This was an issue that came up in the discussions leading up to our Nepal Hackathon. But the idea that apps should be developed to read currency notes did not go too far. Electronic payments should, of course, be designed with all disabled persons in mind. Here is a report on how the debate in playing out in India: Currency notes should be of different lengths and widths or have simple symbols embossed on them for easy identification, as this would be simpler than a separate device to recognise them, according to associations representing the visually impaired. The comments come after the Reserve Bank of India, in its bimonthly Monetary Policy Review, said it would look into the feasibility of developing a device or mechanism to help the visually challenged easily identify currency notes.
Hate speech on Facebook has been an incendiary issue. The latest action is unlikely to be received quietly. Nor is it likely to quell the problem completely. It banned the Buddhist nationalist movement Ma Ba Tha from its platform, as well as a pair of prominent monks known for stoking hatred towards the Rohingya. “They are not allowed a presence on Facebook, and we will remove any accounts and content which support, praise or represent these individuals or organisations,” said content policy manager Mr David Caragliano.
Few days back, I spent time at the Dompe District Hospital (a modest 100 bed hospital where people go for clinic visits but not for surgery) observing the impressive progress made in re-engineering work processes and introducing ICTs. The story is well told in Roar.lk. All the doctors worked with laptops and barcode readers. Each patient presents a barcode.
The person heading the national regulatory agency must know everything about any punitive measure his office takes. Otherwise, it compromises his authority and opens the floodgate of extra-judicial interventions. And that sprouts mistrust among the public.
A trade publication, Satellite Today, has written about an agreement between a satellite provider and the Ministry of Transport and Communication of Myanmar. Under the new multi-year, multi-transponder agreement, Intelsat 39 will host both C- and Ku-band satellite services for Myanmarsat-2, which will enable the government of Myanmar to significantly enhance its existing network as well as the networks of other mobile operators and media companies. This will advance the expansion of affordable, high-speed broadband and internet connectivity to government agencies, businesses and communities throughout the country. It will also support and advance the MOTC’s goal of ensuring that 95 percent of its population will have access to broadband connectivity by 2022. By integrating satellite solutions into its own mobile networks, the MOTC will be able to dramatically increase its overall network bandwidth, speed and reliability as it expands 3G and 4G services into the more remote areas of Myanmar.
We’ve been talking about competition as one of the major policy issues in the data analytics space. But this is an angle we had not thought about: China. Still, with the European Union enacting tough new privacy laws, and some in the United States eager to follow, Google and Facebook could soon be forced to find ways to make money beyond selling users’ personal information to advertisers, said Raj Rajgopal, president of digital business strategy at Virtusa Corporation, a consulting firm. “As profitability reduces, they’ll say, ‘Now I need to monetize my customer base,’” Mr. Rajgopal said.
India keeps shutting down the Internet. This necessarily involves shutting down Facebook. Few pay attention. Sri Lanka has never shut down the Internet. But it restricted access to some social media including Facebook in March 2018.
Prof. Rohan Samarajiva was recently invited to the ’99 Minutes’ show hosted by Shan Wijethunga on the national television corporation of Sri Lanka, ‘Rupavahini’. The full panel discussion on energy regulation (specifically electricity) in Sri Lanka, can be found below:
I was recently listening to some Microsoft officials asserting that they would be fully compliant with the new European General Data Protection Regulation, implying that it could be applied here too. There is no doubt that countries that seek to do business with Europe will have to pay special attention to GDPR. But that does not mean that we should simply do a cut and paste. The GDPR bears the marks of its birth. It may be appropriate for Europe (this article suggests, that too will be a problem).
The Learning Organization (and International relations) Monica Kerretts-Makau (PhD) Course on Regulatory Design and Practice Nay Pyi Taw September 2017
Is this a sign that Facebook is moving into transactions and payments in an even bigger way? Under Facebook’s new emerging technologies group, Mr. Zuckerberg has also created a new team focused on blockchain, a digital ledger that underpins virtual currencies like Bitcoin. The group will be led by David Marcus, who had been overseeing Facebook Messenger, with the mandate of examining how Facebook can incorporate blockchain. Over the last six months, three people who have had conversations with Mr.
We’ve been thinking about the implications of differential access to data for a while. Here‘s a detailed discussion: Some scholars said Facebook’s recent privacy changes may have gone too far by also cutting off academics who behaved responsibly. “Academics would argue that we need access to primary data,” said Dr. Nielsen of Oxford. He said the changes might lead to an asymmetry, with internal Facebook researchers accumulating mounds of data while outside academics would not.
It is reported that momentum is building for rules for e commerce under the WTO. India is both a hotbed of e commerce developments (Walmart has just gained majority control of Flipkart) and a heavyweight in international trade negotiations. Its role in scuttling the Doha Round is still remembered. But India is said to lack adequate knowledge to formulate positions on e commerce, except for one blatantly protectionist issue and one that poses significant challenges to implement: Consider, for instance, one key demand by developed countries to make permanent the current ban on customs duties on ‘global electronic transactions’ that were suspended in 1998. On the face of it, this is a reasonable ask: if the ban is overturned, it would give countries the right to impose tariffs on downloads of mobile applications, streamed music from Spotify or videos from Netflix.
It is one thing to talk about the second circle of associates in terms of lawful interception, as we did in our bulk surveillance paper that will be out of review shortly. It is quite something else to see how many records are actually yielded by surveillance of a relatively small number of targets. In 2017, 543 million records were collected from surveillance of just 40 people. In 2016, the first full year for which that replacement system was in operation, the government obtained orders to target 42 people and collected just over 151 million call detail records. In 2017, the government obtained orders for 40 targets.
Much of the discussion on privacy is premised on the implicit imposition of a private-property model on data or information that is subject to control/consent. This could have worked when all we were dealing with were relatively simple data like a social security number or an address. But the really interesting data are transaction-generated data (TGD). These necessarily involve more than one person. How can I give or not give consent to the use of my TGD, when multiple entities have been involved in its production?