CHIBA – Hota Elementary School in Kyonan, Chiba Prefecture, shut down in 2014, but the building is enjoying new life as a Michi no Eki roadside rest area.

The facility, in the southwestern part of the Boso Peninsula, is named Michi no Eki Hota Shogakko in honour of the school, where generations of local children were educated. With some of its charms as a school still intact, it is attracting many tourists, including during this year’s Golden Week holiday period.

Michi no Eki are rest areas along ordinary roads. They generally are also places that provide local information and enhance regional co-operation. The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry registers the facilities after municipality heads and others apply for the registration.

As of April 2017, there were 1,117 Michi no Eki facilities across the nation, but few use old school buildings.

Hota Elementary School opened in 1888, and over 600 students attended there at its peak. As the number of students dropped to just over 70 due to depopulation in the town of Kyonan, the school ended its 126-year history in 2014 and integrated with another school.

The town government decided to use the closed school as a roadside rest facility because the location, being close to an expressway exit, is convenient for transportation. The town hoped to make it a place for selling local products and providing food and drink, as well as a place to promote interactions between locals and visitors from urban areas.

“We want to cherish the history of the school as an educational facility and make it a place where people who meet there can learn from each other and help each other grow,” Kyonan Mayor Harukazu Shiraishi said in a newsletter published when the roadside rest facility opened.

Michi no Eki Hota Shogakko houses multiple restaurants on the first floor of the old school and accommodations in former classrooms on the second floor. The former gym currently serves as a place for selling local specialties. The building for teachers is used as a bathing facility.

The town government invited public proposals for the design of the roadside rest facility, and adopted one by a consortium represented by a Waseda University professor. The facility thus transcends its original concept with novel designs by university students.

“Calculated from various data, about 600,000 people were estimated to have visited here last fiscal year, although the population of the town is a little over 8,000,” said Katsuya Otsuka, the manager of the roadside station who also identifies himself as the “principal” of the facility. “Not only the number of visitors, but also sales have greatly exceeded our initial predictions. What matters next is how the facility functions. We want the town residents to be more involved in the facility, and we want to make it a core facility to invigorate Kyonan town.”

New Delhi – Kanishk Sajnani did not receive so much as a thank you from a major Indian airline when he contacted them with alarming news — he had hacked their website and could book flights anywhere in the world for free.　

It was a familiar tale for India’s army of “ethical hackers”, who earn millions protecting foreign corporations and global tech giants from cyber attacks but are largely ignored at home, their skills and altruism misunderstood or distrusted.　

India produces more ethical hackers — those who break into computer networks to expose, rather than exploit, weaknesses — than anywhere else in the world.　

The latest data from BugCrowd, a global hacking network, showed Indians raked in the most “bug bounties” — rewards for red-flagging security loopholes.　

Facebook, which has long tapped hacker talent, paid more to Indian researchers in the first half of 2016 than any other researchers.　

Indians outnumbered all other bug hunters on HackerOne, another registry of around 100,000 hackers. One anonymous Indian hacker — “Geekboy” — has found more than 700 vulnerabilities for companies like Yahoo, Uber and Rockstar Games.　

Most are young “techies” — software engineers swelling the ranks of India’s $154-billion IT outsourcing sector whose skill set makes them uniquely gifted at cracking cyber systems.　

“People who build software in many cases also understand how it can be broken,” HackerOne co-founder Michiel Prins told AFP by email.　

But while technology behemoths and multinationals are increasingly reliant on this world-class hacking talent, just a handful of Indian firms run bug bounty programs.　

Information volunteered by these cyber samaritans is often treated with indifference or suspicion, hackers and tech industry observers told AFP.　

Anand Prakash, a 23-year-old security engineer who has earned $350,000 in bug bounties, said Facebook replied almost immediately when he notified them of a glitch allowing him to post from anyone’s account.　

“But here in India, the email is ignored most of the time,” Prakash told AFP from Bangalore where he runs his own cyber security firm AppSecure India.　

“I have experienced situations many times where I have a threatening email from a legal team saying ‘What are you doing hacking into our site?'”　

Sajnani, who has hacked around a dozen Indian companies, said he was once offered a reward by a company that dropped off the radar once the bugs were fixed.　

“Not getting properly acknowledged, or companies not showing any gratitude after you tried to help them, that is very annoying,” the 21-year-old told AFP from Ahmedabad, where he hunts for software glitches in between his computer engineering studies.　

Attitudes changing 

An unwillingness to engage its homegrown hackers has backfired spectacularly for a number of Indian startups, forcing a long-overdue rethink of attitudes toward cyber security.　

In 2015, Uber-rival Ola launched what it called a “first of its kind” bounty programme in India after hackers repeatedly exposed vulnerabilities in the hugely-popular app.　

This month Zomato, a food and restaurant guide operating in 23 countries, suffered an embarrassing breach when a hacker stole 17 million user records from its supposedly secure database.　

The hacker “nclay” threatened to sell the information unless Zomato, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, offered bug hunters more than just certificates of appreciation for their honesty.　

“If they were paying money to the good guys, maybe ‘nclay’ would have reported the vulnerability and made the money the right way,” Waqas Amir, founder of cyber security website HackRead, told AFP by email.　

The incident was especially galling for Prakash. He had hacked Zomato’s database just two years earlier, and said if they listened to him then “they would never have been breached in 2017.”　

In a mea culpa rare for an Indian tech company, Zomato agreed to launch a “healthy” bounty programme and encourage other firms to work with ethical hackers.　

“We should have taken this more seriously earlier,” a Zomato spokeswoman said in a statement to AFP.　

The Zomato hack, and panic surrounding this month’s global WannaCry cyber attack, comes as the Indian government aggressively denies suggestions its massive biometric identification programme is susceptible to leaks.　

The government has staunchly defended its “Aadhaar” programme, which stores the fingerprints and iris scans of more than one billion Indians on a national database, and has accused those who have raised concerns of illegal hacking.　

Prakash said it was vital the government embrace its own through a programme like the “Hack the Pentagon” initiative, which last year saw 1,400 security engineers invited to poke holes in the US Department of Defence’s cyber fortifications.　

“The Indian government definitely needs a bounty programme to make their system more secure,” Prakash said.

Thai and US nationals charged in major sex-trafficking ring

NEW YORK – US authorities have charged 21 people in connection with a multi-million dollar prostitution racket in which hundreds of Thai women were forced into sexual slavery in major US cities.

The traffickers lured young women from poor backgrounds in Bangkok by painting a “rosy picture” of life in the United States, according to court records.

Once in America, the women were held captive in apartments and hotels where they were forced to work as prostitutes to pay off debts of up to $60,000, US authorities said.

Some were told to undergo breast implant surgery, and the surgery cost was added to their debt, according to prosecutors.

The charges against 10 Thai and 11 US nationals were filed in a Saint Paul, Minnesota, federal court on Thursday. Most of the defendants were arrested a day earlier in US cities from Los Angeles to Chicago.

Some 38 people have been indicted in Minnesota since last year in connection with the global trafficking ring which is believed to have operated since 2009 and made tens of millions of dollars.

The alleged Thai boss was arrested in Belgium last August..

Three others charged last year have since pleaded guilty, the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Minnesota said.

“This is a highly complex case that required years of hard work,” Gregory Brooker, acting US Attorney for the District of Minnesota, said in a statement.

The women were advertised online including on website Backpage.com, which has been hit by lawsuits in recent years over allegations it promotes trafficking in its advertisements.

They were not allowed to leave the properties where they were held unless escorted by a member of the ring.

The captors used violence and threats against the women and also threatened to hurt their families in Thailand if they refused to have sex, authorities said.

The victims, who numbered in the hundreds and spoke little English, were held in at least a dozen US cities including Atlanta, Washington, Seattle and Dallas.

Investigators hunted down the traffickers by tracking the money they pocketed and laundered, authorities said.

“Special agents used their accounting expertise to analyse the complex financial transactions made by these criminals,” said Shea Jones, a special agent in charge of Internal Revenue Service investigations.

“All financial transactions leave a trail,” he said in a statement.

The charges include conspiracy, sex trafficking and money laundering.

Anti-slavery group Polaris says it has received reports of more than 22,000 sex-trafficking cases in the United States over the last decade.

Globally, nearly 21 million people are victims of human trafficking, according to the International Labour Organisation. An estimated 4.5 million of them are forced into sex work.

JAKARTA: Amelia Deva Puspita, 17, a resident of Pejompongan, Tanah Abang, in Central Jakarta, was allegedly locked up for nearly two days by Hendra Kurniawan, 22, an unemployed man she recently met on Facebook, the police have said.

Amelia’s mother, Suharmi, 51, said her daughter asked her permission to go out on Tuesday afternoon but did not return home that evening.

Family members attempted to locate Amelia but she was not contactable by phone.

Suharmi then directly filed a report to the Jakarta Police after being informed by Lia, 17, that she received a message from Amelia on Thursday saying that Hendra had locked her up, tribunnews.com reported.

“In the message, Amelia was asking for help because a man she had just met locked him up,” Palmerah Police chief Comr. Armunanto Hutahean said.

The police quickly followed up on the report and discovered that Amelia was locked up in a rented house in the Kemanggisan area in West Jakarta, where Hendra was arrested, he said.

“Hendra and Amelia only knew each other via Facebook.

They made an appointment to meet up and Hendra picked her up at her house,” Armunanto said, adding that Hendra then locked her up at his rented house because Amelia refused to give him money.