Anonymous hackers darkened several Indian government websites, retaliating against the country's censorship practices in its continued crusade for a free Internet.
The Supreme Court of India and All India Congress Committee websites suffered distributed denial of service attacks under "MT Operation India," leaving them inaccessible for 24 hours. Anonymous crippled the government pages to chastise Indian service providers for blocking file-sharing sites like Vimeo and The Pirate Bay.
India's ISPs acted in anticipation of a pending government proposal, which aims to create a Committee for Internet Related Policies for overseeing the subcontinent's online activities.
The committee, a 50-member UN-backed organization, would hold censorship powers over content deemed inappropriate or offensive by India's ruling party. But Anonymous, whose Pirate Party won parliamentary seats in Sweden and Germany after campaigning for Internet freedom, disagrees with this direction.
"Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck. #SaveTPB #Anonymous #Censorship," the collective tweeted.
Anonymous has a history of denouncing governments that wish to control the Internet, while India has a record of censoring websites. The two interests are now clashing for the second, but likely not the last, time.
Anonymous' first publicized tangle with India occurred in February and concerned the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, which left thousands dead and maimed. The global intelligence firm Stratfor, according to Anonymous, paid corrupt Indian officials to silence victims after the disaster.
Before turning its sights to Bhopal, Anonymous already enjoyed widespread notoriety for challenging worldwide governments on censorship issues.
The collective hit the FBI for nabbing Wikileaks suspects, struck China over its strict censorship policies, even targeting Malaysia and Spain for their attempts to police the Internet.
Anonymous also involved itself in the Arab Spring, fighting against Gaddafi in Egypt and Assad in Syria. The leaderless hackers also criticized Iran over its plans to create a government-run, internal Internet by August 2012.
Until the Stratfor hack this February, however, Anonymous largely remained silent while India sought to censor emails and social media content.
India successfully banned Nokia email servers in April 2011, citing security risks, and enlisted RIM's reluctant help in monitoring BlackBerry Messenger content last fall. The country is also suing Google and Facebook after the Internet giants' allegedly slow response to government requests for proactive censorship of "offensive" content.
But after years of ignoring India's increasingly strict Internet controls, Anonymous is beginning to take interest. The collective may be doing so in part to burnish its reputation as a crusader for freedom after a slew of bad press smeared the hackers this winter.
If India pursues its current direction about online restrictions, however, Anonymous will likely strike the subcontinent more often, denouncing Internet regulation and preserving its own reputation in the process.
Indian regulators is probing a consumer complaint alleging Apple violated the country's antitrust laws by partnering with just two carriers -- Bharti Airtel and Aircel -- effectively barring rivals from selling the iPhone 4.
Apple insists all iPhone 4s sold in India are unlocked, even those from Bharti Airtel and Aircel, meaning customers can switch carriers at any time.
"If your operator can provide you a micro SIM, you can use it on the iPhone 4," said one Apple retailer in the country.
In its defense, Apple earlier partnered with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone when it started selling the iPhone 3G and 3GS in India and no one complained about its exclusivity at that time.
Apple's practice is unusual in India, where cell phones are typically prepaid. In most of Asia, however, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company sells its smartphones on only one or two carriers. In the U.S., Apple first partnered with AT&T before adding Verizon as its second carrier just last February.
Until recently, U.S. consumers have had to choose between AT&T and Verizon, or forgo the iPhone altogether. Apple this month debuted an unlocked iPhone 4 in the U.S., allowing buyers to use it on other compatible carriers like T-Mobile. At $650 for 16-gigabytes, though, the phone only really makes sense for travelers.
But if the FCC approves AT&T's planned $39 billion merger with T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon will edge out Sprint and smaller carriers who don't currently sell the iPhone. Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse has argued vociferously against the merger for this reason, saying it would squash competition and jeopardize his company's welfare by putting nearly 80 percent of the market in two companies.
His argument resembles the Indian complaint over Apple's exclusivity: some accuse Bharti Airtel and Aircel of artificially raising prices now that they are the iPhone's sole distributors in India.
The Indian antitrust committee will have the final say in whether or not to investigate the complaint. Either way, the complaint could raise similar questions in the U.S. about Apple's exclusive partnerships with wireless carriers.
A village in northern India voted to change its name to Snapdeal.com Nagar, after an Indian startup installed water pumps in the town, showing how the power of philanthropy can work in strange ways.
The town, formerly named after the Hindu god Shiva, reportedly decided on the name change after Snapdeal, a leading Indian e-commerce company, installed fifteen hand-powered water pumps so that villagers would no longer have to walk nearly two miles to access clean water.
"It cost us $5,000 max, but it was quite life changing for residents there," said Kunal Bahl, founder of the company, to CNN.
The villagers' decision to rename the town was apparently spontaneous. "They just wanted to express their gratitude," said Bahl.
Bahl said he hoped Snapdeal's action would both highlight how the government is failing the rural poor and also inspire other Indian companies to take on philanthropic projects.
"India has about 640,000 incorporated companies," he said. "Many are much larger and more resourced than us. Even if ten percent decided to do something like this, 64,000 villages would have clean water."
Bahl said he intends to continue his company's relationship with the town, with a plan to donate computers next on the agenda.
A Chinese-made knockoff or "shanzhai" phone reportedly electrocuted a 25-year-old Indian man when he tried to make a call while it was charging, underscoring the dangers posed by unlicensed, uncertified electronics.
Dhanji Damor reportedly picked up the phone to make a call and screamed. Friends rushed him to the hospital but doctors declared him dead on arrival.
The incident draws attention to China's booming illegal phone market. Shanzhai handsets from thousands of tiny manufacturers made up an estimated 20 percent of the Chinese market last year. Many are ripoffs of popular designs like Apple's iPhone. They may be built in small factories without business permits, and the phones themselves are usually not properly licensed.
The shanzhai trade is already an issue for Nokia, which does a huge business in inexpensive phones targeting developing markets. It may also prove a challenger to global smartphone makers as they explore new markets. Apple, for example, is rumored to be working on a low-cost version of the iPhone for emerging markets, especially as the company focuses on expanding its presence in China.
The Chinese government announced it would crack down on the shanzhai phone makers earlier this year following reports that some were preloading malware on handsets, but it's unclear what effect that's had on the industry.
Dhamor is not the first cell phone casualty. An Indian woman was reportedly killed in a similar fashion last year, and exploding batteries have burned many people and reportedly killed at least one man.
Deaths due to malfunction, however, are almost certainly dwarfed by fatalities caused by perfectly functioning handsets being used by drivers.
A new mobile service is helping Indian farmers weather tough agricultural times, working to lower the suicide rates of those who struggle to make ends meet.
The new service, called "mKrishi," offers farmers in India information on everything from weather and crop diseases to where they can sell their produce, making their difficult lives a little bit easier. Arun Pande of Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) Innovation Labs and his team are still perfecting mKrishi, which has so far debuted in four Maharashtran villages.
MKrishi enrollees use cameras equipped with cell phones and specialized software to snap and send in pictures of their crops. Experts from agricultural universities and companies then analyze the photos with a web application, offering instant advice to the farmers via text messages and voicemail on what pesticides to use or weather to expect.
For the weather reports to work, farming villages must set up sensor networks and weather stations to provide experts with localized data. Crop disease forecasting is more difficult because the sensors cannot measure all the various factors needed to predict when plants will become ill or suffer an insect attack. Still, mKrishi won MIT's Technology Review Grand Challenge this year for alerting farmers whenever possible to the threat of crop diseases.
"We expect preventive measures will reduce the cost of expensive pesticide once the disease is set in," Pande said.
MKrishi has so far helped cotton, grape, potato and soybean farmers in four villages to increase productivity and decrease pesticide use. The Grape Growers Association, fertilizer manufacturers and NGOs are now eager to use mKrishi, spurring Pande's team into talks with each group over potential partnerships.
If mKrishi had been developed earlier, it might have saved the nearly 20,000 recorded Indian farmer suicides in 2009. As the corporate chemical industry began to control seed supplies starting in 1997, prices rose and many farmers found they couldn't afford to grow anything. As it stands today, one Indian farmer kills himself every 30 minutes for want of any avenue to make an adequate living.
MKrishi can't heal the plight of Indian farmers overnight, but it may at least prevent them from ending their lives in despair. This in turn could encourage the next generation to stay and farm the land rather than leaving it to become migrant workers in a big city.
"Today's rural youth is aware of the prosperity in cities through print and television media, and they're moving away from the family farms, which are being sold off," Pande says. "This is creating a vicious cycle of reduction of farm land, fewer farmers to till the land, lower income from farms, migration of rural families to cities."
This cycle continues to spawn slums in over-crowded cities, hasten the loss of traditional culture and separate family members from one another. If mKrishi succeeds in making farmers' jobs easier, it could potentially help reverse this trend, drastically improving both India's economy and its society.
Bollywood is using mobile technology to advertise its films, as the movie-making machine tries to engage India's booming wireless market in order to boost slipping profits.
For the first time ever, the mega movie industry is advertising a new film solely online and via mobile phones. Trailers for "Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara" (You Only Live Once) will air on an interactive website and the movie's parent studio, Excel Entertainment, will also send clips to Aircel's 55 million cell phone customers.
The film, starring popular heartthrob Hrithik Roshan, has a Facebook page and trailers on YouTube as well. It's a quantum leap compared to past Bollywood attempts to leverage mobile advertising through simple ringtones and text messages.
Most Bollywood films still adhere to simple posters and print advertising, but the film's producer wanted to forgo traditional "spray and pay" poster advertising in favor of reaching India's burgeoning group of mobile phone customers.
"Many people and especially the young crowd watch promos on the Internet, so we felt it was better to go with this plan," said Ritesh Sidhwani, one of the film's producers.
Sidhwani's assessment echoes India's explosive digital growth in the last year. Despite widespread poverty, India's cellular network coverage is impeccable, and analysts predict 82 percent of the country's population will own phones by 2014.
As the 3G network expands, even people in isolated villages will soon be able to watch the latest videos and download apps. Internet subscriptions in the country have risen 40 percent since last year as well.
This is good news for Bollywood, whose profits have declined in recent years because of pirating. Having suffered a 20 percent drop in revenue since 2008 and losing an estimated $4 billion per year to illegally sold DVDs, the filmmaking giant welcomes the advent of mobile and Internet technology as a more reliable and much wider platform for advertising.
If India, now the world's fastest-growing and second-largest cell phone market, can keep adding smartphone subscribers in the coming years, Bollywood's bet on mobile advertising might just pay off big time.
Bees may be dying from cell phone radiation, according to several studies, an alarming possibility given that staple crops worldwide require the insects' pollination to reproduce.
Researchers in India, Switzerland, England and Germany are reporting that people's use cell phones near hives, which emit electromagnetic fields, are interfering with bees' sense of direction, causing them to swarm and then circle aimlessly to their deaths.
Daniel Favre, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, conducted 83 experiments to see how honeybees' react to cell phones. What he found was that when a call in progress, noise from bees, called "worker piping," which helps tell them to leave their hives, dramatically jumps -- by more than 10 times. In short, phones confuse bees.
"The induction of honeybee worker piping by the electromagnetic fields of mobile phones might have dramatic consequences in terms of colony losses due to unexpected swarming," Favre said.
These findings may account for, or help explain, a mysterious "colony collapse" disorder that began in 2006.
A shortage of bees, which pollinate an estimated one-third of the commercial crops in the U.S., and provide 90 percent of the world's food, according to the U.N., would cause widespread global food shortages. In fact, Albert Einstein once said that if honeybees died out, mankind would have four years to live.
Still, some scientists disagree about the severity phones have on bees. They say worker bees merely give off irritated noises, lay less eggs and lower honey production for hives. But it isn't wiping them out.
Previously, scientists thought microbes, viruses, pesticides, GMO crops and other factors were triggering bee colonies to suddenly disappear, but now it appears cell phones may play a role, though no one yet knows exactly how.
This phenomenon also raises concerns over the safety of cell phones in general -- if they are possibly harming bees, they may also be hurting humans. Several studies have linked brain tumors to excessive cell phone use, indicating an increased cancer risk by 40 percent for those who jabber away all day long.
In San Francisco, lawmakers are considering whether to make mobile phone manufacturers label their products as radioactive, a move causing a great deal of debate.
While the over-arching issues surrounding cell phone safety will continue to swirl, it does appear that in regard to honeybees, the scientific community is concerned about the pollinator's plight.
Newly married Punjabi brides were warned today that excessive cell phone use could ruin marriages, in a clash between traditional culture and new technology in India.
In an official statement by the Punjabi State Commission for Women, or PSCW, asked new brides to cut down on cell phone conversations to save their marriages. The Commission says more than 40 percent of women who consider divorce do so because their husbands or in-laws suspect them of having an affair if they talk too much on the phone.
Women's reactions to this advice have been mixed, highlighting a gulf between older and younger generations as well as a divide in comfort over technology.
"Talking over mobile is a very serious issue," said Gurdev Kaur Sangha of the PSCW. "Many cases have come to me where boy and his family members think that the girl is talking to another man over the phone and they want divorce. This also led to domestic violence."
On the other hand, younger generation women find the advisory problematic. "This advisory is a big joke, simply glorifying male chauvinism," said Pankhuri Bhalla, a writer for a fashion magazine. "Every day I have to call at least seven to eight people in connection with my stories, but it does not imply that I am having an affair with someone."
In India parents often still arrange marriages without giving their children much choice in a partner, so many couples come to marriage having had to cut ties with secret boyfriends or girlfriends.
This reality spurs fear from spouses and families that such ties might still exist, prompting them to keep close watch on phone-toting brides in a society that is still highly patriarchal.
Also, in traditional society women go to live with their husband's family after marriage, but now the advent of cell phones threatens this ancient pattern of life. Where beforehand women would have great difficulty traveling home, and thus be forced to bond closely with their new family, they can now keep up strong connections with their parents via mobile phones.
But even maintaining familial connections can prove problematic in a new marriage, as women in traditional homes are expected to rear children and maintain the house. This new role as a married woman may prompt them to express frustrations to their own families rather than discuss problems with husbands and in-laws, weakening already tenuous emotional connections and in some cases leading to abuse.
As technology reaches further and further into India -- the country now boasts just over 800 million phone subscribers and growing -- clashes like these are sure to continue.
Nokia's new push e-mail services have been banned in India, as the country moves its sights beyond BlackBerry maker Research in Motion in its quest to monitor telecommunications.
The Finnish phone maker's new push e-mail services are now barred by India's mobile operators, by orders of the government, which is waiting for a new monitoring system to be put in place.
India's Ministry of Home Affairs have ordered ?Telecom Service Providers not to launch Nokia's proposed pushmail and powermail service without putting in place monitoring facilities."
Nokia's messaging services, which include push e-mail for companies and consumers, allows mobile users to manage multiple e-mail accounts via clients such as Yahoo, Gmail, Rediff and Sify.
Nokia representatives in India said they have not heard about the issue but strive to meet government and legal demands where they do business.
The move is part of increasing security activity by the Indian government on telecommunications it cannot monitor. Previously, Indian authorities have tussled with RIM's BlackBerry e-mail services, ordering RIM to come up with a solution that would allow government to intercept business-level e-mail services.
But while the pressure on RIM primarily affects its growth in the business market in India, Nokia's ban may prove more wide-ranging. While the Finnish company has been beleaguered by the rise of Apple and Android and the steady erosion of its market share to these rivals, Nokia is still the world's largest handset maker, partly based on its share in emerging global smartphone markets.
With nearly 50 percent of the E-Series business phones activated for push e-mail, India's ban could hit a crucial segment for the company. Nokia previously claimed it set up servers in India to enable local security agencies to monitor the Finnish company's enterprise e-mail services within the country.
India's home ministry doesn't look likely to let up on its national security efforts, however. It has already asked telecom and IT departments to broaden the meaning of telecom and Internet services within existing legal frameworks, which would make it mandatory for operators to have security systems in place to allow interception by national security agencies based on telephone numbers, device identity, e-mail IDs, IP addresses or keywords on a real-time basis.
Research in Motion publicly questioned India's expanding demands for access to encrypted communications, noting that privacy concerns could impact foreign investment in the country.
Robert Crow, vice president of industry and government relations for the Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry maker, called recent demands by Indian security agencies ?rather astonishing." The country wants real-time access to all communications to allow surveillance of suspected criminals and terrorists; the dispute between the Indian government and RIM has been ongoing since late last fall.
At stake is a market of 770 million wireless users that are just beginning to migrate to smartphones. But the growth of this market may be curtailed by its own government, as tech companies find the terrain politically difficult to navigate.
"I think this may well go on and on in India, and frankly it will be one of those factors that people talk about in the Indian business environment -- not one that will be seen in India's favor in international comparison," Crow said.
RIM's growth within India has been troubled for some time. Last year, India threatened it would ban RIM's services if the company didn't grant access to its communications. RIM allowed access to its consumer-grade BlackBerry Messenger service, but maintains the technical impossibility of giving selective access to its strongly-encrypted corporate mail service.
India subsequently expanded its demands to all communications networks operating in the country. That development took some heat off RIM, but didn't solve the underlying issues.
Until now, RIM has tried to appease the government's demands for access. The company has now shifted to the offensive, perhaps hoping to inspire a push-back from other communications providers that could pressure to the government to reduce its requirements.
RIM's high visibility and famously encrypted messaging service have led to conflict with other governments, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which threatened or enacted service bans before the company reached accommodations under undisclosed terms. RIM also had to block pornographic content on its BlackBerry phones to satisfy Indonesian demands.
Tags:
