Blog posts
3,108 items.
30 Oct 2016
Blog post
Kannada Wikipedia Education Program at Christ university: Work so farAs you know we are working closely with Christ university in Bengaluru for the Education Programs in Kannada Wikipedia and Kannada Wikisource, we worked on redesigning the programme for this academic year 2016-17 based on the lessons …
29 Oct 2016
Blog post
Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work PublishedWe raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 …
28 Oct 2016
Blog post
Adopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly CommunicationORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these …
27 Oct 2016
Blog post
Open source in everyday life: How we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in BengaluruThe free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts just celebrated the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 all across the world. This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The …
25 Oct 2016
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How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language WikipediasMobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like …
22 Oct 2016
Blog post
What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in IndiaThe number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.
22 Oct 2016
Blog post
How Long Have Banks Known About The Debit Card Fraud?The recent security breach in an Indian payment switch provider, confirmed earlier this week by the National Payments Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL), has forced domestic banks into damage control mode over the past few days.
21 Oct 2016
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RBI Directions on Account AggregatorsThe Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) Directions for account aggregator services in India seem to lay great emphasis on data security by allowing only direct access between institutions and do away with data scraping techniques.
21 Oct 2016
Blog post
Querying Wikipedia DataRecently I wrote a blog about the stub article length of Wikipedia articles. I mentioned the difference in actual number of characters and the number of bytes used to define stub articles between English and Indian language Wikipedias. One …
20 Oct 2016
Blog post
UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in WikipediaOne of the activities conducted as part of Wiki Conference India 2016 was the Punjab Editathon. It was about adding articles related to Punjab to Indian language Wikipedias and English Wikipedia. There was also an announcement made about …
20 Oct 2016
Blog post
Technical Alternative to Encrypted Media ExtensionsThis post is an analysis of the various technical alternatives to EME (encyrpted media extensions) that have emerged from the discussions at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These alternatives and the proposed EME specification along …
20 Oct 2016
Blog post
MLATs and the proposed Amendments to the US Electronic Communications Privacy ActIn continuance of our blog post on mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs), we examine a new approach to international bilateral cooperation being suggested in the United States, by creating a mechanism for certain foreign governments to …
20 Oct 2016
Blog post
(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web StandardsWorld Wide Consortium (W3C) as a standard setting organization for the World Wide Web plays a very important role in shaping the web. We focus on the ongoing controversy related to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and found that there was a …
17 Oct 2016
Blog post
Love in the Time of TinderService providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.
17 Oct 2016
Blog post
Digital Native: The Future is NowThe digital is not just an addition but the new norm in our lives, and it might not be all good. There used to be a popular joke among technology geeks when Bluetooth arrived on our mobile devices — everything becomes better with Bluetooth.
16 Oct 2016
Blog post
Request for Specifics: Rebuttal to UIDAIResponding to the Unique Identification Authority of India’s article that found “serious mathematical errors” in “Flaws in the UIDAI Process” (EPW 12 March 2016), the main mathematical argument used to arrive at the number of duplicates in …
15 Oct 2016
Blog post
IANA Transition: A Case of the Emperor’s New Clothes?Transparency is key to engaging meaningfully with ICANN. CIS has filed the most number of Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP) requests with ICANN, covering a range of subjects including its relationships with contracted …
12 Oct 2016
Blog post
Why Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look UpIn an important development, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against the India-based OMICS group for harassing authors to publish in its journals.
10 Oct 2016
Blog post
A Market Structure for Digital IndiaIf delivery is priced below cost, communications services will be unsustainable and ineffective. The stress in the telecom sector is evident from the data. The market capitalisation of listed telecom operators has been stagnant since the 3G …
9 Oct 2016
Blog post
Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report formThis form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For …
8 Oct 2016
Blog post
Internet Democratisation: IANA Transition Leaves Much to be DesiredAt best, the IANA transition is symbolic of Washington’s oversight over ICANN coming to an end. It is also symbolic of the empowerment of the global multistakeholder community. In reality, it fails to do either meaningfully.
7 Oct 2016
Blog post
How we celebrated Software Freedom DayA small group of 6 FOSS contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map and users of FOSS solutions gathered in Bengaluru to celebrate Software Freedom Day. Subhashish Panigrahi who was a part of the …
6 Oct 2016
Blog post
Services like TwitterSeva aren’t the silver bullets they are made out to beTwitterSeva is great, but it should not be considered a sufficient replacement for proper e-governance systems. This is because there are several serious shortcomings with the TwitterSeva approach, and it is no wonder that enthusiastic …
6 Oct 2016
Blog post
Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu WikipediasIt has become a fashion to talk about the digital divide in India. These talks are going on for more than 2 decades now. Nevertheless there is no doubt about the need of taking the benefits of Information Communication Technology (ICT) for …
27 Sep 2016
Blog post
Mobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India SubredditThis essay by Sujeet George is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author offers a preliminary gesture towards understanding reddit’s usage and breadth in the Indian context. Through an analysis of the “India” subreddit and …
26 Sep 2016
Blog post
Right to Food Campaign, Ranchi Convention, 2016The Right to Food Campaign held its 2016 Convention in Ranchi during September 23-25, 2016. While three years have elapsed since the passage of the National Food Security Act, despite improvements in the Public Distribution System (PDS), …
24 Sep 2016
Blog post
Mobile Apps Are Excluding Millions Of Indians Who Want To Use ThemIf someone were to ask you how many apps you use in a day, you might need to stop and count. You use apps to book cabs, to order groceries, make payments online, buy diapers, connect with friends... the list goes on. In fact apps, are …
24 Sep 2016
Blog post
Delhi High Court’s Ruling Against Publishers is a Triumph For KnowledgeThe court conclusively stated that the reproduction of any work by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction would not constitute infringement.
23 Sep 2016
Blog post
Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Call for SessionsIt gives us great pleasure to announce that the second Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC17) will take place in Bengaluru on March 03-05, 2017. It will be organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in partnership with the …
23 Sep 2016
Blog post
How Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the UglyThis essay by Aishwarya Panicker is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author draws attention to the fact that there is little data, debate, analysis, and examination of the environmental impact of the internet, which is …