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Richard Stallman recently visited Mandya, a small town about 60 miles from Bengaluru, India, to give a talk. On the sidelines, Indian news outlet FactorDaily caught up with Stallman for an interview. In the wide-ranging interview, Stallman talked about companies that spy on users, popular Android apps, media streaming and transportation apps, smart devices, DRM, software backdoors, subscription software, and Apple and censorship. An excerpt from the interview: If you are carrying a mobile phone, it is always tracking your movements and it could have been modified to listen to the conversations around you. I call this product Stalin's dream. What would Stalin have wanted to hand out to every inhabitant of the former Soviet Union? Something to track that person's movements and listen to the person's conservations. Fortunately, Stalin could not do it because the technology didn't exist. Unfortunately for us, now it does exist and most people have been pressured or lured into carrying around such a Stalin's dream device, but not me.

I am suspicious of new digital technology. I expect it to have new malicious functionalities. It has happened so many times that I have learned to expect this, so I have always checked before I start using some new digital technology. I asked to find out what is nasty about it and I found out these two things. It was something like 20 years ago, and I decided it was my duty as a citizen to refuse, regardless of whatever convenience it might offer me. To surrender my freedom in this way was failing to defend a free society. This is why I do not have a portable phone. I refuse to carry a portable phone. I never have one and unless things change, I never will. I do use portable phones, lots of different ones. If I needed to call someone right now, I would ask one of you, "Could you please make a call for me?" If I am on a bus and it is late and I need to tell somebody that I am going to arrive late, there is always some other passenger in the bus who will make a call for me or send a text for me. Practically speaking, it is not that hard.

Richard Stallman recently visited Mandya, a small town about 60 miles from Bengaluru, India, to give a talk. On the sidelines, Indian news outlet FactorDaily caught up with Stallman for an interview. In the wide-ranging interview, Stallman talked about companies that spy on users, popular Android apps, media streaming and transportation apps, smart devices, DRM, software backdoors, subscription software, and Apple and censorship. An excerpt from the interview: If you are carrying a mobile phone, it is always tracking your movements and it could have been modified to listen to the conversations around you. I call this product Stalin's dream. What would Stalin have wanted to hand out to every inhabitant of the former Soviet Union? Something to track that person's movements and listen to the person's conservations. Fortunately, Stalin could not do it because the technology didn't exist. Unfortunately for us, now it does exist and most people have been pressured or lured into carrying around such a Stalin's dream device, but not me.

I am suspicious of new digital technology. I expect it to have new malicious functionalities. It has happened so many times that I have learned to expect this, so I have always checked before I start using some new digital technology. I asked to find out what is nasty about it and I found out these two things. It was something like 20 years ago, and I decided it was my duty as a citizen to refuse, regardless of whatever convenience it might offer me. To surrender my freedom in this way was failing to defend a free society. This is why I do not have a portable phone. I refuse to carry a portable phone. I never have one and unless things change, I never will. I do use portable phones, lots of different ones. If I needed to call someone right now, I would ask one of you, "Could you please make a call for me?" If I am on a bus and it is late and I need to tell somebody that I am going to arrive late, there is always some other passenger in the bus who will make a call for me or send a text for me. Practically speaking, it is not that hard.

Bengaluru-based Zapr Media Labs, which counts Rupert Murdoch-led media group Star and several major local companies including Flipkart (which is now owned by Walmart), music streaming service Saavn, handset maker Micromax as its investors, has developed a tech that listens to ambient sounds around users to build targeted advertising profiles of them, reports news outlet FactorDaily. Zapr does this by using the microphone on the smartphone. Several major services in the country including Chota Bheem games to Dainik Bhaskar (a news outlet) to, likely, even Hotstar (a hugely popular streaming service which launched its service in the US and Canada last year, and which as you may recall, set a global record for most simultaneous views earlier this year) have embedded Zapr's technology into their apps. FactorDaily reports that most of these services are not forthcoming to their customers about what kind of monitoring they are doing. An excerpt from the report: One of the apps that inspired Zapr's founding team was the popular music detection and identification app Shazam. But, its three co-founders saw opportunity in going further. "Instead of detecting music, can we detect all kinds of medium? Can we detect television? Can we detect movies in a theatre? Can we detect video on demand? Can we really build a profile for a user about their media consumption habits... and that really became the idea, the vision we wanted to solve for," Sandipan Mondal, CEO of Zapr Media Labs, said in an interview last week on Thursday.

Shorn of jargon, the underlying Zapr tech listens to ambient sounds around you, analyses it, and profiles users based on their media consumption habits. "That data would be very useful in order to recommend the right kind of content and also for brands and advertisers to hopefully reduce the wastage and inefficiencies and make smarter decisions," said Mondal, who co-founded the company in 2012 along with his batchmates from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (batch of 2010) Deepak Baid and Sajo Mathews.

Zapr claims to have the largest media consumption analytics database in India and helps television channels and brands to earn a better bang for their advertising buck. To be sure, advertising -- even with the internet's promise of better targeting -- still is an inaccurate business with proxies, at best, helping measure its return on investment. But, Zapr's tech comes with privacy and data concerns -- lots of it.

Bengaluru-based Zapr Media Labs, which counts Rupert Murdoch-led media group Star and several major local companies including Flipkart (which is now owned by Walmart), music streaming service Saavn, handset maker Micromax as its investors, has developed a tech that listens to ambient sounds around users to build targeted advertising profiles of them, reports news outlet FactorDaily. Zapr does this by using the microphone on the smartphone. Several major services in the country including Chota Bheem games to Dainik Bhaskar (a news outlet) to, likely, even Hotstar (a hugely popular streaming service which launched its service in the US and Canada last year, and which as you may recall, set a global record for most simultaneous views earlier this year) have embedded Zapr's technology into their apps. FactorDaily reports that most of these services are not forthcoming to their customers about what kind of monitoring they are doing. An excerpt from the report: One of the apps that inspired Zapr's founding team was the popular music detection and identification app Shazam. But, its three co-founders saw opportunity in going further. "Instead of detecting music, can we detect all kinds of medium? Can we detect television? Can we detect movies in a theatre? Can we detect video on demand? Can we really build a profile for a user about their media consumption habits... and that really became the idea, the vision we wanted to solve for," Sandipan Mondal, CEO of Zapr Media Labs, said in an interview last week on Thursday.

Shorn of jargon, the underlying Zapr tech listens to ambient sounds around you, analyses it, and profiles users based on their media consumption habits. "That data would be very useful in order to recommend the right kind of content and also for brands and advertisers to hopefully reduce the wastage and inefficiencies and make smarter decisions," said Mondal, who co-founded the company in 2012 along with his batchmates from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (batch of 2010) Deepak Baid and Sajo Mathews.

Zapr claims to have the largest media consumption analytics database in India and helps television channels and brands to earn a better bang for their advertising buck. To be sure, advertising -- even with the internet's promise of better targeting -- still is an inaccurate business with proxies, at best, helping measure its return on investment. But, Zapr's tech comes with privacy and data concerns -- lots of it.

Bengaluru-based Zapr Media Labs, which counts Rupert Murdoch-led media group Star and several major local companies including Flipkart (which is now owned by Walmart), music streaming service Saavn, handset maker Micromax as its investors, has developed a tech that listens to ambient sounds around users to build targeted advertising profiles of them, reports news outlet FactorDaily. Zapr does this by using the microphone on the smartphone. Several major services in the country including Chota Bheem games to Dainik Bhaskar (a news outlet) to, likely, even Hotstar (a hugely popular streaming service which launched its service in the US and Canada last year, and which as you may recall, set a global record for most simultaneous views earlier this year) have embedded Zapr's technology into their apps. FactorDaily reports that most of these services are not forthcoming to their customers about what kind of monitoring they are doing. An excerpt from the report: One of the apps that inspired Zapr's founding team was the popular music detection and identification app Shazam. But, its three co-founders saw opportunity in going further. "Instead of detecting music, can we detect all kinds of medium? Can we detect television? Can we detect movies in a theatre? Can we detect video on demand? Can we really build a profile for a user about their media consumption habits... and that really became the idea, the vision we wanted to solve for," Sandipan Mondal, CEO of Zapr Media Labs, said in an interview last week on Thursday.

Shorn of jargon, the underlying Zapr tech listens to ambient sounds around you, analyses it, and profiles users based on their media consumption habits. "That data would be very useful in order to recommend the right kind of content and also for brands and advertisers to hopefully reduce the wastage and inefficiencies and make smarter decisions," said Mondal, who co-founded the company in 2012 along with his batchmates from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (batch of 2010) Deepak Baid and Sajo Mathews.

Zapr claims to have the largest media consumption analytics database in India and helps television channels and brands to earn a better bang for their advertising buck. To be sure, advertising -- even with the internet's promise of better targeting -- still is an inaccurate business with proxies, at best, helping measure its return on investment. But, Zapr's tech comes with privacy and data concerns -- lots of it.

Shadma Shaikh, reporting for FactorDaily: Chetan Gowda, 27, was speaking to a room full of students in IIIT Hyderabad for a workshop on OpenStreetMap for beginners organized by Swecha, a non-profit organization to support free software movement last month. There were close to 40 students in the room. Beginners often ask him: Why use open source maps when we already have Google Maps? For Gowda, it was the fact that Google Maps is a global, commercial product and did not capture local detail. Like the old banyan tree that was a major landmark in his hometown Hassan or public benches just outside the town where pedestrians could stop to catch a break or fire catchment areas in Bellandur lake in Bengaluru, India.

"It was fascinating to add little but important details of my town to open maps," says Gowda who was introduced in 2013 to OSM or OpenStreetMap, a global community of mappers formed as a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world in 2004. Since then he has been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and has conducted many workshops in colleges and institutes to induct more people in the community. Gowda has made 8500 edits in the OpenStreetMap, mainly covering areas in Bengaluru, Hassan and Hyderabad. Gowda and a few other contributors from India are part of a tiny yet growing resistance movement which doesn't want giant corporations to own all the mapping data. For the average consumer, this may not seem like a big deal. But mapping is big business.

The market opportunity for suppliers of mapping to the autonomous car industry is going to be worth over $24 billion by 2050, according to one estimate [PDF]. And that's just one industry. A study commissioned by Google in 2015 estimated that industries that run on top of the Global Positioning Satellite Systems and mapping generate nearly $73 billion in annual revenue. Worldwide, that industry is was estimated to generate $150- $270 billion in revenues. Although new research isn't available, with growing smartphone usage and the birth of companies such as Uber and many others it is safe to assume that the industry has only grown bigger. All the more reason why map data can't be held by only a few companies. With Google Maps beginning to charge small and medium-sized businesses and indie developers more for access to its platform, many have started to explore and switch to open source alternatives of Maps, and commercial services such as Here Maps.

Further reading: What OpenStreetMap Can Be, and Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth.

Shadma Shaikh, reporting for FactorDaily: Chetan Gowda, 27, was speaking to a room full of students in IIIT Hyderabad for a workshop on OpenStreetMap for beginners organized by Swecha, a non-profit organization to support free software movement last month. There were close to 40 students in the room. Beginners often ask him: Why use open source maps when we already have Google Maps? For Gowda, it was the fact that Google Maps is a global, commercial product and did not capture local detail. Like the old banyan tree that was a major landmark in his hometown Hassan or public benches just outside the town where pedestrians could stop to catch a break or fire catchment areas in Bellandur lake in Bengaluru, India.

"It was fascinating to add little but important details of my town to open maps," says Gowda who was introduced in 2013 to OSM or OpenStreetMap, a global community of mappers formed as a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world in 2004. Since then he has been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and has conducted many workshops in colleges and institutes to induct more people in the community. Gowda has made 8500 edits in the OpenStreetMap, mainly covering areas in Bengaluru, Hassan and Hyderabad. Gowda and a few other contributors from India are part of a tiny yet growing resistance movement which doesn't want giant corporations to own all the mapping data. For the average consumer, this may not seem like a big deal. But mapping is big business.

The market opportunity for suppliers of mapping to the autonomous car industry is going to be worth over $24 billion by 2050, according to one estimate [PDF]. And that's just one industry. A study commissioned by Google in 2015 estimated that industries that run on top of the Global Positioning Satellite Systems and mapping generate nearly $73 billion in annual revenue. Worldwide, that industry is was estimated to generate $150- $270 billion in revenues. Although new research isn't available, with growing smartphone usage and the birth of companies such as Uber and many others it is safe to assume that the industry has only grown bigger. All the more reason why map data can't be held by only a few companies. With Google Maps beginning to charge small and medium-sized businesses and indie developers more for access to its platform, many have started to explore and switch to open source alternatives of Maps, and commercial services such as Here Maps.

Further reading: What OpenStreetMap Can Be, and Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth.

lkcl writes: Phoronix and The Register have an insightful look into an effort by ARM that is reminiscent of Microsoft's "Get The Facts" campaign. RISC-V's design is a revamp of the RISC concept that is intended from the ground up to fix the mistakes and learn from the lessons of the past 30 years. Power efficiency is 40% better than ARM or Intel. Compressed instructions reduce I-cache misses by 20-25%, which is roughly comparable to the same performance that would be achieved by doubling the Instruction Cache size. Yet despite El Reg's insightful analysis,
all is not as it seems: on further investigation, some of ARM's criticism has merit, whilst some of it is clear out-and-out FUD from ARM that, being so critically dependent on free software, had its own employees complain so much that the site was pulled.

Also we cannot help but wonder which "Big Chip" company offered seven-figure salaries to try to shut down the IIT Madras Shakti Project. Most interesting however is the fact that ARM -- a $40 billion dollar company -- is rattled by RISC-V enough to use underhanded tactics, whilst Intel on the other hand is actually investing.

Here's an interesting development about to take place in India. From a report: Walmart Inc. has decided to go all in on its deal to acquire Flipkart in a deal sealed on Thursday to buy 73% of the Indian ecommerce company in one of the biggest mergers and acquisitions in the country -- spending at least $14.6 billion in the cash-and-stock buyout. One source said Flipkart was valued at $20 billion, while two others said Walmart, the world's largest retailer, had put the target company's value at as much as $22 billion, a price at which it will spend more than $16 billion. Alphabet Inc., the parent company of search giant Google, is said to be participating in the deal with a $3 billion investment. Kalyan Krishnamurthy will stay on as chief executive of Flipkart.

A fascinating story of how Indian women have persevered through various roadblocks, including cultural, to actively contribute to the open source community. An excerpt from the story: As Vaishali Thakker, a 23-year old open source programmer looked over the hall filled with around 200 people, she didn't know how to react to what she had just heard. Thakker was one of the five women on the stage at PyCon India 2017, a conference on the use of the Python programming language, in New Delhi. The topic of the discussion was "Women in open source." As the women started discussing the open source projects they had been working on, the challenges and so on, someone from the audience got up and drew the attention of the gathering to the wi-fi hotspots in the hall. They were named "Shut the fk up" and "Feminism sucks." "It was right on our faces," remembers Thakker. For their part, the organisers were upset and even warned the audience. But the event had no code of conduct for anyone to really penalise or expel the culprits.

"It's disheartening when you're talking about the problem, someone is actually giving a proof that it (gender bias) indeed is a problem. In a way, I found it funny, because how stupid can you be to give the proof that the problem actually exists," says Thakker. And how. It's just been three years in her coding career but she is familiar with the high wall that gender stereotyping puts up in the world of software scripting. More so in her chosen field of coding. Thakker is among a small -- but fast-growing -- set of women coders from India shaping the future of several open source platforms globally including the Linux kernel, the core software program behind the world's biggest eponymous open source software.

A fascinating story of how Indian women have persevered through various roadblocks, including cultural, to actively contribute to the open source community. An excerpt from the story: As Vaishali Thakker, a 23-year old open source programmer looked over the hall filled with around 200 people, she didn't know how to react to what she had just heard. Thakker was one of the five women on the stage at PyCon India 2017, a conference on the use of the Python programming language, in New Delhi. The topic of the discussion was "Women in open source." As the women started discussing the open source projects they had been working on, the challenges and so on, someone from the audience got up and drew the attention of the gathering to the wi-fi hotspots in the hall. They were named "Shut the fk up" and "Feminism sucks." "It was right on our faces," remembers Thakker. For their part, the organisers were upset and even warned the audience. But the event had no code of conduct for anyone to really penalise or expel the culprits.

"It's disheartening when you're talking about the problem, someone is actually giving a proof that it (gender bias) indeed is a problem. In a way, I found it funny, because how stupid can you be to give the proof that the problem actually exists," says Thakker. And how. It's just been three years in her coding career but she is familiar with the high wall that gender stereotyping puts up in the world of software scripting. More so in her chosen field of coding. Thakker is among a small -- but fast-growing -- set of women coders from India shaping the future of several open source platforms globally including the Linux kernel, the core software program behind the world's biggest eponymous open source software.

Several Indian smartphone manufacturers including Micromax, Intex and Lava plan to unveil a slew of Android smartphones priced around $30 in the coming weeks, Indian news outlet FactorDaily reported on Tuesday. These handsets would run Android Oreo Go, a lite version of Google's mobile operating system first unveiled last year. The report sheds light on India's smartphone market: With cheap smartphones, Google and the phone vendors hope to ride the wave of mass scale internet access on mobile phones in India. From a monthly consumption of 20 crore (200 million) GB of data about 16 months ago, Indians now consume over 150 crore (1.5 billion) GB a month making the country No. 1 among mobile data consuming countries. Much of this change is credited to aggressive data pricing plans by Reliance Jio, which launched services in September 2016.

An anonymous reader shares an article: "I'm basically from that area (Gauribidanur in Indian state of Karnataka); son of a farmer, came to academia... keen to bring back my younger days, when the river used to flow for three to four months a year. I need to rejuvenate it," says professor KPJ Reddy over a phone conversation. It's quite apparent from his tone that this experiment means a lot to him. A day earlier, on June 5, World Environment Day, Reddy, in collaboration with two other scientists at the Department of Aerodynamics, Bangalore, Dr H N Science Centre, and the Department of Forest, collectively held their first ever drone-seeding trial on the banks of river Pinakini in the Gauribidanur area in Karnataka's Kolar district. "For that, the only way is to reach by air. Doing it with big aircraft is expensive, and take-offs and landings are a problem. So the only way to do it is through drones," he says, when we meet a few days later at the IISc Campus in Bangalore. Over tea with professor S N Omkar, chief research scientist at IISc, he further elaborates on their plans. "What we have in mind is to at least seed 10,000 acres, and we will be doing this every year, for three consecutive years," he says.

From a report: The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore ($45 million) through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a state government official on Sunday. IT became a compulsory subject in Kerala schools from 2003, but it was only in 2005 that FOSS was introduced in a phased manner and started to replace proprietary software. The decision made by the curriculum committee to implement it in the higher secondary sector has also been completed now. "It's not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software license enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish," K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School said.

Apple plans to set up three of its own retail stores -- the iconic Apple Store -- in India, reports FactorDaily. The stores will be setup in Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai in the next 18 months. The report adds that Apple also plans to unveil a startup accelerator in the country which would incubate ideas largely around apps built for iOS. The publication claims that these announcements will be made public later this week when Apple CEO Tim Cook visits India. With the growth of iPhone sales starting to decline, and India being one of the handful places to show an increasingly growing interest in its phone, Apple has shifted its focus in the recent months to actively target Indian market.

Apple plans to set up three of its own retail stores -- the iconic Apple Store -- in India, reports FactorDaily. The stores will be setup in Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai in the next 18 months. The report adds that Apple also plans to unveil a startup accelerator in the country which would incubate ideas largely around apps built for iOS. The publication claims that these announcements will be made public later this week when Apple CEO Tim Cook visits India. With the growth of iPhone sales starting to decline, and India being one of the handful places to show an increasingly growing interest in its phone, Apple has shifted its focus in the recent months to actively target Indian market.