Daily Current Affairs : 11th April

Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE

Topics Covered

1. EC puts on hold release of biopic
2. Jallianwala bagh
3. Honeypot
4. Blackhole
5. Facts for Prelims – Non convertible Debentures, Blue

1 . EC puts on hold release of biopic

Context : The release of a biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been deferred till further orders from the Election Commission, which on Wednesday issued a directive prohibiting display of any biopic material that subserves “the purposes of any political entity or individual connected to it”.

Constitutional Provision under Article 324

• Under Article 324 of the Constitution, superintendence, direction and control of elections are bestowed upon the Commission and it is the duty of the Commission to take necessary measures to create a level playing field and provide a conducive electoral environment to all the stakeholders.
• The Model Code of Conduct, in its present form, doesn’t explicitly prohibit screening of films based on a candidate or a political party. Hence, the EC invoked its extraordinary powers under Article 324 to stop the screening of the biopics.

Argument for banning Biopic

• As per EC political content like biopics pose a “serious threat to the level playing field as it may create an impression of truthfulness of such content being shown through television/ cinema/ Internet-based entertainment programmes/ social media.
• It is in the larger interest of ensuring the level playing field and conduct of free and fair elections that such political content ought to be regulated during the election period to prevent violation of Model Code of Conduct
• The ban isn’t just limited to public screening of the films, but also applies to display of posters and publicity material related to them in print and electronic media.
• As for future complaints with regard to violations of the Model Code of Conduct in films, the EC said a committee headed by a retired Supreme Court Judge or a retired Chief Justice of a High Court would vet them.

2 . Jallianwala Bagh

Context : British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday expressed “regret” in Parliament for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, ahead of the 100th anniversary of the killings 

Background

• Since the beginning of the World War I, there had been an increasing resentment and civil unrest throughout the country especially in the states of West Bengal and Punjab.
• It was due to the terrible repercussions of the war, like- inflation, heavy taxation, a huge number of dead and wounded soldiers that contributed immensely in uniting the nation against the British Rule.
• The worsening civil unrest led to the formation of Rowlatt Committee in 1919. The Rowlatt Act was a legislative act that allowed certain political cases to be tried without the presence of a jury and permitted internment of suspects without any trial. This is the time when Mahatma Gandhi came to light as a revolutionary. The Act resulted in furious protests throughout the country. The unrest became worst, especially in Punjab.
• There were demonstrations held to demand the release of two popular leaders of the Indian Independence Movement- Satya Pal and Saifuddin Kitchlew.  There were violent protests that resulted in the burning of the Town Hall and Railway station, disruption of telegraphs and communication system. It resulted in many deaths including a few deaths of the European government officials as well as civilians.
• Due to all these activities, the city of Amritsar witnessed a few days of silence while other parts of Punjab suffered. The British Government thus decided to place most of Punjab under Martial Law. Restrictions were placed on the civil liberties that banned public gatherings and prohibited assembling of more people together.

About Jallianwala bagh Massacre

• On 13 April 1919, thousands of people were gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab. This day marks the beginning of New Year for the Sikhs and is also celebrated as Baisakhi festival all over Punjab. Colonel Reginald Dyer had announced the implementation of a curfew throughout Amritsar and a ban on all processions that even prohibited a group of 4 or more people to meet publicly.
• By mid-day, thousands of people were gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh including the devotees at Harmandir Sahib. Jallianwala Bagh was covered on all sides by walls reaching up to 10 feet. It is equipped with narrow entrances, most of which were locked.
• General Dyer arrived there with armed troops. The main entrance was also guarded by the armed troops.
• On Dyer’s orders, there was ruthless firing done on the uninformed crowd. There were about 25,000 people present there at the time of firing. Some tried to escape while some choose to jump in the solitude well built in the premises of Jallianwala Bagh.
• The troops were ordered to start shooting from the most densely crowded spot to harm the maximum number of people. This heinous act of violence resulted in extreme mass killing. The firing continued for about 10 minutes, and it only ceased when the ammunition supplies were almost exhausted.
• Sir Michael O’Dwyer was at the helm of affairs in undivided Punjab under British rule during the Jallianwala Bagh carnage and had supported ‘General’ Reginald Dyer ordering firing on unarmed civilians.
• Udham Singh avenged the massacre and shot dead Sir Michael O’Dwyer at a meeting of the East Indian Association in London on March 13, 1940.
• In protest against the massacre and the British failure to give due justice to the victims, Rabindranath Tagore gave up his knighthood and Gandhiji relinquished his title ‘Kaiser-e-hind’ bestowed on him by the British for his services during the Boer War in South Africa. In 1922 Rowlatt Act was repealed

3 . Honeypot

Context : Cybercriminals attempted attacks on a Mumbai Cloud server honeypot more than 678,000 times in a month, which was second to Ohio in the US that recorded more than 950,000 login attempts, among a total of 10 honeypots placed globally, global cyber security major Sophos

What is Honeypot

• Honeypots are used to trap attackers into thinking that they have penetrated a network, allowing time for defenders to analyze their threat parameters and generate appropriate threat indicators to block an impending attack.
• Honeypots are decoy systems providing hosts that have no authorized users other than the honeypot administrators, as they serve no business function.
• Honeypots collect data on threats and activity directed at them that is considered suspicious. Honeypots can be set up inside, outside, in the DMZ, or in all three locations.
• They are most often deployed inside of a firewall for control purposes. Honeypots are variants of standard intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) but with a greater focus on information gathering and deception.
• When an attacker scans a network, they are redirected to the honeypot system via a Virtual Private Network. The honeypot computers mimic operational devices but threat intelligence is gathered by observing the attacker’s actions, detecting the earliest signs of widespread incidents so that the organization can collect better data on these threats.
  

4 . Blackhole

Context : The groundbreaking, first-ever photograph of a black hole was published around the world

Details of the Image

• It’s been named Powehi a Hawaiian phrase referring to an “embellished dark source of unending creation.
• Powehi was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that connected eight telescopes around the world.The supermassive black hole and its shadow, at the center of a galaxy known as M87, were photographed back in April 2017, but the results were only revealed on Wednesday.
• More than 200 researchers were involved in the project, and they had worked for more than a decade to capture the image. The project is named after the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape.

What is a black hole?

• Black holes are extremely dense objects that nothing, not even light, can escape. As they eat nearby matter, they grow in size. Black holes usually form when a large star dies and collapses onto itself.
• Supermassive black holes, which are millions or billions of times as massive as the sun, are thought to lie in the center of almost every galaxy, including our own. Our’s is called Sagittarius A.

Before this image, how did we know black holes existed?

• Einstein’s theory of relativity first predicted that when a massive star died, it left behind a dense core. If this core was over three times as massive as the sun, his equations showed that the force of gravity produced a black hole
• But until yesterday (April 10), scientists couldn’t photograph or directly observe black holes. Rather, they relied on indirect evidence — behavior or signals coming from other objects nearby. For example, a black hole gobbles up stars that veer too close to it. This process heats the stars, causing them to emit X-ray signals that are detectable by telescopes. Sometimes black holes also spit out giant bursts of charged particles, which is, again, detectable by our instruments.

What are we seeing in the image?

• Black holes themselves emit too little radiation to be detected, but as Einstein predicted, a black hole’s outline and its event horizon — the boundary beyond which light can’t escape — can be seen.
• The dark circle in the middle is the “shadow” of the black hole that is revealed by the glowing gas that sits at the event horizon around it. (The extreme gravitational pull of the black hole superheats the gas, causing it to emit radiation or “glow”). But the gas in the event horizon isn’t really orange — rather the astronomers involved in the project chose to color radio-wave signals orange to depict how bright the emissions are.
• The yellow tones represent the most intense emissions, while red depicts lower intensity and black represents little or no emissions. In the visible spectrum, the color of the emissions would probably be seen with the naked eye as white, perhaps slightly tainted with blue or red.

How did scientists capture this image?

• Over 200 astronomers around the world took the measurements using eight ground-based radio telescopes collectively known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). These telescopes are typically located at high-altitude sites such as volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Atacama Desert and Antarctica
• In April 2017, the astronomers synchronized all the telescopes to take measurements of radio waves being emitted from the event horizon of the black hole, all at the same time. Synchronizing the telescopes was akin to creating an Earth-size telescope with an impressive resolution of 20 microarcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in the hands of a New Yorker all the way from a cafe in Paris, according to the statement. (In comparison, the black hole they imaged is about 42 microarcseconds across).
• They then took all these raw measurements, analyzed them and combined them into the image

Why did the scientists measure radio waves rather than visible light to capture the image?

• They could get better resolution by using radio waves than if they used visible light. Radio waves currently offer the highest angular resolution of any technique at present. Angular resolution refers to how well (the smallest angle) a telescope can discern between two seperate objects.

Is this an actual photograph?

• No, it is difficult to make an image with radio waves. The mission scientists measured radio waves being emitted from the black hole’s event horizon and then processed that information with a computer to make the image

5 . Facts for Prelims

Blue

• Scientists have developed a robot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to master intricate human tasks, and could one day help you fold laundry or make a cup of coffee at home.
• Robot is named as Blue

Non-Convertible Debentures

• The debentures which can’t be converted into shares or equities are called non-convertible debentures 
• Non-convertible debentures are used as tools to raise long-term funds by companies through a public issue. To compensate for this drawback of non-convertibility, lenders are usually given a higher rate of return compared to convertible debentures.