It is that time of the year again when the king of fruits is back in demand. Mumbaikars can now buy the Alphonso online, directly from farmers in Devgad and Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. One of the first organisations to go solo with the sales was the Devgad Taluka Amba Utpadak Sahakari Sanstha Ltd (DTAUSS). The 25-year-old co-operative society is made up of 700 farmers from Devgad Taluka, all growing the Devgad Alphonso mango.
“Since we are a co-operative society of Devgad mango farmers, only the Devgad Alphonso is available on our website. It is a premium variety because of its superior taste and aroma. The rates differ every season because they are decided by market demand-supply and cost of production,” says Omkar Sapre, member of the board and chief marketing officer, DTAUSS, adding that the season has just started and so far the production looks average.
Problems are on the rise too. Due to reduction in subsidy on pesticides and fertilisers, their prices have increased, there is a shortage of adequate manpower to work on the fields, an increase in pests and lack of effective pesticides. “Since the tsunami of 2004, we have not seen a stable climate. It rains when it should be warm and gets cold when it should rain,” says Adv Ajit Gogate, chairman, DTAUSS.
The co-operative society is currently in the process of putting up a factory from where customers will be able to buy mango pulp, pickles, drinks, barfis and wadis directly.
Similarly, another organisation, AAR Mangoes works towards providing consumers mangoes directly from Ratnagiri. Grown on 40 acres of land on more than 2,000 trees, they are couriered and distributed to various parts of Maharashtra, including Mumbai, Kolhapur and Nashik.
“We only grow the Alphonso and the going rate this season ranges from R500 to R1,200 per dozen. The season has been average, and climate change has taken a toll on the fruit,” says Ganesh Ranade, a mango farmer.
Ask if the fruit they market is cheaper in comparison to what is available in the market and we are told that it is not possible. “We arrive 20 days late. That is because we do not artificially ripen our mangoes. They are organic. So due to the time lag, our products are 20 per cent more expensive than what is available at that time in the market,” says Ranade.
AAR Mangoes also offer mango tourism facilities. On packages of different rates, one can head to Ratnagiri, enjoy rural life for a few days and hog on mangoes. “We also make mango pulp in limited quantities,” says Ranade.
Naturally ripened mangoes have a natural aroma that is noticeable from a distance. Chemically ripened mangoes are devoid of such a smell.
The mangoes should look and feel soft. Chemically ripened mangoes are yellow, yet hard. Observe the colour. Naturally-ripened mangoes have uneven colouring in yellows and green. Many people feel that if mangoes show wrinkles, they are good. Mangoes will show wrinkles if they are overripe.
Mature mangoes develop a slight trough near the stem, enough to hold a drop of water or stop it from sliding down. Immature mangoes do not have that trough.
To place your orders, log on to www.devgadmango.com or www.aarmangoes.com or send email to mahitavision@gmail.com to place the order.
You could also call the AAR Mangoes representative in Hyderabad on 8099157444, Mumbai on 96192 46419.
The iconic fast food chain hopes nutritious menu options will boost sales.
McDonald's will be releasing an egg-white McMuffin in April for Americans to try once, spit out and never buy again. The Egg McMuffin is getting a makeover.
McDonald's has announced that it will debut a yolk-free version of its iconic breakfast sandwich as part of its latest effort to attract health-conscious consumers.
The "Egg White Delight," which rolls out on April 22, will clock in at just 250 calories and feature a slice of white cheddar and Canadian bacon on a whole grain English muffin. "According to the McDonald's webpage, the egg whites will be grilled and will be sandwiched by 8 grams of whole grains. The Canadian bacon is extra lean as well," says CBS News.
The yolk-free McMuffin isn't McDonald's first effort to be more nutritious. Last year, the chain began advertising a "Favorites Under 400 Calories" menu. It's also added more salad and wrap sandwich options to the menu, and revamped its Happy Meal offerings in 2011 by adding fruit slices and including fewer French fries.
The slimmer McMuffin comes on the heels of sluggish sales for one of the world's largest restaurant chains. Last week, the company said its Indian same-store sales slipped 3.3 percent in February.
Of course, the house that Ronald built is hardly alone in going healthy. "Though McDonald's dominates the fast-food breakfast category, competitors such as Dunkin' Donuts, Subway, and Starbucks Corp have offered egg whites — lower in fat and cholesterol than whole eggs — as a breakfast sandwich choice for years," says Reuters.
"It's a great move," said Sanjay Mehta, an executive vice president at food service consulting firm Technomic. "It will broaden [McDonald's] audience."
Of course, not everyone was quite so laudatory. Some members of the Twittersphere were predictably pessimistic about the new endeavor.
Instead of economics, are Congress president Sonia Gandhi‘s pet welfare schemes drawn from the occult?
In an Indian Express column that evaluates 15 years of Sonia Gandhi’s leadership, Chairman of Oxus Investments Surjit S Bhalla says that the Congress chief’s economic policies, which were aimed at helping the poor, but ended up hurting them the most, defy “pure reason” and dubs them “occult economics”.
Her policies have their origin in the creation of the Congress in 1885 by the Theosophical Society, an occultist movement, he says.
“Sonia UPA’s alchemy raised procurement prices of food grains beyond reason, helped a few rich farmers (say 20 million) and massively hurt ten times as many landless agricultural workers. And by generating super-inflation for four years, transformed the Indian economy beyond recognition,” says Bhalla.
Bhalla also analyses the economics of MGNREGA, a UPA pet scheme aimed at giving employment to the rural poor.
According to Bhalla, as per the NSS data of 2009-10, of the Rs 1,70,000 crore spent on MGNREGA, only a fifth reached the intended beneficiaries. In other words, about Rs 1,40,000 crore went to the non-poor. The scheme has helped nothing but corruption, says Bhalla.
Another example of ‘occult economics’ is the 2013-14 budget, in which the government aims at 13 percent GDP growth and 16 percent expenditure growth, which is to be financed with a 19 percent growth in tax revenue.
A third example of this brand of economics is the Food Security Bill, which is slated to be presented in the current Budget session of Parliament. The bill seeks to provide subsidised food grains to 67 percent of the country’s population.
According to a recent report in The Hindu, the bill would burden the government with a subsidy bill of about Rs 1.35 lakh crore.
Such economic policies have already halved the GDP growth, doubled inflation, depreciated the rupee by 20 percent and widened the current account deficit to 6.7 percent of GDP.
For the country to come out of the economic rot, Sonia has to change her occult spots by resorting to economic reforms, the Bhalla says. Otherwise, the Congress—and with it the country—will perish.
If India lives in its villages, then the model it perhaps must follow is Gangadevipalli, a hamlet in Andhra Pradesh's Warangal district where every house has the bare necessities of life, and more.
From regular power and water supply to a scientific water filtration plant, a community-owned cable TV service and concrete, well-lit roads, Gangadevipalli has been steadily gaining in prosperity thanks to a disciplined and determined community that has also managed to work in harmony towards goals set collectively.
The village, about 200 km north of state capital Hyderabad, has won several awards, including the "Nirmal Gram Puraskar", for health and hygiene.
Now, the village headman has been invited to Nepal to recount Gangadevipalli's success story.
"Our village has been hogging the limelight for all the right reasons. I have now been invited to Nepal to explain how we work so cohesively," headman K. Rajamouli told INN.
With a population of a little over 1,300, the village has 100 percent adult literacy. The school dropout rate has been zero since 2000.
"The unity of the village and the realisation of the need for community development are at the root of the achievements of Gangadevipalli," says S.S. Reddy of Bala Vikasa Social Service Society, an NGO that has been working closely with villagers.
The village has over two dozen committees, which manage areas like health and hygiene, the provision of drinking water, cable television and literacy.
Another remarkable achievement for the village is that its married population under the age of 35 does not have more than two children.
The village now boasts 100 percent survival of new-born babies, their inoculation and immunisation, as well as regular vaccination of children below five. The supply of nutritious food to children and pregnant and lactating women, along with regular health check-ups, is also among the unique achievements of the village.
The gender ratio of women and men is almost the same. Each woman is also a member of a self-help group, making a significant contribution to the family income.
Apart from having savings of at least Rs.10,000 each, every family has a life insurance policy, prompting authorities to give the village the "Beema Gram" award.
The farmers' development panel looks into improvements in agriculture; experts explore ways of increasing productivity as well as reducing farming costs.
But sometimes, even discipline could result in loss: "While farmers all over the state rejoiced after the government announced waiver of agricultural loans for small and marginal farmers, peasants here suffered a loss of over Rs.40 lakh because we had repaid our loans on time," headman Rajamouli said.
There is also a committee to come to the help of villagers engaged in family disputes. A civil supplies body ensures that no corruption takes place in the supply of essential commodities through ration shops.
The village also enforces a complete ban on the sale of alcohol.
"Drinking may lead to communal disharmony as well as domestic abuse. Hence the sale of liquor has been banned for more than a decade now," said Kusam Ramaiah, head of the prohibition committee.
The journey to progress has not been smooth sailing, though.
"The essence of our prosperity and development is our unity, and it took years to forge that. There were so many divisions on the basis of caste, religion, political belief, etc, but we did not lose heart," says S. Kaadambani, the member of a self-help group.
As the village became famous, the residents launched a fresh scheme to garner revenue - visitors are charged Rs.1,600 for a conducted tour with proper guides to explain the progress that the village has witnessed. Government functionaries, members of other gram panchayats, media people and NGO activists from within the country and abroad are among those who have dropped by.
There are at least two visits to this model village each week.
In July 2011, an Aadhar camp was held in a Jogeshwari colony; till date all the documents residents submitted and their original Aadhaar forms are lying in a cupboard, despite repeated reminders to authorities to take them away.
In order to get their ‘unique’ identities in the form of Aadhaar cards, citizens first have to submit documents in proof of their ‘regular’ identities — PAN card details, passport copies, bank details, and other significant personal documents that testify for their age, date of birth and address.
But is your identity, or at least the documents that prove it, safe with agencies deployed by the UIDAI to provide you your ‘unique’ identity? A recent discovery by INN gives evidence to the contrary. In yet another glaring instance of carelessness, sensitive documents of over 1,000 Aadhaar applicants — including PAN cards, hard copies of forms, and bank details — have been lying in a state of neglect in the cupboard of a housing society in Jogeshwari, in the room where an Aadhaar camp was organised for residents almost two years ago.
Aadhaar camp
In July 2011, Malcolm Baug, a colony in Jogeshwari, organised an Aadhaar camp for residents and neighbouring societies in the area. Their aim was to make the enrollment process easy for the people. Over 1,000 people from the area participated in the camp, making it a huge success.
Almost two years have passed since, and many of the residents are now proud owners of Aadhaar cards. However, copies of the compulsory documents they had submitted as proof of identity, as well as hard copies of the forms, were left behind by the agency that filed the data. Farokh Shaher, secretary of the Malcolm Baug Zoroastrian Association said, “On July 17, 2011, we organised an Aadhaar camp for our residents. We had spoken to the authorities and set up a centre at the community centre. The camp was a big success but it’s been almost two years now, and the documents which they had asked for from applicants continue to lie in our office.”
He added, “We have spoken at least 10 times to the enrollment agency in charge of data collection for Aadhaar cards in the colony — asking them to collect the documents. Each time, we were told that they would send an authorised representative to collect the papers in two days. But no one turned up. It is shocking that such sensitive information is lying around in sorry neglect. Reposing their trust in the authorities, the residents of the colony provided copies of address proof and date of birth. But they had no idea that their information would be left like this.”
Threat of data theft
An office bearer expressed relief at the fact that the copies and the forms are lying in the cupboard and not elsewhere, in which case the data could easily be misused by others.
Shaher added that even though he has sent a slew of e-mails to the Aadhaar helpline in January, no one has contacted him yet. The documents and forms of over 1,000 people continue to lie in the office cupboard. “We don’t know if we should return the residents their information or continue to wait for a reply from the Aadhaar officials.”
‘True shame’
INN contacted a few residents of the society, who expressed shock and outrage at the news. “How can officials not take care of the documents? We provide them with copies of our PAN cards and even our bank details and, it’s not even protected. It’s a true shame,” said a resident.
Another resident scoffed at the Aadhaar enrollment programme, pointing out that it made no sense to ask for hard copies of documents when the process was being conducted online. “The whole thing is a joke,” he added.
The Other Side
An official from the UID regional office said, “Data collection is the responsibility of the enrollment agency. We provide them with a definite timeframe in which to provide us with the data packages. During phase I, in which the residents enrolled for the cards, there were a few errors owing to which the documents were left behind. However, in phase II no such errors are occurring.”
Santosh Bhogle, state nodal UID officer and undersecretary, IT department of Maharashtra, expressed shock at the situation. “It is very wrong that these hard copies and documents are lying unattended. People trustingly provide their details, what has occurred is unfortunate. It was the responsibility of the agency responsible for data collection to submit the documents for processing to the government,” he said.
The Muslims of Sit Kwin were always a small group who numbered no more than 100 of the village's 2,000 people. But as sectarian violence led by Buddhist mobs spreads across central Myanmar, they and many other Muslims are disappearing.
Their homes, shops and mosques destroyed, some end up in refugee camps or hide in the homes of friends or relatives. Dozens have been killed.
"We don't know where they are," says Aung Ko Myint, 24, a taxi driver in Sit Kwin, a farming village where on Friday Buddhists ransacked a store owned by the town's last remaining Muslim. "He escaped this morning just before the mob got here."
Since 42 people were killed in violence that erupted in Meikhtila town on March 20, unrest led by hardline Buddhists has spread to at least 10 other towns and villages in central Myanmar, with the latest incidents only about a two-hour drive from the commercial capital, Yangon.
The crowds are fired up by anti-Muslim rhetoric spread over the internet and by word of mouth from monks preaching a movement known as "969". The three numbers refer to various attributes of the Buddha, his teachings and the monkhood. But it has come to represent a radical form of anti-Islamic nationalism which urges Buddhists to boycott Muslim-run shops and services.
Myanmar is predominantly Buddhist but about 5 percent of its 60 million people are Muslims. There are large Muslim communities in Yangon, Mandalay and towns across Myanmar's heartland where the religions have co-existed for generations.
But as violence spreads from village to village, the unleashing of ethnic hatred, suppressed during 49 years of military rule that ended in March 2011, is challenging the reformist government of one of Asia's most ethnically diverse countries.
Dusk-to-dawn curfews are in effect in many areas of Bago, the region where Sit Kwin lies, while four townships in central Myanmar are under a state of emergency imposed last week.
"I will not hesitate to use force as a last resort to protect the lives and safeguard the property of the general public," President Thein Sein said in a nationally televised speech on Thursday, warning "political opportunists and religious extremists" against instigating further violence.
The unrest has made almost 13,000 people homeless, according to the United Nations. State-run media reports 68 people have been arrested.
Rumours
The trouble in Sit Kwin began four days ago when people riding 30 motorbikes drove through town urging villagers to expel Muslim residents, said witnesses. They then trashed a mosque and a row of Muslim shops and houses.
"They came with anger that was born from rumours," said one man who declined to be identified.
Further south, police in Letpadan have stepped up patrols in the farming village of 22,000 people about 160 km (100 miles) from Yangon.
Three monks led a 30-strong group towards a mosque on Friday. Police dispersed the crowd, many of whom carried knives and staves, and briefly detained two people. They were later released at the request of township officials, police said.
"I won't let it happen again," said police commander Phone Myint. "The president yesterday gave the police authority to control the situation."
The abbot who led the protest, Khamainda, said he took to the streets after hearing rumours passed by other monks by telephone, about violence between Buddhists and Muslims in other towns. He said he wanted revenge against Muslims for the destruction by the Taliban of Buddhist statues in Bamiyan province in Afghanistan in 2001.
"There is no problem with the way they live. But they are the minority and we are the majority. And when the minority insults our religion we get concerned," he told Reuters. "We will come out again if we get a chance."
Letpadan villagers fear the tension will explode. "I'm sure they will come back and destroy the mosque," says Aung San Kyaw, 35, a Muslim. "We've never experienced anything like this."
Across the street, Hla Tan, a 67-year-old Buddhist, shares the fear. "We have lived peacefully for years. Nothing can happen between us unless outsiders come. But if they come, I know we can't stop them," he said.
North of Sit Kwin, the farming town of Minhla endured about three hours of violence on both Wednesday and Thursday.
About 300 people, many from the nearby village of Ye Kyaw, gathered on Wednesday afternoon. The crowd swelled to about 800 as townsfolk joined, a Minhla policeman told Reuters. They then destroyed three mosques and 17 shops and houses, he said. No Buddhist monks were involved, said witnesses.
"Very nervous"
The mob carried sticks, metal pipes and hammers, said Hla Soe, 60, a Buddhist who runs an electrical repair shop in Minhla. "No one could stop them," he said.
About 200 soldiers and police eventually intervened to restore a fragile peace. "I'm very nervous that it will happen again," he said.
About 500 of Minhla's township's 100,000 people are Muslims, said the police officer, who estimated two-thirds of those Muslims had fled.
However, Tun Tun is staying. "I have no choice," says the 26-year-old, whose tea shop was destroyed and looted by Buddhists, one armed with a chainsaw.
He plans to rebuild his shop, whose daily income of 10,000 kyat supports an extended family of 12. On the wall of his ransacked kitchen is a portrait of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He did not believe she could do anything to help.
Tun Tun traced the rising communal tension in Minhla to speeches given on February 26 and 27 by a celebrated monk visiting from Mon State, to the east of Yangon. He spoke to a crowd of 2,000 about the "969 movement", said Win Myint, 59, who runs a Buddhist community centre which hosted the monk.
After the 969 talks, Muslims were jeered and fewer Buddhists frequented his tea shop, said Tun Tun. Stickers bearing pastel hues overlaid with the numerals 969 appeared on non-Muslim street stalls across Minhla.
President Thein Sein's ambitious reform programme has won praise, but his government has also been criticised for failing to stem violence last year in Rakhine State in western Myanmar, where officials say 110 people were killed and 120,000 were left homeless, most of them Rohingya Muslims.
The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar said on Thursday he had received reports of "state involvement" in the recent violence at Meikhtila.
Soldiers and police sometimes stood by "while atrocities have been committed before their very eyes, including by well-organised ultra-nationalist Buddhist mobs", said the rapporteur, Tomas Ojea Quintana. "This may indicate direct involvement by some sections of the state or implicit collusion and support for such actions."
Ye Htut, a presidential spokesman and deputy minister of information, called those accusations "groundless". "In fact, the military and the government could not be concerned more about this situation," he said in a Facebook post.
Late on Friday, three monks were preparing to give another "969" speech in Ok Kan, a town 113 km (70 miles) from Yangon.
Sridevi famously said recently that her 1983 career-making potboiler Himmatwala was no Mughal-e-Azam. She was right to a point….Until now, when Sajid Khan’s remake of the 1983 K Raghvendra Rao film has come along to provide a comparative viewpoint.
And suddenly the old Himmatwala does appear to be a classic. It gave us the timeless Sridevi as an arrogant spoilt rich bitch who mouthed insanely capitalistic dialogues like “I hate the poor”.
Thirty years later, Tamannaah Bhatia does a Sridevi. She gets into Sridevi’s leather pants, with a whip to match and tortures the peasants in a village lorded over by a fatuous feudal dad who is not really evil. He is just mad. Somehow Tamannaah misses the bus and the bullock-car by a wide margin. Not her fault, really. It’s the mood and milieu that this oddball of a remake generates.
We hear the larger-than-life hero Ravi (Ajay) mouth words of old-fashioned heroism with a straight face. But somehow we aren’t convinced if he means business. Indeed, there was more than a dash of Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew in the way the original Himmatwala Jeetendra brought Sridevi to heel.
The new-age Sridevi is a squeal. She quickly changes from her audacious mini skirts and high heels with whips as accessories, to being a simpering salwar-kameez-clad doormat who is willing to walk that extra mile for the man in her life.
There are only two other female characters in the entire plot. The hero’s long-suffering mother(played with commendable dignity by Zarina Wahab) and a sister (Leena Jumani). Vanquished by the villains, the mother and daughter live in the village forests.
Curiously the daughter appears to have walked straight out of a gym. Like all good sisters from the past history of commercial cinema, this one too nearly gets gang-raped. This one happens in a sealed van(Delhi’s grisly rape reconstructed?) until the hero appears to literally crush the wannabe-rapists’ balls. Ouch. Devgn ends his ballsy crusade with one of the film’s many bravura-tinged exclamation lines: “As long as women are attacked, Himmatwalas would be born.”
Chalk up a long-hurrah for this dime-store braveheart. We can look at Ajay Devgn in Himmatwala as the man who came in from the cold and warmed up the bucolic baddies’ backsides with what he calls a bum pe laat. That, we can say is the other side of the jadoo ki jhappi which Sanjay Dutt used to heal the world not so long ago. I guess Sanjay’s jadoo ki jhappi got a bum pe laat .
Cute? That’s how Ajay plays his shehar ka hero gaon ka super-hero part. He wants us to believe he is having fun with the trite part. But the boredom underneath the facade of fun shows up often enough to make us cringe.
The fractured world of Sajid Khan’s “Himmatwala” is not looking for healing. It is happy being unfinished, wonky and out of shape. A wheezing grunting snoring world of demented feudalism where the Zamindar, as played by the gifted Mahesh Manjrekar is part-fiend, part-clown. Meals are not cooked in this tottering tyrant’s kitchen. Instead he orders the villagers to get him khaana from their homes which he eats on a table long enough to serve as the passenger’s cabin in a domestic airline. And when his daughter announces she is pregnant, the father throws a fit in the style of a 8-year-old who has just been told his favourite GI Joe has gotten flushed down the toilet.
The narrative serves up enough ‘feud’ for thought to make our heads go dizzy with thoughts of ruptured continuity. But gosh, are we really seeking logical explanation for what the characters do, say and convey in this film where a tiger appears from nowhere to help the hero fight the goons in the climax? Is this a film to be taken seriously? Presuming for a minute that we are expected to abandon all rationale and ….well go with flow, how do we set aside the uneasy feeling that the narrative is laughing not with us, but at us?
The second movement of the pesky potboiler is taken over by the Mahesh Manjrekar-Paresh Rawal duo doing the Amjad Khan-Kader Khan banter from the original “Himmatwala” with a dash of homo-erotic humour thrown in when the duo are forced to share a bed in a cowshed. This is where the mystery of the shapeless potboiler deepens.
The dialogue that follows between the two bedded buffoons has to be heard to be believed. To their credit, Manjrekar and Rawal, seasoned troupers both, try their utmost to have fun with their parts. Their vain efforts to infuse a joie de vivre in the clogged veins of this perverse potboiler only reminds us that stereotypical characters from conventional mainstream cinema died long before Joy Mukherjee.
Any attempt to revive the old-fashioned masala potboiler would require oodles of inbuilt humour and a developed sense of spoofiness. “Himmatwala” lacks both. It is neither fish nor fowl. How does one describe the film in a nutshell? For that we can go back to one of the songs recreated from the original Himmatwala.
Ho tacky ho tacky ho tacky tacky tacky re…..
Biggest Cyberattack In History Believed To Be Work Of Spammers; Netflix, Spamhaus Targeted. Internet users worldwide are having to endure slow connections after the biggest cyberattack in history.
The attackers are throwing so much digital traffic at online networks that they have reportedly disrupted access to popular sites such as Netflix, the on-demand TV streaming service. There were fears that any worsening of the attack could affect web browsing and emails.
The onslaught has focused attention on the extent to which modern communications depend on the internet. Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, one of the firms dealing with the assault, likened it to a series of digital “nuclear bombs”. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage,” he added.
The attack is believed to have begun last week, when Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization, was hit by a wave of digital traffic that knocked its website offline. The body draws up lists of the servers used to send spam messages around the world. Email administrators use these lists to block spam.
But last week one of the spammers irked by Spamhaus’s work is believed to have launched the massive distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack to bring down the anti-spam group.
Pretending to be Spamhaus, the attackers sent a series of data requests to DNS servers, which help edirect web traffic around the world. While many of these servers can only be accessed by authorized users, thousands are “open” and can be targeted by attacks like those that first struck last week.
After receiving what they thought were legitimate requests, the servers responded by sending the required data to Spamhaus, which could not deal with the wall of information that suddenly came its way. The attack, which still had not been fully dealt with on Wednesday, was so large that it began clogging up the DNS servers. This in turn slowed down replies to the ordinary internet users, hitting connections worldwide.
Spamhaus said it does not yet know who carried out the attacks. “A number of people have made claims to be involved,” it said in an email statement on Wednesday. “At this moment it is not possible for us to see if they really are.”
Cyberbunker, a web hosting service based in the Netherlands, has been named by reports as a potential culprit. It was recently added to one of
Spamhaus’s anti-spam lists. With more than 10,000 dedicated servers, and housed in a disused nuclear bunker, it offers anonymous hosting to its customers.
Its website states: “In most cases we have no idea who or where our customers actually are. We do not known and we simply don’t care.”
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The attackers tried to overwhelm their target by sending it heavy traffic. A flood of requests to view a site at the same time will exceed its capacity — stopping it from loading. Spamhaus sought greater capacity, turning to CloudFlare, which can spread the traffic over a larger bandwidth. However, the attackers began targeting their attacks so they would be concentrated. This congestion was so heavy that it overwhelmed DNS routers, used to direct internet traffic. The congestion caused meant that connections across the internet slowed down.
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