Government is probably irked by Bloggers coverage of CWG Scam,2G,Radia Tapes,ISRO affairs.
Going Tinpot Dictators’ way?
Bloggers in and from India should put a stop to this non sense.
Forward your views .
We shall pettiton first The President India( hope she remembers she is the President)
Simultaneously ,represent to Human Rights organization and International Civil Rights Groups.
NEW DELHI: A government proposal seeking to police blogs has come in for severe criticism from legal experts and outraged the online community. The draft rules, drawn up by the government under the Information Technology Amendment Act, 2008, deal with due diligence to be observed by an intermediary.
Under the Act, an ‘intermediary’ is defined as any entity which on behalf of another receives, stores or transmits any electronic record. Hence, telecom networks, web-hosting and internet service providers, search engines, online payment and auction sites as well as cyber cafes are identified as intermediaries. The draft has strangely included bloggers in the category of intermediaries, setting off the online outcry.
Blogs are clubbed with network service providers as most of them facilitate comment and online discussion and preserve the traffic as an electronic record, but equating them with other intermediaries is like comparing apples with oranges, says Pavan Duggal, advocate in the Supreme Court and an eminent cyber law expert.
‘This will curtail the freedom of expression of individual bloggers because as an intermediary they will become responsible for the readers’ comments. It technically means that any comment or a reader-posted link on a blog which according to the government is threatening, abusive, objectionable, defamatory, vulgar, racial, among other omnibus categories, will now be considered as the legal responsibility of the blogger,” he explains.
Even Google, the host of Blogger, among India’s most popular blogging sites, expressed displeasure at the proposal. “Blogs are platforms that empower people to communicate with one another, and we don’t believe that an internet middlemen should be held unreasonably liable for content posted by users,” a spokesperson told TOI.
Blogs, which are typically maintained and updated by individuals, have showcased their political importance in recent times and the internet community views these rules as a lopsided attempt to curtail an individual’s right to expression.
If individual blogs are an intermediary, then why can’t Facebook and Twitter also be classified as such, as they too receive, store and transmit electronic records and facilitate online discussions,” retorts the spokesperson of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based organization, which works on digital pluralism. “These rules will not only bring bloggers and the ISP provider on the same platform, but the due diligence clause will also result in higher power of censorship to the larger player. Imagine your ISP provider blocking your blog because it finds that certain user-comments fit these omnibus terms,” the CIS spokesperson added.
Old scams hiding under new headlines were circulating on Facebook this week, including promises of video involving obsessed Justin Bieber fans.
“I can’t believe a GIRL did this because of Justin Bieber,” says the post that has been appearing on Facebook walls and status updates.
Clicking the link leads to a fake YouTube-looking page that says “Please Watch this video only if you are 16 years or older,” according to an M86 blog post. Hidden behind the video window is an iframe linked to Facebook so that clicking anywhere in the window will submit a “like” click to the page and spread the post on the victim’s Facebook page. This is a standard clickjacking attack that is taking advantage of a current hot topic–the teen singer.
The scam doesn’t stop there. A fake Facebook dialog box also pops up that asks the victim to verify his or her age by completing a survey with links to sites relating to auto insurance, according to M86.
Facebook was able to stop this scam fairly quickly, but not before it had garnered more than 20,000 likes. Other variants of the scam were spreading, M86 said.
Separately, scammers had rehashed some scams involving offers of free iPads, free Southwest Airlines tickets, and a Miley Cyrus-related video link via posts on the site and e-mail messages. It’s unclear exactly how those scams worked and if they involved clickjacking.
Clickjacking prompts a victim to click something while a different action is taken behind the scenes. It takes advantage of a vulnerability in a Web browser and is not specific to Facebook.
If you see a potential or obvious scam on Facebook report it to the person whose account is spreading it, M86 said. The NoScriptFirefox plug-in protects against clickjacking attacks such as this, it added.
Because clickjacking exploits a browser weakness, Facebook can’t technically prevent it completely, a Facebook spokesman said. “We continue to build additional protections to mitigate its impact,” he said in an e-mail. “We’re also involved in discussions with others in the industry on how to fix the underlying issue on the browser side.”
Facebook users should be suspicious of anything that looks or feels strange, even if it has been posted by a friend. Facebook offers tips for how to recognize and avoid clickjacking on the “Threats” tab of the Facebook Security Page here.
The company also has developed automated systems to detect and flag Facebook accounts that are likely to be compromised based on suspicious activity like lots of messages sent in a short period of time or messages with links that are known to be bad. Once Facebook detects a phony post it is deleted across the site. The company blocks malicious links from being shared and works with third parties to get phishing and malware sites added to browser blacklists or taken down. And Facebook displays warnings when people click on a link that has been identified as malicious from an e-mail notification.
Here are some basic safety tips for using Facebook or any site on the Web:
• Use an up-to-date browser that features an antiphishing blacklist.
• Choose unique log-ins and passwords for each of the Web sites you use.
• Check to see that you’re logging in from a legitimate Facebook page with the facebook.com domain.
• Be cautious of any message, post or link you find on Facebook that looks suspicious or requires an additional log-in.
Last week, violent protests surged throughout the north African country of Libya, as protesters clashed with security forces in an attempt to end Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 42-year rule. Qaddafi has respondedwith far more violence than any of the other embattled Mideast autocracies. Human Rights Watch has tallied at least 233 protester deaths from regime security forces so far; Al Jazeera is reporting that another 250 have been killed on Monday alone. Despite a media blackout, reports are emerging on Al Jazeera and elsewhere that fighter jets and helicopters are attacking demonstrators in Tripoli and Benghazi.
Like similar uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — which are said to have inspired the people of Libya — the internet and social media have played their roles in the unrest. Websites like Facebook, Twitter and news provider Al Jazeera have been intermittently blocked, and on February 18 internet access in the country was blocked entirely. Six hours later, the web was mostly back.
Protesters in the country are now taking full advantage of their restored connectivity by posting reports and accounts on Twitter. Arasmus takes the most pertinent, and trustworthy, reports and places them on a Google Map on the country. So far, the map shows reported gunfire, killings, mercenary sightings, helicopter slayings and electricity disconnections.
The map isn’t dynamically generated from Twitter reports, but that’s for safety reasons rather than technical ones, says Arasmus. “The danger of an automatic map is that you will reveal too much information too soon and put protesters in danger,” he said on his Twitter account.
It should also be noted that none of the reports and accounts can be verified because Libya has a stringent lockdown on independent reporters in the country. With violence at a huge scale (Human Rights Watch says the death toll passed 100 after just four days of protesting), undercover reporting isn’t sensible, saysBBC World News editor Jon Williams.
As a result, observers have to rely even more closely on first hand reports and social media accounts than any of the other recent Middle East revolutions.
The role networking sites had in recent uprising in Egypt is well-known.
While this is a welcome sign for those in repressed States, there is also the danger of Alien States misusing them( even States misuse in their own country).
With the evolution of the Internet and growth of Soc-ail networking sites our thoughts are being conditioned;we read what we are presented with(in this connection read my Blog on Media Fixing content filed under media).
We need to have an open mind on any subject/views;
Here at OSM we’ve been bringing you news about the growing role of social media and social networking sites in growing protests around the world, as in the recent Tunisian Twitter Revolution, the unrest in Libya where the Internet was shut down, and also in the protests in Egypt, a revolution helped in part by the use of social media.
The protests and demonstrations in Egypt eventually led to President Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarek stepping down from power, a move that led to jubilant scenes across the country. Now we hear that one new proud Egyptian father has chosen to thank Facebook for the role it played in the revolution, by naming his daughter “Facebook.” Emil Protalinski over on ZDNet reports on this news, sourced from Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram and translated by Tech Crunch.
The newspaper told of a young Egyptian man who wished to show his gratitude to Facebook (the social networking site) and so named his child “Facebook Jamal Ibrahim.” Apparently people have gathered round the baby girl to give gifts to Facebook (the baby) and show continuing support for the revolution and Facebook (the social networking site).
There’s also news that the Egyptian army, which is temporarily running the country, has also opened its own Facebook page. Along with that, in the fourteen days following the first day of the revolution, 32,000 new Facebook groups were established in Egypt with 14,000 pages created.
If you’re interested in learning more about the role that Facebook played in the Egyptian protests you might want to check out an intriguing article by Abigail Hauslohner on TIME which takes an in-depth look at one of the protestors, 20-year-old Khaled Kamel, and how he used Facebook to push for change in the country.
The story of a man naming his daughter “Facebook” (whether you like it as a name or not), is a rather heartening reminder of how Egypt has come a long way in recent months and should also remind us never to take the role of social media for granted, as we use it in our everyday lives. What do you think of this news? Let us know with your comments please.
The man, later identified on Cuban blog Penultimos Dias as Eduardo Tato Fontes Suarez by people claiming to be his former classmates, works for Cuba’s interior ministry. Over the course of the 58-minute video, Suarez explains how new technologies are being used by cyber activists around the world. He says the U.S. is “trying to turn bloggers into a new category of enemies of the state”.
Fontes also alleges that the NGOs founded by young Cuban Americans are different from “historic terrorist groups like the [Miami-based] Cuban American National Foundation (CANF)”.Historically, Cuban-exile groups such as CANF and the US Cuba Democracy PAC lobbied lawmakers in Washington to uphold staunch policies against Cuba like the US embargo and the travel ban of American citizens to the Caribbean island. In recent years, younger generations of Cuban Americans have been proponents of liberalising the US-Cuba policy. Unlike their elders, Fontes says, these new NGOs and online communities have the power to effectively “deceive Cuban youth” and paint the Cuban Revolution in a negative light.
The video has been leaked at a time when the Internet and social networks have been used by young people across the Middle East and North Africa to organise recent anti-government uprisings.
Felice Gorordo is the co-founder of US-based Roots of Hope, one of the organisations that Fontes attacked in the attached video. Roots of Hope was behind Colombian rockstar Juanes’s ‘Peace without Borders’ concert. In the video, Fontes blames Roots of Hope for wanting to cancel the concert. In fact, Juanes had threatened to call it off if Cuba refused to loosen draconian security measures. According to the organisation’s website, Roots of Hope is a privately-funded organisation that does not receive any U.S government funding and “seeks to empower Cubans to be the authors of their own futures”.
They acknowledge in the video itself that we [Roots of Hope] threaten them. It’s clear that the Cuban government doesn’t know how to handle our message, which is apolitical and only seeks to increase contact with Cubans on the island and Cubans overseas.”
The Internet in Cuba does not work in the same way it does in other Communist countries like China or Vietnam, where the Web is generally accessible despite a high level of government control. In Cuba, legal Internet access is only available to a privileged group of government officials and doctors, or by purchasing prepaid cards in hotels that cost the equivalent of 12 euros an hour.
The average salary in Cuba is approximately 15 euros a month, making legal access to the Internet a luxury for most Cubans. The prohibitive Internet access price also serves as an effective extension of government censorship. Most Cubans rely on illegal connections to access the Web, at extremely slow speeds.
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