Report filed by the Telangana State Pollution Control Board with the National Green Tribunal regarding state pollution control boards in south of India not complying with the direction given by the Supreme Court (Parayavaran Suraksha Samithi Vs Union of India) - wherein the states where directed to make provision for …
Taiwan is stopping the use of Chinese characters—the script used in mainland China—on official websites. Taiwan used the traditional but more complicated Chinese script. It switched to a simplified script used in mainland China three years after opening its doors to tourists from mainland. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou has argued …
American defence strategists have plans to categorise cyber attacks as acts of war, the Pentagon says. “A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesperson Dave Lapan told BBC. A US president could …
IN 2007, a group of foodies in the US decided to set themselves a challenge of eating only locally grown food. They kept a log of their performance. This website is a record of their successes and tribulations. Buying locally grown food is stuff for wonderful stories. One writer notes, …
SCIENTIFIC scepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge. Yet this is not what happens in global warming scepticism. Sceptics criticise any evidence that supports human-induced global warming and yet embrace any argument, blog or study that refutes global warming. This website is sceptical about global …
A rianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, cofounders of Huffington Post, sold the popular American website to Internet services and media company, AOL, in March for US $315 million, prompting a group of bloggers to file a $105-million lawsuit against Huffington Post and AOL. The suit is led by Jonathan Tasini, …
THE “about us” section of http://mother-earth-journal. com describes it rather modestly as a citizen journalist project in the US. The content on the site can scarcely be called modest. For one, a rather nononsense home page has articles on mercury toxins, a feature on the Gulf of Mexico, a year …
This first ever report on the energy choices made by IT companies like Akamai, Amazon.com , Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo highlights the need for greater transparency from global IT brands on the energy and carbon footprint of their Internet infrastructure. "How dirty is your data?" …
UNTIL recently, no system of power seemed more invincible than corporate media. A century ago, industrialisation handed a monopoly of mass communication to a tiny elite with the money to buy and run printing presses and, later, TV studios. Yet through a further twist of technological fate, the digital revolution …
Governments and corporations are eager to control the Net. Surveillance of netizens is commonplace whether in democracies or in totalitarian regimes. What does the loss of Internet freedom mean? Down To Earth finds out. As the Internet becomes the public square and the marketplace of our world, it is increasingly …
Our world is increasingly held together by the network of digital communications networks we call the Internet. Business, government, politics, science and the arts have all been fundamentally transformed by the fact that everyone’s connected to everyone else, everywhere, and no one needs to get permission to collaborate, trade, or …
With social media stoking revolt against tyranny in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, it is difficult to be critical of virtual interactions. But there is a group of writers who play devil’s advocate. Last year, journalist Nick Carr warned us of the socially numbing aspects of the Internet, and Evegeny Moro …
On February 4, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) doled out its last five batches of IP numbers that identify destinations for digital traffic. Rod Beckstrom, who heads the organisation that designates numbers which give a site its Internet addresses, said, “ICANN cannot give out any …
BESIDES meeting domestic requirements, India exports 1 to 1.1 million tonnes of onion worth Rs 1,000 crore. In the past 25 years onion production has increased from 2.5 to 7.5 million tonnes. These figures are displayed prominently in the website under review. There is no mention of the current crisis, …
After the WikiLeak revelation, cyber activists went to town claiming the disclosures as another indicator of internet-fostered democracy. Within days Western governments and their friends in the cyberworld clamped down on WikiLeaks. The not-so-thinly-veiled attacks on the whistle-blowing site and its charismatic founder, Julian Assange, by Western governments was covertly …
JOURNALISM is a serious business. You need to inform the gullible who is taking advantage of them. But let us admit that while reading the morning paper we, at least sometimes, wish journalists had a funny bone. The website www.gobionastick.com does precisely that and in a straight-faced, journalistic manner. An …
IN recent times, there has been a spurt of online resources that inform people of their carbon footprints. But most of them are programmed for people in the West. Enter www.no2co2.in. The website has dedicated webspace to calculate carbon footprints from Indian cities. The site has also calculated footprints of …
Delhiites can now lodge complaints of uncleanliness and poor sanitation in their areas on the Facebook page of MCD which promises to take prompt action on the same. The MCD on Wednesday launched its page on the popular networking website Facebook (FB) and the page was
It’s been mayhem and murder on the web with the US government and the McCarthy-like Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, getting websites to pull the plug on WikiLeaks. Not all of what they did was sane or even legal. First, Lieberman, or the Obama administration …
A Palestinian blogger, who set off an uproar in the Arab world by claiming he was God and hurling insults at Prophet Muhammad, was caught in a sting that used Facebook to track him down. Over several years, Husayin is suspected of posting arguments in favour of atheism on English …
