Blognation, a multi-country technology blogging channel has launched its Indian edition. And the person writing their editorial content in India is Kiruba Shankar (surely Kiruba needs no introduction). Kiruba has been at the forefront of covering India technology focused news, blogging, podcasts etc for a while and you can expect quality stuff over at Blognation with him as editor. Kiruba announced the launch of Blognation on his blog a couple of days back.

Blognation has been started by Sam Sethi, who was earlier writing for TechCrunch UK. Its network covers eight countries currently and they have plans for many more. Apart from the blog itself, the site has a separate page for listing of Indian tech events.

Here’s wishing the best to Kiruba, as he puts on the editorial cap for this new blogging news channel.

Yesterday I attended a workshop (in Delhi) that was co-organised by IAMAI, ICAAN and Dept of IT, GOI. This was about macro-level internet policy and administration issues and was unlike any other internet/startup events that I have participated in. Its objective was to spread awareness about ICAAN and focus on internet security issues. Participants included (senior) international internet administrators, government IT/technology policy-makers & IAMAI representatives. I must add that when I first received the invitation, I was unsure if the event made any sense for someone like me. In hindsight, I’m happy not to have skipped it.

Ask the average internet user- “who controls the internet?”; half the people are unlikely to return any answer and the other half are likely to say its ICANN. Well, till yesterday even I would have done the latter. The truth is that there is no single body that controls the internet (or its so called reboot button). A bunch of international organisations act as its administrators- ISO, IETF, ICC, ICANN, W3C, WIPO & Internet Society (see the slideshow for what each one does). ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers) is the global coordinating body for the internet’s system of unique identifiers (or what is commonly know as domain names). People have heard of ICANN simply because they have been exposed to it while booking/buying/selling demain names on the web. But ICANN is simply the “postmaster of the internet”. Its job is to allocation unique addresses and ensure that internet data traffic gets to the its desired location.

Here are my other key takeaways from the workshop:

The 9/11 of the cyber world – The cyber world’s equivalent of the 9/11 terrorism attacks happened in Estonia in May earlier this year. This was a month long spam/bot attack on key internet establishments, started by cyber bullies operating across the border in Russia and was sparked off by Estonia’s decision to relocate a Soviet era World War II memorial within its own territory. Read the details here & here.

The Government’s perspective of the internet- It was an eye-opener to hear government functionaries talk about the role of the internet from a socio-politico-economic perspective. Apart from the commonly understood benefits of the internet, the govt is pushing it as a vehicle of equalising the inherent disparities amongst our different states, regions etc, and developing the hinterland through ICT.

Internet security discussion– The final stage of the event was a panel discussion on internet security and participants included ICANN members, domain name registrars, big web hosting companies etc. The discussion resembled a war strategy meet and showcased how the internet’s administrators are virtually at war with the cyber mafias every day.

Some statistics about Indian internet security metrics for 2007:
– 2400 major website have been defaced so far
– 190 major phising incidents with financial institutions
– 58% of email traffic in India is spam
– majority of the world’s spammers are from US, China, Germany, South Korea & Spain.