Centre for Internet and Society

Links in the Chain, Volume 6

praskrishna — 2011-11-14T05:39:24Z

The Digital Natives newsletter, volume 6.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/write-shop.pdf

Connections

praskrishna — 2011-11-14T06:13:31Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/chains.jpg

Best Practices

praskrishna — 2011-11-14T06:22:26Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/bestpractices.jpg

Essay Review: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause

praskrishna — 2012-02-10T05:53:30Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) are pleased to announce the monthly essay review event. It starts from the midnight of February 17 and ends on the midnight of February 26. Hurry! Pick any essay from the four book collective of Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and send us your reviews.

Hivos and CIS have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”.

This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

The event invites readers from around the world to pick any one essay from the books and review it in the week of 17-26 February 2012.

Previously found reviews can be found here.

For submission guidelines, please get in touch with: Nilofar Ansher (nilofar.ansh@gmail.com)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/essay-review

Mikel Maron

praskrishna — 2012-02-11T03:34:29Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/mikel_maron.jpg

Cartonama Workshop

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T10:21:16Z

HasGeek presents an intensive, hands-on training for managing and building location based services at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), Bangalore on 2nd and 3rd March, 2012. CIS is a partner for this event.

About the Workshop

Around 95% smartphone users around the world - which translates to about 468 million people - are using Location Based Services to look for points of interests, ATMs, restaurants, hotels and many other services. They are checking traffic status, and sharing locations and check-ins with friends on various social networks. In the last four years, this industry has grown six times, to a whooping $6 billion.

Cartonama Workshop will provide developers, neo-geographers and entrepreneurs working on location based services with hands-on training on advanced tools to manage and represent their geographic data.

The trainers will help participants to learn use of tools such as databases, tile servers, tile studios, Geocoding APIs, search APIs and JavaScript libraries through an application building exercise. The learning process is interspersed with lectures and discussion sessions on issues such as quality of geographic data, commercialization, licensing and privacy. For more details about the workshop sessions, visit the HasGeek funnel.

Speakers

Schuyler Erle
Free Software developer and evangelist for over fifteen years. He was a co-author of 'Mapping Hacks' and 'Google Maps Hacks'. He was also a co-founder of the OpenLayers and TileCache projects, and is a charter member of the OSGeo Foundation. He also works in the fields of wireless networking, intelligent search engines and the Semantic Web and was the lead developer of NoCatAuth which is an open source wireless captive portal. He built geocoder.us, which is an open source United States. address geocoder. More recently, Schuyler helped found the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and serves on its Board of Directors. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Mikel Maron
Programmer and geographer working for impactful community and humanitarian uses of open source and open data. He is co-founder of Ground Truth Initiative, and of the Map Kibera project. He’s on the Board of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and President of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, having helped to facilitate the OSM response to the Haiti earthquake. He’s travelled widely, organizing projects in India, Palestine, Egypt, Swaziland, and elsewhere. Previously, he co-founded Mapufacture and worked on collaborative platforms, and geoweb standards, with a wide spectrum of organizations from UN and government agencies to anarchist hacker collectives.

In 2008, Mikel Maron and Schuyler Erle conducted a series of workshops in India. From Delhi to Ludhiana, Pune, Mumbai, Kerala and Bangalore. The workshop series poked people like Arun Ganesh and inspired them to map and build applications. Arun and his friends mapped Chennai extensively and created beautiful maps. They also put the data together into busroutes.in

. BusRoutes.in remains as one of the best examples of using crowdsourced geographic information to create applications that are useful.

Sessions


Introduction to OpenStreetMap	GPS Surveying for OpenStreetMap	Downloading from GPS	Editing Data for OpenStreetMap

Tagging and Map Features	Geographic File Formats	Geo-enabled Databases	Processing OpenStreetMap Data

Data Swiss Army Knives	Creating Shapefiles	Tiles	Tilemill

Java Script Mapping APIs	Serving Tiles	Geocoding and Location queries	Putting it all together

Why You Should Attend the Workshop?

The workshop is only open to 30 participants. This is to ensure that the trainers can pay individual attention to each participant.

The workshop will train you with both back-end as well as front-end tools necessary for developing functional location based services and will enable you to build maps which can be used on devices ranging from phones to tablets to computers. It is aimed at teaching you the entire technology stack, right from managing the data to deploying the data on the server, and finally presenting it to your end user. During the hands-on sessions, you will develop web-based location services and learn how to manage your geographic data by creating interactive maps.

Mikel and Schuyler have extensive experience working with interactive maps, open data, Open Street Maps (OSM) and diverse communities on the ground. Participants will benefit immensely from the knowledge, experience and expertise of the trainers.

Registration

Tickets are priced at Rs. 10,000. Participants can register through the DoAttend portal. Or, you can pay offline through cheques and DD. Your ticket price covers workshop facilities and the facilitators' travel to India. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has sponsored part of the workshop expenses.

Participants are expected to bring their own GPS devices / mobile phones and computers for the application building exercises.

If you have any queries, write to Sajjad Anwar.

Buy Tickets Now

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore. The congenial atmosphere at CIS facilitates both formal and informal interactions, and peer-to-peer learning.

No. 194, 2nd C Cross, 4th Main
Opposite Domlur Club
Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 560 071

The Centre for Internet & Society

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a Bangalore-based independent, non-profit research organisation. CIS is primarily involved in research on the Internet and its relationship to society. Through its academic and research programmes, campaigns, and advocacy, CIS brings together scholars, academics, students, programmers and scientists to engage in a large variety of issues concerning the Internet: from histories of the Internet to enhancing accessibility for persons with disabilities, openness, telecom and Internet governance, among others.

CIS is supporting the Cartonama Workshop by providing the venue and hosting the workshop facilitators in Bangalore.

HasGeek

HasGeek was initiated in September 2010 to create discussion spaces for developers around emerging technologies. Our events are developer-focused. We began by organizing five editions of the DocType HTML5 conference in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.

In 2011, we organized a series of events in Bangalore starting with the Android Camp in April, PHP and Cloud Computing in June, JSFoo in October, and Droidcon India in November. Each of these events had an open talks submission and voting system, which made every event more participant-focused.

In 2012, we are attempting to reach out to a wider audience of developers, entrepreneurs and students, across large and small Indian cities, by addressing interesting technology problems such as UI Engineering, Data Science, SMS and email notifications, among others.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cartonama

OpenStreetMap

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T09:26:18Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/osm.jpg

Tagging

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T09:32:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/tag.jpg

Marie

praskrishna — 2012-02-15T07:07:54Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/marie.jpg

Podcast of Digital Natives

praskrishna — 2012-02-15T11:35:50Z

Listen to the podcast of digital natives here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/podcast-of-digital-natives

Tweeple say it pithily with hash tags

praskrishna — 2012-02-13T05:06:10Z

Twitter best captures public irreverence to pomposity and the powers-that-be, writes Deepa Kurup in this article published in the Hindu on February 11, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted in this article.

The Twitter world is divided into two kinds of people, those who are funny and those who try.

And nothing gets them going like a jolly controversy, particularly one that involves politicians — an easy target, always — and pornography. Of course, there's still them blogs and Facebook, but Twitter, with its sense of ‘right here, right now' (something that Facebook's Timeline tries to emulate) appears to be where every current event is made light of, ripped apart, hash-tagged and, of course, wildly re-tweeted.

Hash-Tag Bash

This week, for instance, it was all about the three Ministers from Karnataka who were caught watching porn on their phones in the Legislative Assembly when the House was in session. For at least two whole days, tweeple (people using Twitter) seemed to be gripped by what has been christened #PornGate (yes, every event these days is reduced to a single hash tag on Twitter).

So jokes ranged from the genuinely clever, funny and to the lame and obscene. Though many cannot be mentioned here in print, quite a few had to do with the ministers' state of mind and being, and even offered them advice on how to tide through these, ahem, hard times.

On Facebook, a space that doesn't stifle your creativity to 140 measly characters (for those who've been living under a rock for the past six years, that's the word limit for a single Tweet), there were more elaborate forms of humour such as morphed pictures, couplets and political satire.

The last time when social media in India went viral was the Shahrukh Khan-Shirish Kundar brawl (predictably, christened #SlapGate).

Does something about Twitter, or its format, inspire everyone to try their hand at humour? Perhaps, it's the brevity — the soul of wit, remember? —- that the platform demands. “It's also probably because it's difficult to be profound in 140 characters,” offers Nishant Shah, researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society, who tracks social media closely. Another factor could be what he calls the “gamification aesthetic” of web 2.0. “This is because our social networking sites and writing platforms are performances of a certain kind... they allow us to convert our everyday lives into games — with rewards, actions, punishments or rules.”

More Immediate

Ask Ramesh Srivats, a hugely funny ad man who's wildly popular on Twitter for his one-liners, and he believes that online humour, particularly so on Twitter, is fun because its immediate, more observational, real and allows people an opportunity to be irreverent.

There're no sacred cows here. And there's a certain mood that Twitter sets up, often depending on what's current; the rest is about timing. “Twitter doesn't allow you to analyse or discuss an issue… I'd rather do that on Facebook or elsewhere,” he explains. So is there pressure to say the next-most-funny thing on Twitter? “Of course not. If something comes to mind, I say it. It's just like a conversation among friends,” Mr. Srivats laughs.

Why not Facebook?

It's not that there aren't other forms of humour online — there are videos, blogs, Facebook pages and so on. There are indeed some incredibly humorous bloggers — many of them, however, have migrated to Twitter. But it's the mood that Twitter creates. Facebook, on the other hand, allows for more expression of angst, grief and even activism. Mr. Shah says that Facebook is to sadness what Twitter is to humour; perhaps, it is a more “nurturing and personalised space”.

The “gaming aesthetic” on Facebook, however, does exist with memes, videos, picture remixes and so on, he says. “But unlike Twitter, here the attempt is not to be merely humorous... banter on Facebook is about a post or an object, where as banter on Twitter is about the banter itself!

The original story was published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tweeple-say-it-pithily-with-hash-tags

Prometheus bound and gagged

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T04:47:46Z

Funny how a healthy person like me can collapse one day and end up in the hospital. The doctor who made me go through every lab test available, finally diagnosed the cause after a chat with me. Apparently, I collapsed because I’m getting angry, increasing my blood pressure. The only solution he said is to stop reading newspapers, as I’m getting agitated by headlines like ‘India can go the China way and block sites’, or by how the government says there’s no Internet censorship while all it’s actions point the other way.

The article by Adarsh Matham was published in the New Indian Express on 20 January 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.

Censorship is a word that is particularly abhorrent for someone like me, who grew up listening to tales of how people like Ramnath Goenka fought the censors during the Emergency. And to say that we’ll start blocking websites in India like China is doing, the most heart wrenching moment I’ve ever heard. While researching for this piece, I came across some information that is out in the open on the Internet, but which is not generating the level of debate it deserves. We seem to be immersed in discussing Kolaveri, while slowly sliding into an Orwellian nightmare. As an example, I didn’t know there are rules called ‘Intermediary Guidelines’ and ‘Cyber cafe rules’, and I bet you didn’t either. As Pranesh Prakash of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has pointed out in a blog post, these two rules alone, made up by the Department of IT in April 2011, give the government and citizens of India great powers at censoring the web by allowing them to get Internet firms to remove content that is ‘disparaging’, ‘doesn’t have rights to’, etc.

Killing freedom of speech is only the first crime of these rules as proved by the good people at CIS. To test these rules, they complained against some frivolous content to ISPs and Internet companies, which resulted in six out of seven listings being removed without informing posters or users. More alarmingly, of the 358 items the Government of India (and some states) has requested Google to remove, only eight were for hate speech, one for national security, and an astounding 255 for ‘government criticism’.

Since introducing these draconian rules, the tale only gets murkier. Not content with asking Internet firms to self-regulate, Kapil Sibal has introduced an amendment to the Copyright Act, which introduces section 52(1)(C ), that allows anyone to send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. While this sounds normal, the catch is that ‘the Internet company has to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious’. This amendment is before Rajya Sabha, and considering how our Parliament passes bills without a debate, it’ll become a law very soon.

Baleful rules and people behind them fail to realise that such efforts will lead to the Streisand effect, whereby attempts to hide any information will lead to it being publicised more widely. Yes more widely, because you can take out some content, but India’s youth will re-post it in a million places within minutes, like they do with pirated movies. We play a lot of cunning games just to live peacefully in India already. Please don’t let us play them online too.

The writer is a tech geek.
Email: articles@theadarsh.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prometheus-bound-and-gagged

real world

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T05:04:29Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/real.jpg

Indian law caught in web

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T05:41:57Z

Can Information Technology Act deal with the dynamics of the Net? Lawrence Liang, Pranesh Prakash and Nishant Shah have been quoted in this article by Moyna which was published in Down to Earth magazine Issue: February 15, 2012.

THIS is one series of court cases the nation is following keenly. Within one week, in December last year, a criminal and a civil complaint were filed against 20-odd online giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo for hosting anti-religious and anti-social content on their websites. While the judge hearing the civil case ordered immediate removal and blockade of all controversial content from the web forums named in the plaint, the trial court summoned their top executives for violating the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The companies then approached the Delhi High Court for relief, citing that the matter of hosting objectionable content has been oversimplified and does not address the nuances of the way the Internet works.

Real world v virtual world

December 16, 2011
A Delhi-based journalist Vinay Rai files a complaint in trial court against 21 web companies, accusing them of promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration. Magistrate Sudesh Kumar calls for an inquiry.

December 17, 2011
Tilak Marg police station SHO conducts inquiry and submits report.

December 20, 2011
One Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi moves court of additional sessions judge (civil) Mukesh Kumar. He demands that 22 web companies be asked to remove anti-religious and ant-social material from their sites. The court issues an ex parte order, asking the companies to remove the objectionable content by February 6.

December 23, 2011
Trial court summons executives of 21 companies to appear in person on January 13, 2012, and asks them to remove all objectionable content from their sites by March 13.

January 11, 2012
Google and Facebook appeal to the Delhi High Court against trial court proceedings saying they are regulated by the IT Act and not the IPC. Justice Suresh Kait adjourns the case till January 16, commenting websites have a responsibility to prevent the spread of disharmony.

January 13, 2012
IT ministry sanctions the trial court prosecution of the web companies. Trial court adjourns proceedings till March 13.

January 16, 2012
In high court, website counsels open arguments with the need to protect freedom of expression. They say police investigation report is incomplete and fails to understand the Internet; it does not even mention when, where and by whom the objectionable contents were posted.

The websites contest the complaint filed under Section 153-A (promoting enmity between classes), 153-B (assertion prejudicial to national integration) and 295-A (insulting religion or religious belief of any class) of IPC, saying being intermediaries they are immune to legal action under Section 79 of IT Act.

The case should have been registered through a process—someone needs to complain against the objectionable content to the web company, who should then be given a chance to do everything possible as listed under the provision of “due diligence” of the IT Rules to remove or explain the content.

If the matter is still not removed, the complainant can approach the court, which in turn, needs to go through the Computer Emergency Response Team and inform the web company of the objectionable material.

Following this, the company has 36 hours to remove the content. The case is adjourned till January 19.

January 18, 2012
An intervention petition is filed in the high court saying the case against Google and Facebook is an infringement on right to expr ession. On January 19 the case is adjourned till February 2-3, 2012.

January 20, 2012
Yahoo moves the high cou rt seeking exemption from the case as the objections are against social networking sites.

While the appeal has been adjourned till the first week of February, the cases (see ‘Real world v virtual world’ on p10) have once again stirred the debate on the freedom of expression and raised significant doubts over the legal understanding of the virtual world.

Laws of virtual world

Niraj Kishan Kaul, representing Google in the high court, argued that the trial court issued the summons under IPC when the companies are under the ambit of the Information Technology (IT) Act of 2000. He contended “the summons issued are casual in nature and infringe the Constitutional provisions of freedom of speech”. The IT Act has provisions to deal with objectionable content. Even a web browser can register complaints or take action against objectionable contents, he said.

The objectionable content that spurred the civil and criminal cases has, however, taken a backseat for the time being because the hearings were lost in translation of the technicalities of responsibility and liability of hosting objectionable content, laws under which cyber incidents are to be tried and issues of freedom of expression.

Legal experts and Internet activists are divided over the efficacy of Indian laws governing the online world. “Is it in tune with the ever-changing technologies of the virtual world?” asks Sidharth Luthra, counsel for Facebook in the high court. Given the limitations, the legal system needs to have an open mind while dealing with the Internet, he adds. Rajeev Dhavan, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court, elaborates: “In the present case, the courts are applying criminal and company laws to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Under company law, the director is held liable for the actions of the company. How can the same logic be used in a forum where the content is published without the knowledge of an ISP?” This, he says, is akin to blaming a phone manufacturer for the use of his phone by a criminal.

Lawrence Liang of Alternate Law Forum, in Bengaluru, says, “We are still applying the traditional understanding of media to the Internet. Search engines and social media do not recognise who publishes, where and how.”

Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a non-profit in Bengaluru, agrees. He says the Internet needs regulation but it cannot be treated as a gigantic newspaper or media channel. Besides, the IT Act provides for protection of intermediaries; web browsers, social networking sites and websites cannot be held responsible for material published on their forums by a third party. But the IT rules introduced in April 2011 severely watered down this protection, Prakash adds.

Internet activists and legal experts have been criticising the IT rules since their introduction, saying they are at cross purposes with the IT Act.

“The rules were meant to lay down the process through which complaints should be made and define certain terms used in the Act,” says Apar Gupta, an IT law expert and advocate at the high court. Instead, they only fleshed out the mechanism for censorship and contain vague words that do not have reference to any existing provisions of the law. For instance, the rules use terms like “blasphemous”, “grossly harmful material” and “any material harmful to minors” to define objectionable material. But India has no law on blasphemy, nor is there any Act that defines grossly harmful material or what ought to be the punishment for uploading or downloading such material, Gupta explains.

Pavan Duggal, cyber law expert and a Supreme Court advocate, says the IT laws lack parameters for effective implementation. Since 1995, when the Internet was officially introduced in the country, till date, there have been only three convictions under the laws dealing with cyber crime and the highest fine ever levied was Rs 12 lakh. People’s trust in the efficacy of legislation is eroding, he says, adding that there is need for a stronger law dealing with all the nuances of the virtual world.

Who’s afraid of free Internet

The cases underscore the global concern over attempts by governments to curb freedom of expression and control a decentralised mechanism of information dissemination—the latest being the proposed anti-piracy laws in the US— primarily for two reasons.

One, the complaints against the web companies came close on the heels of a public remark by Union Minister of Communications and IT Kapil Sibal on censorship and pre-screening of web content. Two, Judge Suresh Kait, after adjourning the Google and Facebook appeal hearing in the high court, had remarked that the ISPs need to find censoring mechanisms to avoid objectionable content. He said the companies could be blocked as has been done in China if they failed to comply with Indian laws. Though the comments were not made on record they caused uproar in the media and among supporters of Internet freedom.

“The case deals with technical aspects of our Internet laws but the judges’ remarks and observations, in both the trial court and the high court, raise concerns of censorship and freedom of expression,” says Parasanth Sugathan, lawyer with the Software Freedom Law Centre, international lawyers’ network.

Nishant Shah of non-profit CIS says, “So far, in liberal democracies like India and the US, information was taken for granted and not perceived as central to the understanding of society.” Today, governments are taking cognisance of living in an informed society, which is leading to legal battles between those giving information and those trying to regulate it, Shah adds.

The original article was published in Down to Earth

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/indian-law-caught-in-web

Indecent Proposals

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T06:13:22Z

If Kapil Sibal’s attempts to police net content fructify, it may even lead to a reversal of some of the forward-looking provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000. The new proposal, for instance, will reverse Section 79 which protects intermediaries (websites and carriers) from being prosecuted or made liable for any objectionable content published. Says Pranesh Prakash, programme manager, Centre for Internet and Society: “Unfortunately, what Sibal says turns this upside down as they would now be held responsible for e-content.” Sibal wants to monitor content prior to publication.

The article by Arindam Mukherjee was published in Outlook Magazine on December 19, 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in it.

While there are privacy concerns, any attempt to do real-time monitoring could pose serious legal complications. Says cyber law expert Pavan Duggal: “This proposition could be ultra vires of the Constitution which guarantees fundamental rights under Article 19, which is about freedom of speech and expression subject to reasonable restrictions.” And the reasonable restrictions for monitoring, blocking and interception of internet content are already built into the IT Act.

Says Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar: “If Sibal was really serious about protecting people, he should have read the IT Act that has a section which allows a victim to legally pursue his/her claim of defamation. If Sibal has his way, DoT bureaucrats will decide what content is ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’.”

“If Sibal was really serious, he should have read the IT Act...it has a section on how victims can pursue defamation claims.”

Moreover, the IT Intermediary Guideline Rules, 2011, though still provisional, mandate that once service providers receive instructions, they have to remove objectionable content within 36 hours. The Act also has other specific provisions like Section 69, which provides safeguards for interception, monitoring/decryption of information; Section 69A which gives procedures and safeguards for blocking access of information by the public; Section 69B for monitoring and collecting traffic data or information. There are also provisions for obscenity and defamation, with steep fines prescribed. Following these, the state has blocked 11 websites since ’09

However, what Sibal and his men would have seen is the Act’s inability to act on the content freely flowing in social media sites. Says Duggal: “The IT Act, 2000, was amended in ’08, but doesn’t talk about social media which came up only around that time. There is a need to bring social media within the ambit of the Act. What Sibal is suggesting doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.” Monitoring social media websites would also be a huge challenge as crores of messages and tweets are generated from India everyday.

And privacy? Experts say since India does not have dedicated legislation on privacy, the government could escape any attack on that front. Although some privacy elements were added to the IT Act in 2008, its scope is limited and the concept of data privacy is missing. In fact, the law doesn’t even recognise a person’s right to data privacy!.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/indecent-proposals