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THE INDIAN EXPRESS, NOVEMBER 09, 2020  India’s top online grocer BigBasket has suffered a potential data breach   resulting in personal information of over 20 million customers   being allegedly sold on the dark web. This incident follows a series of data breaches that have impacted Indian companies. When did the Bigbasket breach happen? According to cybersecurity firm Cyble, which first made the details of the potential breach public, the alleged breach occurred on October 14. The firm said that it first detected the breach on October 30 and after validating the breach, it disclosed the breach to the Bigbasket management on November 1. The cybersecurity firm made the details of the breach public on November 7. What BigBasket information has been leaked? Cyble has claimed that personal information of as many as 20 million users such as full names, email IDs, password hashes (potentially hashed OTPs), pin, contact numbers (mobile and phone), full addresses, date of birth, ...

Deployment of AI could mean a quantum leap for diagnostics—promising developments have already been reported for breast cancer, kidney disease and even Covid-19. But, neuropsychological pathologies have presented a different challenge altogether. A fortnight ago, however, a breakthrough was reported by IBM and Pfizer in the detection of the onset of Alzheimer’s. Using language data from the Framingham Heart Study of 1948, the technique detected speech impairment that is typical of Alzheimer’s. Observing 703 samples of 270 participants, the AI model predicted the probability of a person developing Alzheimer’s. Data from the study highlights that linguistic models had a higher level of accuracy than non-linguistic determinants, demographic variables (age, gender, education, etc) and neuropsychological test results. The accuracy in the case of linguistic models was 73%. In contrast, non-linguistic determinants had an accuracy of 64%, whereas models which combined both linguistic and non-l...

 Hindustan Times Sep 22, 2020 Deeksha Bhardwaj The Ministry of Electronics, Information and Technology told the Parliament on Monday that it took down 3,635 social media pages/accounts in 2019 for violating the Information Technology Act. In a response to an unstarred question by Congress MP Ravneet Singh Bittu about the ministry’s regulation of social media, the ministry said that 1,385 pages were blocked in 2017 and 2,799 were blocked in 2018. “With a borderless cyberspace coupled with the possibility of instant communication and anonymity, the potential for misuse of cyberspace and social media platforms for criminal activities is a global issue,” the ministry said in its response. “In line with increase of usage of Internet as also the growth of social media platforms, there are increasing number of incidents of reporting of such content having potential to incite violence and hatred. Government has a well-defined system of reporting and blocking for public access within the fr...

The Telegraph  Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  Bharti Airtel and Amazon Web Services have joined hands to develop the telecom firm’s cloud business, allowing it to offer a comprehensive set of solutions to large businesses and small and medium enterprises (SME) in India.  Airtel has over 2,500 large companies as its clients and more than a million emerging businesses with its product portfolio, including Airtel Cloud, a multi-cloud product and solutions business.  “The strategic collaboration between Airtel and AWS will offer a suite of cloud solutions to drive the digital transformation of businesses in India,” Harmeen Mehta, chief information officer and head –— cloud and security business, Bharti Airtel, said in a virtual conference. Under the partnership, “Airtel Cloud will build an AWS Cloud Practice supported by AWS Professional Services, as well as develop differentiated Airtel Cloud products and capabilities, leveraging AWS services, Airtel’s data centre capabilitie...

The Telegraph Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  Telecom operators have written to the department of telecommunications (DoT) for the early allocation of 5G spectrum so that they can start trials as early as September. The trials with different vendors are necessary as it will take six to nine months to get the relevant data and the optimum results, enabling the operators to prepare their strategy for the long delayed 5G auction. Opposition to the high base price set by the regulator and confusion over the participation of Chinese vendors have amplified the concerns of the telecom entities.  Besides, the operators have sought spectrum in three bands: 26Ghz and 24Ghz (mmWave bands), and 3.5Ghz. mmWave bands such as 26Ghz are meant for government agencies, but the operators want access to them because of their efficiency and have sought a base price for the 26Ghz spectrum.  S.P. Kochar, the newly appointed director-general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), has sa...

The Indian Express  Date: July 31, 2020 Aashish Aryan: Explained: What is the production linked incentive scheme for electronics manufacturers? Unlike the previous electronics manufacturing schemes, there has been considerable interest in the PLI scheme so far. Here's why Global electronics giants such as  Samsung , Pegatron, Flex, and  Foxconn  among others are looking to either set shop or  expand their presence in India . These companies are in final stages of negotiations to benefit from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) production linked incentive (PLI) scheme for making mobile phones and certain other specified electronic components. What is the PLI scheme? As a part of the  National Policy on Electronics , the IT ministry had on April 1 notified a scheme which would give incentives of 4-6 per cent to electronics companies which manufacture mobile phones and other electronic components such as tr...

First Post July 20,2020 A new Android malware has recently been reported, which is apparently equipped with data theft capabilities that allow it to target 337 Android applications. The malware is  named BlackRock  and was first seen in May by mobile security firm ThreatFabric, according to a report by  ZDNet. Reportedly, researchers say the malware was based on leaked source malware strain but was enhanced with more features, especially those that deal with theft of user passwords and credit card information. The report added that BlackRock works like most Android banking trojans but targets more apps than its predecessors. omsGuide  cited a ThreatFabric report that says that the  source code was made public  by its author around May 2019. The firm believes that BlackRock is the only banking Trojan currently using the source code. The report reveals that BlackRock steals credentials such as username and password from apps such as  Amazon, C...

The Hindu Business Line April 03,2020 Google is releasing new data about how the coronavirus pandemic has cut down on foot traffic to transit centers, retail stores and public parks in more than 130 countries. The mobility reports will be posted publicly online. They come in response to requests from public health officials who want more data on how people are moving around cities to better combat the spread of Covid-19, the Alphabet Inc unit said in a blog post. Each report will show how traffic to certain categories of places, such as parks and transportation hubs, has declined in the last month. The information wont show individual places or people. Google arguably has the most accurate and granular data about peoples location of any organization, public or private. More than a billion people worldwide use the companys Maps app to navigate places they live and travel to, giving Google real-time insight into how people move around their environments. With Covid-19 infecting ...

Business Line  March 03, 2020 Diksha Munjal  The Personal Data Protection Bill 2019, currently being analysed by a joint parliamentary committee, would require companies operating in India to make various operational and structural changes for compliance once the provisions of the proposed law come into effect. For example, the data localisation requirements of the Bill from a purely financial viewpoint are bound to negatively impact businesses. It could drive up costs both for international and Indian players alike, while harming the privacy of users, according to Udbhav Tiwari, Public Policy Advisor at Mozilla. Today, companies worldwide store and process huge volumes of digital information. Due to such amplitude of user data being with companies and data breaches occuring across the globe, issues like data privacy and protection have gained importance. One of the recent global models of legislation that lays down a framework for data governance is the EU’s...

liveMint February 24, 2020   Indian CEOs need to build inclusive tech capabilities, says Satya Nadella   Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella on Monday urged Indian business leaders to build technology capabilities that are inclusive in nature. Beginning his three-day visit to India, Nadella was addressing Microsoft’s Future Decoded CEO Summit here. "Indian CEOs need to build own tech capability and ensure that the solutions are inclusive," he said. Stating that the last decade saw emergence of the aggregators, he asserted that aggregators are not enough alone. "We need to ensure that digital interventions lead to broadening of productivity." Nadella stated that 72 per cent of jobs for software engineers in India are outside of the technology industry. Speaking at the same event, Rajesh Gopinathan, chief executive and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) said the company prefers to train internal talent for the cha...

Updated: Jan 29, 2020 16:47 IST Indo Asian News Service The funding is part of Google.org’s broader, $10 million commitment to media literacy, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative (GNI). Google on Wednesday announced a $1 million grant for global non-profit organization Internews that will launch a new initiative to promote news literacy among the Indian public. The funding is part of Google.org’s broader, $10 million commitment to media literacy, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative (GNI), the company said in a statement. Internews will select a team of 250 journalists, fact checkers, academics and NGO workers, who will be trained on a curriculum developed by global and Indian experts, adapted to local needs and available in seven Indian languages. The local leaders will then roll out the training to new internet users in non-metro cities in India, enabling them to better navigate the internet and assess the information they find. In...

Neerad Pandharipande Jan 29, 2020 While the IT cells of both the BJP and Congress engage in coordinated activity on Twitter, the former has a much larger and more complex structure than the latter Like accounts that appear to be affiliated to the BJP, the Congress' social media war room also appears to have a core group from where its content originates However, this core group is much smaller that that of the BJP, viz only 0.1 percent of the total network, as against seven percent for the saffron party Since April 2011, a Twitter account with the handle @AjayPandey_ has tweeted over 874,000 times — an average of over 270 posts per day, for nearly nine years. The content of most of these posts is political — either expressing support for the Central government or attacking political rivals. As is fairly evident, there is more to these astounding numbers than just an individual unhealthily obsessed with social media.  Massive tweet volumes, complex hierarchies, c...

BusinessLine S. Ronendra Singh Going forward, the Indian IT industry is expected to grow faster as part of the Industry 4.0 revolution. The year 2019 continued to take forward the trends in the world of Information Technology with increased usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning. But controversies also cropped up on the use of social media, impacting the industry and common man. Regulation The common man has started feeling the need to regulate the sector to ensure harmonious and progressive growth. It was in 2019 that people started thinking on these lines, especially after WhatsApp started spying on Indian journalists and human rights activists earlier this year. The Facebook-owned company also accepted that Indian journalists and human rights activists were among those globally that were spied on by unidentified entities using Pegasus, an Israeli spyware. Data Protection Act This was one of the main reaso...