Guru-G is the world’s first gamified platform for teaching and teacher training.

Guru-G converts existing textbooks and teacher resources into adaptive teaching packs (or guided lesson plans), which provide in-class guidance to teachers on different ways in which they can teach a topic. The guidance adapts to the teacher’s past behavior, student moods & the practices that have resulted in best learning outcomes for their students. These packs save preparation time & effort for a teacher before class plus make teaching fun and interesting during and after class. Teachers can also track their progress and train at their own pace if interested.

Rationale for Institutional partnership:
A2K aimed at developing additional resources that would supplement the learning curve of students at High school and undergraduate levels. The partnership also aimed to build digital research skills into the students so as to equip them for the new modes of knowledge aggregators.

Both Guru-G labs and CIS work at the intersection of technology, education and social empowerment, it was planned that due to the mutual interests, the partnership will be able to identify a large group of Wikipedia users in Kannada and it was hoped that of these new generation readers some of the students would be trained as Wikipedians. Contribution towards Wikisource was also discussed in the MoU.

Plan of Action:
Due to the internal team movement and shortage of manpower from at CIS, we were unable to work closely with the Guru-G Lab. However, we have recently restarted our conversations with them.

Plans for Future:
As Guru-G Learning Labs provide platforms to collaboratively discuss ideas, A2K team, would like to use this partnership in designing our training activities.

Nature of collboaration and rolling out of resources for better implementation of Wikipedia in Education programme run by CIS-A2K. CIS-A2K will work with educational institutions, developmental organisations and teachers who have already been identified by Guru-G labs and provide to them resources such as Offline Wikipedia.

Training programmes may be designed and customised for Wikipedia in Education programme run by CIS-A2K across different colleges. Creating platforms and activities for A2K's community capacity building activities such as TTT and MWTTT.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guru-g-learning-labs-and-cis-a2k-institutional-partnership

Guru Gomke is a Stylish Ol Chiki Typeface for India’s Santali Speakers

praskrishna — 2016-12-01T14:56:41Z

The blog post was published by AIGA.org on November 29, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi was consulted.

Back story: Ever met a teenaged girl yearning to be a typeface designer? Yes? Then perhaps you know Pooja Saxena, who recognized her life’s calling when she was still in high school. Saxena went on to study with type historian and designer Fiona Ross at the University of Reading in the UK.

The idea for Guru Gomke came from a chat she had with Panigrahi, whose work with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Program at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore underscored the lack of tools and resources available for India’s minority languages online. For example, Ol Chiki is the alphabet needed to write the language Santali, used by over 5 million people in India and its neighboring countries. “At the time of our conversation, we couldn’t find a single Unicode-compliant font in the script—forget a typeface family with a bold or an italic. [Noto Sans Ol Chiki, in regular and bold, has since been released]. Subhashish mentioned all these minority scripts in India that people can’t use because fonts and keyboards for them don’t exist,” Saxena says. “I was enthusiastic to help create a free open-source typeface family and input methods in Ol Chiki, and thanks to Subhashish’s work with A2K, he was able to make it happen.”

Why’s it called Guru Gomke? Guru Gomke is a title of respect for Pandit Raghunath Murmu, creator of the Ol Chiki script in the early 20th century. The name translates to “great teacher.” It was recommended to Panigrahi by one of the language experts consulted by the designers, and they found it a wonderful nod to the history of the script.

What are its distinguishing characteristics? Its very existence, frankly. It’s now one of just two Unicode-compliant fonts with both bold and italic character sets.

What should I use it for? Next time you need to set absolutely anything in Ol Chiki.

What other typefaces do you like to pair it with? Matched to Source Sans Pro visually and proportionally, these two fonts are visually harmonic used anywhere Ol Chiki and Latin texts have to work together. In fact, the Latin glyphs included in Guru Gomke are derived from Source Sans Pro.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/eye-on-design-aiga-guru-gomke-is-stylish