Temple slave: Devendra Shukla, 34, was forced to work in various jobs for a pittance by Sat Prakash Sharma
A Hindu priest has won $2.3million compensation after being forced to 'work as a slave' for seven years at a Hindu temple in New York.
Devout Devendra Shukla had his passport confiscated by Sat Prakash Sharma and his wife Geeta - who ran the Corono ashram in Corona, Queens - and was then forced to do their bidding for a pittance in exchange.
The court was told the 34-year-old worked 18-hour days, including heavy labour on a construction site, for which he received a paltry $50 a week.
Over the seven years he stayed with the Sharmas, Mr Shukla received a miserly $21,000 and was unable to once go home and see his family the whole time.
At an age when children in this country are either at home playing or starting out in school these youngsters in India are putting in a day's work on a building site.
Struggling to hold up shovels which are as tall as them, they are helping to build drainage works in front of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Dehli in time for the Commonwealth Games which takes place this autumn.
They shovel stones into baskets which are then carried away by other children as their parents work nearby on the same construction project.
Parents who bring their children to work on the site have been promised extra bonuses such as money for bread and milk for their children, on top of their normal pay.
Children and parents also receive an additional meal if both of them work on the site.
The Games are due to be held in the Indian capital from October 3-14, but concerns remain over construction of its sporting and transport infrastructure.
The sheer scale of the project has drawn an enormous population of migrant workers from all over India.
And now it seems children have also been drafted in to get the stadium and its surrounding area finished on time.
This week the High Court of Delhi has sought a response from the Government over the alleged failure to provide all the benefits of labour laws to workers involved in construction work for the coming Commonwealth Games.
Workers are being paid below the minimum wage in order to complete these projects whilst also being forced to live and work under sub-standard conditions.
The Commonwealth Games Federation has repeatedly expressed concern about the slow pace of work for the Games, which will involve 6,000 athletes drawn from the former British Empire competing in 17 sports.
Federation president Mike Fennell said in December he was distressed by a report by the CGF evaluation commission that two major venues would not be ready until June, barely three months before the opening ceremony.
The commission said that work on the Nehru stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies and the athletics programme will be held, and the swimming complex, was way behind schedule.
A girl drags a basket of stones at a drainage site near the Commonwealth Games stadium, which is due to open in October
At an age when children in this country are either at home playing or starting out in school these youngsters in India are putting in a day's work on a building site
The Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium goes up in New Delhi ahead of the October 2010 Commonwealth Games
The Commonwealth Games Federation has repeatedly expressed concern about the slow pace of work for the Games, which will involve 6,000 athletes drawn from the former British Empire
Parents who bring their children to work on the site have been promised extra bonuses such as bread and milk, on top of their normal pay
A boy struggles to hold up a shovel which is nearly the same size as him. He and the children around him are working alongside their parents at a construction project near the Commonwealth Games stadium
-In a clear and simple way, this Cisco graphic shows the relationship of the parties in a DDOS attack. -
At 9 a.m., millions of users of Twitter.com found themselves unable to access the microblogging Web site, the modern version of the telephone party line through which more than 40 million people announce what they are doing, reading, eating and thinking at any given moment.
Undaunted, the rejected Twitterers trooped to Facebook.com, the social networking site that has more than 200 million users, which has "status updates" that mimic Twitter feeds. But before users could begin to type, "Is sad that Twitter is down," a terrible and panic-inducing discovery: Facebook was down, too.
Kathleen Loughlin, a spokeswoman for Facebook, also cited a denial-of-service attack, which she said "resulted in degraded service for some users." She added that no user data were at risk during the attack and promised that Facebook was "continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."
"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the official Twitter blog. "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as . . . Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now."
The first big DDoS attack, in February 2000 took down some of the Web's most popular sites for hours, including Yahoo, CNN, eBay, Amazon.com, Buy.com, and E*Trade. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation promptly held a news conference to discuss the disruption to the Internet and eventually tracked down the perpetrator, 15-year-old "Mafiaboy," after he bragged about it to friends online.
Mafiaboy was most likely trying to get attention, like script kiddie hackers do when they deface Web sites. Other attackers have different agendas. For instance, there are politically motivated DDoS attacks, such as those involving Russian and Georgian sites last year. Estonia sites were attacked in 2007. Meanwhile, the origin of recent DDoS attacks targeting U.S. government sites and sites in South Korea remain a mystery.
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Twitter users were unable to log in for several hours after the social networking site became the victim of a cyber attack.
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What's a denial-of-service attack? A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is any effort designed to interfere with access to a Web site or Internet service. A common method of attack involves flooding a target server with so many communications requests that legitimate traffic can not get through. This can shut down or slow down the site temporarily.
Web sites aren't the only things that can be targeted in DoS attacks. Unplugging someone's computer is a very basic type of DoS attack.
What's a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack? Because Web sites are built to handle a lot of traffic, it can take millions of simultaneous communications requests to have enough affect on the performance of the server for an attack. In a DDoS attack, tens of thousands or even millions of computers are used to send traffic to the target site all at the same time and repeatedly."It's a bit like 15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time--nothing can move."
What's a botnet? The hijacked PCs that are used in a DDoS attack comprise a botnet. The individual computers are called "bots," "zombies" or "slaves" and are controlled remotely by the "master" attacker. The attacker relays instructions to the bots via a command-and-control server, typically using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Botnets are also used to distribute spam. Some newer botnets, like one created by a version of Conficker, relay instructions via peer-to-peer.
How many bots are needed to take down a Web site? The number depends on how much resources, servers and bandwidth, the target site has. It can take 25,000 to 50,000 bots to cripple a typical site and as few as 10,000 or less for a small Web site, according to Kevin Stevens, a security researcher for SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit.
It's difficult to know exactly how big any particular botnet is and guesses vary widely. For example, estimates of the Conficker botnet ranged from 500,000 PCs to 10 million.
What kind of damage can a DoS attack do? A DoS can make a Web site completely inaccessible to anyone for a period of time, like the most recent attack did with Twitter. Or it can be equivalent to a hiccup, slowing down page loads or affecting only part of the site.
Sites that aren't in the direct line of fire can also be affected. For example, if a company that is attacked is hosting images or content that is fed to other sites, those other sites may have trouble. So many sites feature Twitter updates that it's likely some of those associated sites were impacted when Twitter was down and the ancillary site's requests to get updates were ignored.
How can a DDoS be prevented or stopped?
In 2001, the White House was able to thwart a DDoS attack that was programmed into the code of the Code Red virus by moving the site away from the targeted IP address.
And in 2005, Microsoft sidestepped a DDoS that was going to be triggered by PCs infected with the Blaster virus by killing the targeted IP address.
A company can reduce its risk by buying plenty of servers and bandwidth, and hosting content on backup servers. Companies can also limit the number of connections that the Web server allows at any one time and set the firewall to block certain types of data that are used in DDoS attacks, said SecureWorks' Stevens.
What can individuals do to prevent their computers from being used in a DDoS attack?
To keep malware off a computer, people should install the latest operating system and application patches, update their antivirus and other security software, consider using auto-updates for browsers and be careful about opening up attachments and visiting Web sites.
