The Union government for the first time conceded before the Supreme Court on Tuesday that it was abuse of power under Section 66A of Information and Technology Act to arrest two Mumbai-based girls for Facebook posts criticizing shutdown of the city on November 18, 2012 for Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray’s funeral. Additional solicitor general…
India fared better this year when it came to freedom of the Net, while globally Internet freedom declined for the fourth consecutive year in 2014 with a growing number of countries introducing more aggressive online censorship and monitoring practices, said a report by Freedom House, an independent watchdog. The global Freedom on the Net report 2014, which…
We live at the most interconnected moment in human history. From India’s rural hinterlands to the coastal metropolises of Africa, from American suburbs to East Asia’s bustling, hi-tech cities, access to the Internet dictates daily rhythms and opens doors for new opportunities. Yet, as a recent McKinsey report pointed out, the majority of the world’s population — about…
Cybercrime has become a challenge and this needs to be addressed by taking a relook at the IT Act and revamping criminal laws, government told the Rajya Sabha. “This is a challenge before the government. In order to counter the challenge, IT Act needs to be relooked,” minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju said…
Singer Barbra Streisand and the governments of Turkey and Pakistan have little in common. But there is one thing: All have tried to censor the Internet, and all have failed miserably. In a new paper, Zubair Nabi, with IBM Research’s big data and analytics research group in Ireland, details how the so-called “Streisand effect” plays out over and…
India’s Cyber Security agency CERT-IN received as many as 96,383 complaints between January and September 2014, Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in the Indian Parliament last week. That amounts to 10,709 complaints per month, which is 79% higher than the 5982 complaints per month in 2013. At this rate, the total number of complaints…
The Supreme Court on Tuesday warned the Centre it would make inoperative certain controversial provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act often invoked by authorities to muzzle free speech on social media, if it failed to clarify its stand within a week. “Heavens are not going to fall if the provisions are stayed… because this…
The Bombay high court on Monday sentenced a man to one month simple imprisonment after holding him guilty of criminal contempt of court for posting defamatory material against the judicial system on social networking sites. “Time has come. The courts will have to take a strict view,” said a division bench of Justices V M…
Mobiles will become a target of cyberattacks in 2015 as they store up a trove of personal and confidential information and are left switched on all the time, making them the perfect targets for attackers in Asia Pacific and Japan, a report said Thursday. “Mobile devices will continue to become a target for cyberattackers especially…
Expect criminals in tech-savvy Millennium City to be cyber-smart. According to statistics released by the cyber cell of Gurgaon police department, cybercrime complaints have gone up nearly three times compared with 2013, with credit card frauds topping the list followed by social networking-related crimes. As many as 850 cybercrime complaints were registered in 10 months…