India is set to block the Internet’s newly-formed, highly controversial cyber “red-light district” after a global agency governing the web approved .xxx suffix for pornographic websites last week, a senior government official said. A few days ago, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)approvedthe .xxx suffix for pornography websites. In response, a senior official at the ministry of IT stated that “India, along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia, opposed the grant of the domain in the first place, and we would proceed to block the whole domain, as it goes against the IT Act and Indian laws....

Indian government is all set to launch its own public data portal next month. This portal which has been modeled onData.gov, a portal which offers public and government data to the outside world, aims to share non-sensitive data from various Indian ministries for general public use in scientific, economic and developmental programmes. Major General (Dr) Siva Kumar, Natural Resources Data Management System head, said: We plan to launch data.gov.in by next month....

Mobile spam has been arecurring problemin India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) attempts to solve this by issuing new guidelines to protect India’s 750 million mobile phone users, and at the same time help marketers target mobile users more effectively. According to the new guidelines, telemarketers would have to cross check their database with theNational Consumer Preference Registry, updated by TRAI twice a week, to ensure that all outbound messages and calls are opted into by the recipient....

In 2015, India’s Supreme Courtstruck down a controversial IT lawthat stifled freedom of speech. It had said at that time that section 66A of the IT Act was“vague in its entirety,” as it punished anyone storing information that could be false or “grossly offensive or has a menacing character.” However, a petition filed byPeople’s Union for Civil Liberties, a non-profit, revealed that six years after the judgment, police stations across the country had filedmore than 1,500 cases under this scrapped act....

TheBureau of Energy Efficiency(BEE), an agency of the Government of India has today unveiled its own energy standard for laptops. Formed under the Ministry of Power in 2002 with a goal of developing programs which will increase the conservation and efficient use of energy, the BEE announced BEE Star Label v1 for laptops today. The initiative to push for energy efficiency labels was proposed about 2 years ago by the India Chapter of Climate Savers Computing Initiative, reportsThe Economic Times....