Category: News

ICANN70 first annual meeting

Posted on by Comunicació

The ICANN Community Virtual Forum was the first of the three annual meetings organised by the body which regulates the two basic technical infrastructures for the internet: the domains and IP addresses which enable users to find content housed on the internet.

This was the fourth of these meetings to adopt a virtual format, given the impossibility of congregating a large number of representatives from governments, associations and industry.

This first meeting of the year is used for planning the tasks of the various workgroups during the rest of the year. This year will see the groups centre on the development of mechanisms which allow domain owners to be contacted without their privacy being compromised, and on the improvement of efficiency in remote work carried out by the ICANN. The group which was analysing the impact of new internet domains has submitted its report and consideration is now being given on how to open up to new domains.

The meeting covered two subjects in depth which directly affect internet users, particularly in Europe: internet crime using domain names and the new European legal framework on the right to the internet.

Crimes with domain names

Recent years have seen surge in internet crime, particularly cases where domain names are used to deceive users by displaying pages which appear to be official, or where email addresses are used to send fraudulent messages.

Internet registers are a key element in identifying these crimes, and we are working on technical initiatives and regulations which will enable us to offer our users greater security.

New European legal framework

The European Commission has put together a series of new regulations which represent a greater degree of protection for European consumers and internet users. The regulations will establish stricter obligations for all companies operating on the internet, particularly large platforms such as Google and Facebook.

While the regulations are not due to be approved until early in 2023, we are studying them and giving our input to EU representatives to improve the aspects relating to domain name users.

GeoTLD general assembly

The GeoTLD group is an association which represents the interests of geographical, cultural and linguistic domains, of which .barcelona is a member. Its representatives work to give the communities they represent a more prominent role in the internet.

The main goal of the assembly was precisely this new European legal framework for the internet. Our goal as the representative for the .barcelona community with the internet’s governing bodies is to offer the citizens and internet users we represent the chance to express themselves and voice their concerns.

This annual assembly was also used to present the new design of the website geotld.group, which features a collaborative section for news items by all its members. Another highlight was the presentation of a new international promotional video to explain what geographical domains are and the main advantages to them.

Cyberattacks up during the pandemic

Posted on by Comunicació

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a digital transformation in all spheres: schools found themselves having to conduct classes and all interaction with pupils via internet, while a large number of companies introduced teleworking between their teams and continue to work remotely or combine this with on-site activity at their offices.

But it doesn’t stop there. A study confirms that the creation of new domains in Europe is up by 20% because of the pandemic, an increase most likely stemming from the fact that most businesses have had to undergo a transformation and get online to be able to keep offering customers their products and services.

Yet the digital transformation has its downside too, with cyberattacks mushrooming in 2020 and half of them attributable to the increase in teleworking caused by the pandemic: “Over half of organisations weren’t ready for the digitalisation needed to implement teleworking”, affirms a study by ACCIÓ and the Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia.

The same study states that “on a global scale estimates put the rate of cyberattacks in 2021 at one every eleven seconds. This figure has risen considerably in recent years: in 2016 the average was 40 seconds”.

One of the most common forms of IT attack is ransomware, with malicious software or a virus encrypting the whole content of a computer and demanding a ransom to decrypt it. Another is phishing, involving the fraudulent supplanting of identity and aimed at businesses and individuals alike: recipients get an email or mobile phone message requesting data or passwords. One of the most common scenarios is where a bank is imitated, with the recipient getting a message asking them to confirm a user ID and password which are then used to access the account.

How to spot internet fraud?

A quick check of the domain the message is trying to direct us to is one way to detect this. With both ransomware and phishing, it’s likely they’re trying to supplant the identity of recognised organisations to either get us to download a virus or to get access to our user data. But one important datum they can’t supplant is the domain of the real organisation.

Carrying on with the bank as an example, imagine you’re contacted by your bank, “Bank Segur”, and you know their website is bancsegur.barcelona. If you get a message from the bank asking you to access a page with the domain bancsegur.xxxxx.barcelona, here’s your clue that this is a fraud. Why? Because in this case the domain is xxxxx.barcelona, and bancsegur.xxxxx.barcelona is a subdomain. In other words, we should always look at what comes just before .barcelona (or .cat, .com, .es etc.).

If you’re still unsure, the best thing to do is not to reply to the message and to contact the organisation another way, via their customer service phone line, social media or the email address on the website you usually use.

More women in tech sectors, less of a digital gender divide

Posted on by Comunicació

A new government measure is under way to update the municipal strategy to combat the digital gender divide and promote equality in ICT. The fifty actions set out by the measure are designed to increase women’s presence in the tech market, drive digital training and promote science vocations among girls.

With a three-year roadmap and a budget of two million euros, the new government measure on gender equality in tech environments provides a new impetus for the promotion of women in the digital realm, strengthening the feminist perspective in the construction of an increasingly tech-driven society.

Achieving equality in the technological sphere is fundamental for building a fairer society which guarantees the same opportunities form girls and women when it comes to science and technology careers. This goal also forms part of the feminist struggle, with this year’s 8 March campaign adopting a collective and combative wave as its icon.

Women in the ICT sector

Even though Barcelona is a pioneering city at the forefront of the tech sphere, more action is needed to consolidate parity and a more equal city model in creation, design and the production of technology. Women currently occupy just 26% of jobs in the ICT sector and only 8.6% of technical posts.

Women’s reduced presence in the digital labour market heightens discrimination and their invisibility in the science and tech sphere, hampering their access further.

Four strategy areas to combat the digital divide

The new government measure is based around four main goals and 51 specific actions:

  1. Facilitate women’s access to ICT jobs: this includes the creation of digital training programmes and jobs, such as the BCNFemTech skills-acquisition plan, designed to get fifty women in vulnerable situations into professional positions in programming and web development.
  2. Support women in the ICT sector: visibility and recognition of women’s contribution to the development of tech industries is needed, along with the promotion of their involvement in public policies in this area. The measure therefore includes the creation of a BCNFemTech women’s network and backing for tech projects by women entrepreneurs.
  3. More women in public procurement: gender clauses are planned for public contracts with providers from the tech sector, along with the creation of an internal women’s technology team to drive digital training among women municipal workers.
  4. Science and tech girls: the promotion of science and tech careers among young girls is essential for ensuring equality in the digital society of the future. To this end, the roadmap includes a STEAM initiative for girls in primary school with the collaboration of the Mobile World Congress and agreements with universities to increase women’s presence in technological study areas.

Take part in compiling citizen initiatives for defending digital rights

Posted on by Comunicació

Barcelona is aiming to increase the general public’s knowledge of the new digital reality and, together with Xnet and the Citizen’s Group on Digital Policies (GCPD), it is setting in motion a campaign to compile initiatives launched by Barcelona’s civil society in defence of digital rights.

We want this citizen ecosystem to drive change and guide Barcelona’s participation in the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights.

Cities are their inhabitants

This project involves Barcelona City Council, Xnet and the GCPD undertaking a mapping process to give greater visibility to everything city residents are doing to defend and promote digital rights.

The compiled information will be made available through an open web repository.

The process will end with a public presentation to showcase the initiatives and create synergies among the various active groups and individuals involved. The event will allow the ecosystem to be recognised and become an example and inspiration to other civic organisations. All initiatives will be made public and five or ten will be highlighted in particular.

The entire list of initiatives will also be presented to all the other members of the Cities for Digital Rights network, so that they can become a reference for other cities and collaborations are established.

Citizen’s Ecosystem for Digital Rights

Whether you are an individual, a group, an organisation or a company active in the area of digital rights, you can form part of Barcelona’s Citizen Ecosystem for Digital Rights by helping with this campaign to compile initiatives.

All you have to do is send in details of a maximum of three initiatives, carried out in or from Barcelona, which help to understand or develop one or more of the following areas*:

  1. Equal and universal access to the Internet – Net neutrality.
  2. Digital privacy and data protection.
  3. Algorithm ethics.
  4. E-democracy and distributed digital governance.
  5. Access to knowledge and information for open digital protocols. Digital as a means of access to and expansion of fundamental rights.

How you can take part

Take part by filling in the following form (CA).

Applications are open from 19 January to 21 March 2021.

*Initiatives with entrepreneurial purposes or concerning online entrepreneurism will not be accepted, not because they are unimportant, but to delimit the framework of the project. However, if the initiative is from a company and serves digital rights or involves digital rights expansion, it will be included in the list.

The pandemic highlights inequalities in the use of ICT

Posted on by Ana Tapia

Use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has risen by 62% in recent months as a result of the Covid-19 health crisis. Teleworking, online schooling and remote administration procedures mainly account for the increase, which has been slightly greater in areas with average and above-average incomes, and lower in areas with below-average or low incomes.

These are the main conclusions from the Report on the digital divide in Barcelona in 2020, conducted by the Fundació BitHabitat with the collaboration of Mobile World Capital to analyse the evolution of the digital divide in the city and the impact of Covid-19 on the use of ICT. The report is based on a survey of 2,542 people in the autumn of 2020.

The vast majority of people in Barcelona have an internet connection (92%). Just 8% of households have no connection and most of these, some 55%, are made up of people over the age of 74. Notably, the divide in terms of connections and household incomes has been significantly reduced in Barcelona over the last four years. The number of low-income households with internet connections has risen from 75% to 91%, closing the gap to just 6% with high-income households, which have gone from 91% to 97%.

Teleworking

Teleworking has gained ground during lockdown. Some 59% of employed people have been able to do their work remotely over this period, while 39% were unable to as their work could not be done remotely.

The survey shows some significant differences by income: some 56.3% of people living in low-income areas were unable to telework, compared to just 24% who were unable to do so in high-income areas.

Education

Online schooling has mainly been possible thanks to ICT. Some 73.2% of schoolchildren under 16 have been able to continue their studies online during the lockdown, according to people surveyed living in the same home, while 26.8% have been unable to.

However, in low-income homes, in over 50% of cases where children did not continue their education online the reason was because they did not have sufficient devices, a decent connection or the necessary training. In the highest income bands, these causes represented 20-22% of cases.

E-administration

At the same time, the lockdown and the social and health crisis have seen e-administration procedures rocket. Over 75% of people living in average or above-average income areas have conducted e-procedures with the administration, compared to 63% in low-income areas.

Some 81.9% of people with university qualifications have conducted procedures online, compared to 28.7% of people without studies. Over 80% of people under the age of 55 have conducted e-procedures, compared to just 34% of people over 75.

Qualitative analysis of the ICT officer programme

The ITC officer programme was launched by the City Council as part of the Shock Plan for Digital Inclusion to help people conduct e-procedures with the administration. In the period from 21 September to 27 November 2020, the service helped resolve 3,068 e-procedures and attended to more than 1,904 people in person, devoting 30 minutes to each of them on average.

Two out of three people required support to apply for economic support: 33% for unemployment benefits and subsidies, 21% for income support and 7% for the guaranteed citizen income.

The digital divide, which is not only linked to equipment but to digital skills, is wider among the most vulnerable.

Want to know more?

At Ca l’Alier, the urban innovation centre and headquarters of the Fundació Bit Habitat, you can see an exhibition on the digital divide in the city. Full data from the survey can also be found on the Open Data BCN website.

New domains up by 20% in Europe due to the pandemic

Posted on by Ana Tapia

The pandemic, and in particular the lockdown in the spring, has prompted an increase in the creation of new domains.

The recommendation for people to work from home and the impossibility of attending to customers in traditional establishments mean that so far this year the number of newly created websites is up by 20% in Europe, with e-commerce accounting for a large volume.

The data for the whole of Europe is handled by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), whose goal is to promote and participate in the development of high standards for Internet Country Code Top-Level Domain Registries (ccTLDs), in other words, the two-letter domains corresponding to countries.

For instance, .es domains (Spain) reached the same levels as in 2013, while .it domains (Italy) reached record figures, with over 60,000 new domains registered.

With the exception of August (summer in the northern hemisphere and consequently in Europe), the volume of registrations was high and averaged 0.9% in the last quarter (some 3.4% over the last 12 months).

At the peak of the first lockdown, newly created domains rose by 20% compared to the same period last year. Though some doubt remains as to whether this can be attributed to the pandemic, if it was the case, it would be a matter of checking whether these domains are renewed once the health crisis is over.

The average number of .barcelona domain renewals is up by 10% compared to last year, and 3% compared to 2018. This figure means we can affirm that although domain loyalty is reasonably high, there is still room for it to improve.

‘Barcelona Accelerates’ its backing for innovative start-ups

Posted on by Comunicació

The new ‘Barcelona Accelerates’ initiative will invest up to ten million euros in six private venture capital funds with the intention of providing a boost for innovative start-ups in the city and keeping the digital enterprise ecosystem competitive. The investment companies selected will have to invest at least three times the amount awarded and make a commitment to investing an equal amount in companies led by women.

Companies from the Barcelona metropolitan area belonging to the sectors defined as strategic in the Barcelona Green Deal will be able to benefit.

These sectors have the greatest capacity to generate added value, create quality jobs and position the city brand at a global level: digital economy, creative industries, the green economy, 4.0 industry, health and bio, sport and sports tech, food and food tech and the blue economy.

The measure corresponds to the strategy to reactivate the city economy and help it grow, to tackle the effects of Covid-19 and strengthen Barcelona as southern Europe’s digital capital.

Smart City Week returns with a new edition focusing on digital inclusion

Posted on by Ana Tapia

The third edition of Smart City Week is being held from 9 to 15 November with the slogan ‘Reconnecting Barcelona: City, Society and Technology’. Jointly organised with the municipal foundation BIT Habitat, the programme includes over thirty free online activities reflecting on digital inclusion in the city, a priority for improving the situation of people for whom technology is still a barrier.

This edition broadens its outlook to open up the debate to citizens and analyse the opportunities offered by technological advances for fairer, more sustainable and more inclusive cities.

The activities being offered include lectures, debates, exhibitions, documentaries and initiatives for families, with three itineraries providing the common thread for the programme:

  • The city we see: activities relating to access to technology, connected spaces and the explanation of urban space.
  • The city we don’t see: infrastructures which make digital interaction possible, linked to related activities through an explanation of the digital city and skills acquisition.
  • The city we imagine: the city of the future, presenting activities linked to the innovation ecosystem and the projection of the future.

BIT Habitat, the urban innovation centre housed in Ca l’Alier, is also inaugurating an exhibition on the digital divide. Under the slogan ‘An analogical vision of digital inequality’, the display explores the race towards total digitalisation.

Welcome to the new .barcelona web!

Posted on by Comunicació

We are introducing the new .barcelona website, a gateway from physical to digital Barcelona. Events, entities, small and large shops, small and large businesses… There is room for everyone in this space, a place dedicated to .barcelona, the domain that links your product and/or service to one of the most innovative cities in the world.

This website aims to afford a voice and visibility to those spaces that are committed to the city domain, thus creating a strong digital community.

This new website is more visual, dynamic and intuitive, more accessible and user-oriented. The web design can be adapted to all types of screens and devices, as this has been one of the requirements when developing this space. In addition, it features the ability to interconnect all related contents in order to simplify the search for information.

Among the new contents on .barcelona, ​we would like to highlight the following:

  • The Tours: Different thematic tours around digital Barcelona are suggested. Websites with similar topics are grouped together and can be browsed by means of an interactive and infographic point map. Each point includes information on that .barcelona domain.
  • Projects: The most representative projects that are being developed within the framework of .barcelona are shown. In fact, the domain benefits are reinvested in society.

New edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress

Posted on by Comunicació

From November 19 to 21, there is the ninth edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, one of the leading international events on intelligent cities.

Under the claim “Cities made of dreams”, the edition of this year highlights the progress achieved by internationally promoting the concept of smart cities to achieve a sustainable and inclusive future.

The ninth edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress focuses on 5 themes: digital transformation, the urban environment, mobility, governance and finance and inclusive cities.

The city of Barcelona is at Smart City Expo with the stand of the City Council of Barcelona, explaining its smart city model structured on three pillars:
• The architecture of transversal information systems.
• Data as a fundamental element for the governance of the city.
• The objectives of sustainable development that guides municipal actions.