Part of: GS Prelims and GS-II- Governance; GS-III- Awareness in IT
In News:
Use of Social media was allowed in Jammu & Kashmir but Internet connectivity is made available “with mac-binding”.
Every device has a Media Access Control (MAC) address, a hardware identification number that is unique to it.
While accessing the Internet, every device is assigned an IP address.
Mac-binding essentially means binding together the MAC and IP addresses, so that all requests from that IP address are served only by the computer having that particular MAC address
In effect, it means that if the IP address or the MAC address changes, the device can no longer access the Internet
Also, monitoring authorities can trace the specific system from which a particular online activity was carried out
