Durga Vahini, the “moral police”

[email protected] (The Hindu)
February 5, 2013

New Delhi, Feb 5: The Durga Vahini or Durga brigade appeared in the early 1990s at the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement: its objective was to band together Hindu nationalism's female “youth.”

This organisation, like the Bajrang Dal, too, stresses defence — especially self-defence — of young Hindu women, including training in the use of firearms. It also continues the tradition started by the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, a women's organisation founded in 1936 alongside the RSS, whose primary objective was to train Hindu women in self-defence techniques to enable them to resist Muslim aggressors.durga

The founding chairperson of the Durga Vahini is Sadhvi Rithambara, known for her provocative speeches against Muslims. The self-advertised mission of the group is 'protection of Rashtra-Dharma and Sanskriti through… a renaissance in the Hindu society with Service, Security and Sanskars as its motto.' It was set up by the Sangh Parivar as a “moral police” to specially take up issues related to obscenity, molestation and human trafficking “to protect the womenfolk.”

In a mission statement, the outfit says its members provide “a solid support to the Hindu society and culture by ending all types of insecurity, unrighteousness, immorality and inequality among Hindus and to launch our nation on to the path of progress; to create a Dharmic atmosphere and to re-establish Dharma by destroying all the wicked and crooked people like Durga Devi did in the ancient times”.

The Durga Vahini has seen action on several occasions, starting in 1990 during the riots in Bijnor in western Uttar Pradesh: on that occasion, its activists organised a Bajrang Dal procession through the Muslim quarter of the city shouting provocative slogans that triggered the violence. Then in March 2002, Durga Vahini activists, wielding tridents and sporting saffron headbands, ransacked the Orissa Assembly, along with members of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal to protest against criticism of their members by some MLAs. In March 2004, six Durga Vahini members were arrested in Gwalior for blackening the face of Neetu Sapra, director of the play Kal Aaj Aur Kal. The VHP and the Bajrang Dal claimed that the play depicted Rama, Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman in an “indecent” way.

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Agencies
July 9,2020

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

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Agencies
July 18,2020

New Delhi, Jul 18: India's national cybersecurity agency CERT-in, has warned people of credit card skimming spreading across the world through e-commerce platforms.

Attackers are typically targeting e-commerce sites because of their wide presence, popularity and the environment LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said in a notice on Thursday.

Recently, attackers targeted sites which were hosted on Microsoft's IIS server running with the ASP.NET web application framework, it said.

Some of the sites affected by the attack were found to be running ASP.NET version 4.0.30319, which is no longer officially supported by Microsoft and may contain multiple vulnerabilities, CERT-In said.

The notice also included a list of best practices for website developers including the use of the latest version of ASP.NET web framework, IIS web server and database server.

The advisory is based on research by Malwarebytes which found that this skimming campaign likely began sometime in April this year.

Credit card skimming has become a popular activity for cybercriminals over the past few years, and the increase in online shopping during the pandemic means additional business for them, too, Malwarebytes said in a blog post, adding that attackers do not need to limit themselves to the most popular e-commerce platforms.

Researchers from global cybersecurity and anti-virus brand Kaspersky had warned in December last year that more cybercriminal groups will target online payment processing systems in 2020. 

It said that over the past couple of years, so-called JS-skimming (the method of stealing of payment card data from online stores), has gained immense popularity among attackers. 

Kaspersky researchers in their report said they are currently aware of at least 10 different actors involved in these type of attacks.

Their number will continue to grow during the next year, the report said, adding that the most dangerous attacks will be on companies that provide services such as e-commerce as-a-service, which will lead to the compromise of thousands of companies.

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Agencies
June 12,2020

New Delhi, Jun 12: The Supreme Court on Friday asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to convene a meeting of the Finance Ministry and RBI officials over the weekend to decide whether interest incurred on EMIs during the moratorium period can be charged by banks.

A bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M.R. Shah queried Mehta as the court was concerned since the Centre has deferred loan for three months.

"Then how can interest of these 3 months be added?" the apex bench asked. Mehta replied: "I need to sit down with the RBI officials and have a meeting."

SBI's counsel, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, intervened during the proceedings and said "all banks are of the view that interest cannot be waived for a six month EMI moratorium period".

"We need to discuss it with the RBI," insisted Rohatgi.

Justice Bhushan then asked Mehta to convene a meeting of the RBI and Finance Ministry officials over the weekend, and listed the matter for further hearing on June 17.

The top court, during the hearing, indicated that it was not considering a complete waiver of interest but was only concerned that postponement of interest shouldn't accrue further interest on it.

After the RBI said the waiver of interest charges on EMIs during moratorium will lead to loss of 1 per cent of the nation's GDP, the top court had earlier asked the Finance Ministry to reply, whether the interest could be waived or it would continue during the moratorium period.

The top court said these are not normal times, and it is a serious issue, as on one hand moratorium is granted and then, the interest is charged on loans during this period.

"There are two issues in this (matter). No interest during the moratorium period and no interest on interest," said Justice Bhushan. The observation from the bench came on a petition by Gajendra Sharma, in which he sought a direction to declare portion of the RBI's March 27 notification as ultra vires to the extent it charged interest on the loan amount during the moratorium period.

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