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North Korean
rhetoric Importing trouble |
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Right to Education
Troublemakers of
Bangladesh
Betty Memsahib of
Narangibaugh
Can spam be canned? Massive attack on
anti-spam service
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Importing trouble
India’s current account deficit – the gap between imports and exports – has risen to an all-time high of 6.7 per cent of the GDP in the December 2012 quarter, according to RBI data released last week. The reasons are well known: exports have remained muted due to trouble in the European Union and slowdown in the US, while oil and gold imports have surged. There is a bit of good news too. The balance of payments has shown a surplus of $781 million compared to a deficit of $156 million in the previous quarter. The surplus comes from an increase in foreign investment in Indian stocks and bonds as well as overseas borrowings by Indian companies and banks. Portfolio investments, however, are fickle and can move out quickly over any sign of trouble. The worse-than-expected current account deficit has its negative implications. The rupee may weaken further against the dollar. The rupee fell 16 per cent in 2011 and 3 per cent in 2012. On Thursday, the last working day, it closed at 54.28 against the dollar. Secondly, the RBI may find it difficult to lower interest rates required to boost economic growth. Cheaper loans fuel consumption, thus driving up imports while higher interest rates attract foreign capital inflows. Solutions are also available and the government is not unduly perturbed. There is the hope that exports would pick up since the US is coming out of the woods. More reforms are required to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) in key sectors of the economy. There are small but periodic hikes in diesel prices to cut the oil subsidy. A duty hike on gold is also possible. On his way back from Durban Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured the media, and the country, that his government would complete its term and reforms would be carried forward. The current account deficit is not bad in itself but an equally serious fiscal deficit and high inflation may deter foreign investment. |
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Right to Education
Uninviting
buildings, indifferent teachers and a very discouraging ambience of our schools has frustrated lofty plans of the government to make primary education universal and effective. In 2009, with the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, all states and Union Territories were expected to comply with certain norms for elementary education. The norms included optimum pupil-teacher ratio, infrastructure rules like adequate drinking water, toilets, stipulated working days and instruction hours and establishment of school management committees. All schools were told to comply with the norms by March 31, 2013. It seems unlikely that the deadline set by the government will be met. Going by the data released by the government agencies, about 40% primary schools do not have adequate teachers, 33% are without girls’ toilets and 39% lack ramps for children with disabilities. Several NGOs working in the education sector have expressed fear that over 3 lakh private budget schools will face the threat of closing down, impacting 4-5 crore students. We legislate with rather ease, but haven’t developed the skills and structures to implement what we legislate. The government will have to extend the deadline for the benefit of crores of students, it should fine the defaulters though. The central government should also ask states to replicate successful modules, like the one followed in Gujarat where rules of recognising private schools are based on meeting performance standards.
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Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'! — Audrey Hepburn
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Troublemakers of Bangladesh President
Pranab Mukherjee was recently on a state visit to Dhaka. Bangladesh is witnessing turbulent times with clashes between nationalists and Jamaat elements who had links with anti-Bangladesh forces, manipulated by Pakistan. The President’s visit reminds me of my own visit to Bangladesh in 1972 as Security Adviser to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. It may be recalled that after Partition, Pakistan consisted of two wings — West and East Pakistan — which later emerged as Bangladesh. In the elections held in 1970, Mujibur Rehman and his party emerged as winners which were not acceptable to diehard elements like Z A Bhutto. After a brief incarceration in Pakistan, Mujibur Rehman was released but sent to the UK as a neutral destination. Immediately thereafter Mujibur Rehman flew to Delhi where he was given a rousing reception with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself receiving him at the foot of the ladder. Mujibur Rehman expressed his gratitude to Indira Gandhi for India’s support to the cause of Bangladesh and flew off to Dhaka in the same plane. His arrival in Dhaka witnessed a massive reception from Bangladeshis. Indira Gandhi’s senior adviser DP Dar was sent to Dhaka as observer of Bangladesh affairs while JN Dixit, a senior Foreign Service officer, was sent as CDA to Dhaka. Soon after a request came to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from Mujibur Rehman for sparing the services of a senior officer of the Intelligence Bureau to look into the security arrangements for himself in Bangladesh and suggest the necessary recommendations. I was chosen for this job. I arrived in Dhaka on January 21, 1972, and stayed there for a week interacting with senior officers of the Bangladesh security establishment and also visited the residence and office of Mujibur Rehman. The Bangabandhu, as he was reverentially called by the Bangladeshis, preferred to stay at his own residence at Dhanmandi, a middle class area of Dhaka. His family members stayed with him in the same house and Mujibur Rehman’s wife cooking food for her husband. There was a state guest house with sufficient space and security arrangements such as adequate fencing, etc, and this would have been a better and safer place for the President and his family to stay. When President Mujibur Rehman set out on a visit to the countryside by road and I travelled in the motorcade observing the security arrangements made at various places where he was stopped and requested to address them. There was total chaos in the arrangements and he was literally mobbed everywhere. President Mujibur Rehman travelled up to Tangail, about 75 miles north of Dhaka, where he accepted the surrender of arms by Tiger Siddiqui, who was one of the Mukti Bahini heroes of Bangladesh liberation movement and had fought the Pakistani forces in 1971. President Mujib made a visit to Calcutta in February 1972 where a massive public reception awaited him at the maidan. It was one of the largest gatherings in Calcutta’s history. Indira Gandhi was with Mujib on the rostrum and she was dressed in the traditional Bengali garad saree. She also spoke in Bengali in which she was proficient because of her education at Santiniketan during her younger days. Later, I met Mujibur Rehman in the Calcutta Raj Bhavan and discussed with him for nearly half an hour on the essentials of my security scheme which had already been given to him. An important recommendation was that he should shift from his ancestral house in Dhanmandi and move into the state guest house. He dismissed the suggestion out of hand. He said that the guest house was notorious as Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s erstwhile military ruler, used to do all sorts of undesirable acts during his official visits and that he would not move out of his own Dhanmandi residence. I said that he should at least look for a spacious house with ample frontage and distance from the road to enable the construction of certain security structures and positioning of the inner and outer cordons. He dismissed this suggestion also and said, “Who would think of causing me any harm.” I found myself talking to an overconfident leader living in an unreal world. No doubt, the Bangabandhu had nothing to fear from his own people at this time. In June 1972, Mujibur Rehman fell ill and needed surgery. His family members decided to go to London and India offered an Air India plane to ferry him. I was chosen to accompany him to London and I remained there during his medical treatment and returned with him a few days later. But dark clouds were forming above his head and conspiracies were occurring in the Dhaka cantonment, which Mujibur Rehman was unaware of. My security scheme was given personally to Majib and a copy was sent later officially to the Ministry of External Affairs. These were of no consequence. In August 1975 the tragic massacre of Sheikh Mujib and his entire family in his own Dhanmandi residence was perpetrated by a section of the Bangladesh Army. It was a great tragedy, waiting to happen. The emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation was a historic inevitability. Dr Kissinger his memoirs, “The White House Years”, published in 1979, has given a detailed account of the India-Pakistan crisis of 1971 as Nixon and he himself viewed it. He believed that it was the beginning of a liberation movement of Bangladeshis. But President Nixon held India responsible for the crisis in East Pakistan which eventually resulted in the war and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. Dr Kissinger himself had viewed the emergence of Bangladesh as a visionary and thinker, which he was. He wrote, “Bangladesh was in effect East Bengal, separated only by religion from India’s most fractious and most separatist state of West Bengal. They shared language, tradition, culture and, above all, a volatile national character. Whether it turned nationalist or radical, Bangladesh would emerge as an independent nation”. Dr Kissinger went on to say that the Muslim heritage between Bangladesh and Pakistan might eventually lead to a rapprochement with Pakistan, which did not happen. While there was no question of any rapprochement between Bangladesh and Pakistan, there are Muslim diehard elements in Bangladesh who draw their inspiration from Pakistan. These elements aim to strike at the very basic concept of Bangladesh. A Bangladesh tribunal had sentenced Jamaat Vice-President Delawar Hossain Sayedee to death and assistance to Pakistani troops in the genocide during the Bangladesh war. The more rabid elements of Jamaat, who were described as Razakkars during the liberation days, even vandalised the Shaheed Minar which symbolised the Bangladesh liberation war. During the visit of Pranab Mukherjee, these Jamaat elements resorted to violence in the streets and the army had to be called out for putting down the violence. Begum Khaleda, the leader of the opposition party BNP, was known to be sympathetic with the Jamaat elements. She cancelled her appointment with President Pranab Mukherjee, even though it was fixed on her own request. This act of Begum Khaleda was condemned by the Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dipu Moni as an ungracious act on the part of a former Prime Minister. By and large, however, President Pranab Mukherjee’s visit went off
successfully. The writer is a former Governor of UP and West Bengal.
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Betty Memsahib of Narangibaugh In
1984, I was selected to enquire into how best tourism could be promoted in certain parts of Madhya Pradesh without causing ecological degradation. The impact of tourism was a subject that had hardly been researched before. Of the places chosen for the study of their tourism potential and impact, Khajuraho held the pride of place though much had been written and said about this astonishing temple town that dated back to the 9th and 10th centuries where the artistic and architectural genius that prevailed during the reign of the Chandela kings had quite suddenly emerged out of wilderness. There was a constant inflow of tourists to Khajuraho, which was one of the preferred destinations after the Taj Mahal in Agra. The impact of tourism on the environment and society was clearly discernible in Khajuraho—the temple town wore a festive air and I had the feeling that we were in a foreign land, attending some melee. I invited the head purohit to talk to me at the cottage. He was full of grief that the increased tourism into Khajuraho had broken his family and traditions. He told me that his two sons had taken up employment as barmen and waiters in a luxury hotel. “They now drink alcohol, eat the flesh of animals, dance with foreign women and wear bowties”. The sons had been cast out and the priest worried about who would succeed him to show people around the temples, interpret their sculptures or even show mankind the right path after he was gone. He refused to partake of the tea and sweetmeats offered to him. Khajuraho was a glowing example of a poor area, hidden away in the jungles of a backward region, having raised its standard of living and gaining an international ambience through showcasing the remains of an ancient temple city. In the process, medieval buildings had been carefully restored; Khajuraho had its own airport and had become a coveted tourism destination. I rejoiced in the light and air of Khajuraho and the thick forests where the kind of peace that pervades centres of worship was evident. And there was the more interesting aspect of a constant flow of wide-eyed foreigners who examined the deeply erotic temple art that continues to perplex the Western mind till today. I came across a Frenchman analysing each sculpture down to its finest details. A newly wedded American couple wondered about the advances that Indians made since the 10th century. “We tried the Indian curry. Why not try an Indian position?” I made friends with Betty, a European lady, who had been the mistress of the raja of Chatarpur for years. He had granted her a “jaagir” called Narangibaugh, where her Swiss husband lived in a tree house to superintend the vast orchard land. I enjoyed talking to her. She had been asked to leave the palace as a fallout of the intrigue created by the “ranis” of the king. Leaving Narangibaugh to her husband, she spent the entire day attending to guests at the café. I invited Betty to the cottage where I was staying for a drink. She told me about her life and the vacuity of her situation, for there was a constant yearning to revive the relationship that she had shared with the king. As she left a few hours later, I handed her a sheet of paper on which I had been recreating the story of her passion. We have run out of excuses for not getting to know one another better/ the frailty of your argument interspersed with apology holds for me strongly no longer—/ as I have altered a little, and my mind now reacts in the natural reflex, not selectively as before./ And in the natural reflex, your layers of strength have fallen away,/ and I now love you for your limitation,/ and for the intensity that I shared with you
alone.
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Can spam be canned?
The recent cyber attack was because of a battle between spamers and those who try to stop them. There are 100 billion spam emails sent daily. However, that number is decreasing.
There
are more than 100 billion spam emails sent every day and most of them seem to end up in my junk email. “Beyoncé Knowles”. “Weight Loss Now”. “Great Buy Opportunity”. Their short titles seem to read like a list of my fantasies. The Twitter spam that turns up is more like my fears: “Someone is talking about you.” Each one tempts you to open it, download an attachment or click on a link. Spam, of course, is the Internet equivalent of unsolicited junk mail – originally sent by email, but now reaching us via tweets or even e-books as well. Even though there has been an “unprecedented decrease” in the amount of spam emails sent since 2011 – by 8.2 per cent – it still accounts for 71.1 per cent of the 144.8 billion emails sent every day, according to the IT firm Kaspersky Labs. Some analysts have suggested that up to 40 per cent of half a billion daily tweets are spam. In 2012, 19.5 per cent of the world’s unsolicited emails were sent from China, 15.6 per cent from the US and about 2 per cent from the UK
Web war Just recently, a web war between an anti-spam group and a Dutch web host called Cyberbunker was violent enough to slow down the wider Internet in an attack described as the biggest of its kind. The crimes that spam has been accused of read like the rap sheet of a fairly common criminal: selling dodgy medicines or fake Louis Vuitton, extorting money through requests for help, and stealing your identity by directing you to a website that asks for your personal details – a practice known as phishing. Malware that is often downloaded without you knowing it can turn your innocent-looking computer into an automated spam factory sending out hundreds of spam mails a minute to your nearest and dearest. The only clue: that it has slowed down. So while some may see spam just as the background noise of the Internet, for the security industries, and indeed for many of us, spam is “another problem to be solved and we have to do the best job we can at solving it,” says Don Blumenthal, senior policy adviser at the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG Internet domain.
Unforeseen consequence Yet for others, such as new media theorist Jussi Parikka, “spam messages are also like the unconscious of our cultural fantasies”. Parikka is reader in media and design at Winchester School of Art. “From Viagra to instant riches, spam embodies an exaggerated, hyperbolic version of the things we are taught to dream about.” And according to Kristopher Gansing, artistic director of Berlin’s Transmediale Festival of Art and Digital Culture, “spam has become the essence of human communication as we live more and more of our social life in a spam-like way. “For me, the ‘I just bought a Soya Latte’ status update is indeed the ultimate spam, especially since it replicates through your social network without any hackers needing to automate it.” In the words of Finn Brunton, “spam is one of the complex chaotic unforeseen consequences of the extraordinary open system that we have created”. Brunton is a professor of information at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet. (due to eb published by MIT Press in May) “It is one of the constant double-edged swords of the Internet that it is brilliantly easy to build new systems and services for, but at the same brilliantly easy to take advantage of,” he says. “So the changing meaning of spam is a mirror to the changing value of the Internet.”
According to Brunton, the first proto-spam message was sent in 1978 by the Digital Equipment Corporation to all 593 members of the Arpanet community announcing the launch of their new Arpanet-enabled computer, whether they were interested or not. Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was the progenitor of the global Internet. Then in April 1994, Arizona-based law firm Canter and Siegel sent its advertisement “Green Card Message – Final One?” to all the members of 5,500 Usenet discussion groups and created the first commercial spam. Or what we today know as spam. And for Brunton, this was the moment of transition for spam, as the purpose of spam was “all about money now”. By 2003–4 a motley crew of spammers that ranged from semi-legitimate business entrepreneurs to outright criminals was increasingly being put under pressure by anti-spam filtering systems that used ever more sophisticated algorithms, and by harsher penalties for “spamming”. “They were being presented with a kind of devil’s bargain, as either they could either go legit and probably out of business, or start to lie about who their spams were from and what they wanted to get round filtering systems and wait for the law to catch up with them” Then in 2007 the infamous Storm botnet hit, which at its height may have controlled up to 50 million Windows computers and earned its creator, according to research, an estimated $9,500 a day from purchases of the goods it was flogging. If anyone was foolish enough to open such emails as “230 dead as storm batters Europe” they would find an article to download or a link to a web page, and clicking on either would lead to malware taking over their computer and sending out 150 messages a minute. The Storm botnet is an example of how “spam was now about building capacity” to “create vast systems where the spammers no longer even have to pay for the electricity” to make spamming as profitable as possible, Brunton says.
Dark side of digital culture For Blumenthal, whether spam is the product of organised crime or an 18 year old in his parents’ basement it doesn’t matter, “if different protocols had been used years ago there may not have been so much spam now. Our standard email address makes dictionary attacks much easier because with @domain you can keep guessing the address and you will eventually get it right. In contrast the X.400 protocol would have made it much harder.” Jussi Parikka’s view is that “spam is a good reminder that the Internet is a rich cultural sphere of human interaction, and not all sides of it are pleasant. The dark sides of digital culture are insights to the whole cultural logic of our computing technologies such as automation.” For David Emm, a security researcher at Kaspersky Labs, the future of spam is uncertain because filters can identify 98 per cent of all spam and “the economics of spam are changing – the emergence of Web 2.0 has made it cheaper for them to use legal advertising methods.” Spam, though, will also take new forms, Kristopher Gansing believes. “With 3D-printing technology becoming more widely available, I can imagine a new kind of physical spam becoming possible – spamming people’s workplaces and private lives with unwanted objects.”
In the future, Brunton thinks that spam will become more personalised and salient. “Personalisation is figuring out how to make a message that is personal enough that filters don’t catch them and that people fall for them, through a kind of lightweight identity theft by building up deep dossiers on individuals and their relationships from what people post online. “Being salient is about making it almost impossible to tell if someone who is saying ‘I love you’ online is a real person or a bot.” So it appears that the cat and mouse game goes on. —
The Independent
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Massive attack on anti-spam service A
day after details emerged of an alleged massive cyber attack targeting the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus, questions arose about the severity and origin of the attack. The target of the attack, which was widely reported on Wednesday, was the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus based in Geneva. Reports described the attack as so large that it affected regular data traffic mainly in Europe but also around the world. But on Thursday the website Gizmodo said there in fact hadn't been complaints from large Internet-based operations such as Amazon and Netflix that the Internet being unusually sluggish. Gizmodo also said organisations that monitor the health of the web "showed zero evidence" that the attack had severely affected Internet traffic and suggested it might have been used as a publicity stunt by the company that Spamhaus hired to help it defend itself. "Why didn't anyone notice this over the course of the past week, when it began?" Gizmodo asked. It claimed that the only people willing to make any claims about the validity or scope of the attack were directly involved. An expert from another Internet company, Alexander Lyamin of Moscow's Highload Labs, claimed that the attack was launched by a gang of hackers from Russia and neighbouring countries. Lyamin, whose company also specialises in defending against DDoS attacks, told The Wall Street Journal that the gang had earlier launched a series of brief strikes on several top Russian Internet companies. Lyamin told the Journal he believed whoever was behind the attack had hired the Russian hackers to launch the attack, which he said is a copycat of one undertaken in October 2010. "This is not new," he said. "And I really doubt this is the biggest." Spamhaus said the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack started on relatively small scale on March 19. A DDoS attack is carried out when the attacker sends so many requests to a server that it is overwhelmed and goes off line. The attack grew to the rate of 300 billion bits per second of DDoS traffic or about three times bigger than the biggest DDoS attacks known to date, the US-based ComputerWorld reported Wednesday. Germany's federal office for information technology security also called it the largest mass attack that it had ever seen. Reports suggested that the attack was linked to a dispute between Spamhaus and the Dutch company Cyberbunker that arose after Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by email providers to help them identify unwanted junk email also called spam. Spamhaus posted a statement Thursday saying it had been overwhelmed by inquiries about the attack, which it said "certainly is the biggest attack ever directed at Spamhaus." Spamhaus also said a number of people have claimed they were involved in the attack, but it wasn't currently possible to confirm their claims. The IT security company that Spamhaus called for help was Cloudflare. Matthew Prince, chief executive of the San Francisco-based company, was quoted Wednesday as saying his company had never seen a public attack as large as the one launched on Spamhaus. On Thursday Prince tweeted that the attack was "not baloney" and said it had been confirmed by another IT security company. His tweet included a link to a New York Times story that said millions of ordinary Internet users had experienced delays in service. That story quoted an Internet activist who identified himself as a spokesman for the attackers as saying Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for abusing its influence.
— DPA
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