On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 12:12 am Vignesh Prabhu <[email protected]> wrote:

http://thewire.in/2015/06/09/israeli-firm-strong-arms-indian-techie-for-exposing-suspicious-code/

In an intriguing case of abuse, a Bengaluru-based programmer was on
Monday threatened with a criminal lawsuit for attempting to expose an
avaricious program that violated net neutrality.

On June 3, Thejesh GN, an activist and programmer, published screenshots
and some text explaining how the Airtel 3G network was inserting some
extra lines of code into his browser every time he visited a webpage.

...
On June 8, however, he received a cease-and-desist order issued by Flash
Networks, Ltd., a company based out of Herzliya, Israel, via their
attorneys in Mumbai. The order required that Thejesh remove the
description and implications of Anchor.js he had uploaded to GitHub
because they violated Flash Networks’ copyright over it. His ‘act’ was
alleged to be a criminal offence under the IPC 1860 and Information and
Technology Act, 2000.

 However, it should be noted that the act of inserting code between the
user and the requested webpage is in itself possibly a direct violation of
the impugned Act. It might also be construed as a violation of the license
conditions, although one might imagine that the company lawyers (Airtel, I
mean) would have checked that out. Since the action is surreptitious, the
company may have neglected to clarify to the Israeli company that there was
a big question mark on the planting of code on user browsers.

The company needs to clarify in addition (the nation wants to know!)
whether the harvested data is being transmitted out of the country as a
result of this activity.

Vickram


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