-The Hindu When all else fails, you still have the social media to bank on. Hyderabad: With phone lines from almost all service providers getting jammed, social networking websites Twitter and Facebook played a vital role in spreading news of individuals who were in the vicinity of the blast area among friends, relatives and colleagues. The micro blogging sites also became a platform to make frantic appeals by users to stop spreading unnecessary...

-The Hindustan Times The Supreme Court has issued notices to the Union government, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Delhi and Puducherry seeking an explanation over the recent arrests of social media users. This, after an aspiring Delhi Univeristy law student Shreya Singhal filed a PIL before SC stating that Section 66(A) of the IT Act be modified. An apex court bench headed by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir issued the notice - also to  Maharashtra, West...

-The Hindu Governments, industry, civil society meetin Azerbaijan to discuss future of Internet India has decided to take a decisive stand on Internet governance at a conference being hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 6-9. An indication of the importance that India accords to the global dialogue on Internet governance is evident from the fact that Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal is himself leading the government delegation, which will include senior officials like...

-Al Jazeera New report from UN's telecommunications agency breaks down international internet usage statistics. About one-third of the world's population now has access to the internet, but more needs to be done in order to achieve internet penetration targets as set out in the Millennium Development Goals, the International Telecommunications Union has said in a new report. Currently, 20.5 per cent of households in developing countries have access to the internet, which the...

Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...