(malware) how a 13-yr old kid made my day...

Around 8:30 this morning I went out looking for a place that will let me photocopy some documents I needed later in the day; I need not tell you that our government bureaucracy is solely responsible for the profit margins of most copier makers ;-)

Anyway I found a little internet cafe + photocopy shop in which a young boy was vigorously dusting the various bits of hardware lying around. Very hopefully, fearing the usual "abhi dus minit mein ho jayega", I approached him.

[Aside for people unfamiliar with Hyderabad: "dus minit" is measured on the Brahma scale (refer to Hindu mythology for that one...)]

To my intense surprise, he actually took my documents immediately, hit some buttons on the machine, and started the copy. Great -- I don't have to wait around.

While he was doing that, a young man of about perhaps 20-25 years walked in, and said "internet chal raha hai?"

Having seen more than my share of blank looks in the past, I resisted the urge to explain to him that multi-billion dollar corporations like Cisco and Sprint and BBN and God knows who else are hard at work trying to make sure of precisely that, and so, in all probability, the internet was not just "chal raha hai" but "doud raha hai".

Anyway the 13-year old lad running my photocopy said "hanh -- woh teesra cubicle mein jao. Aur internet explorer mat kholna; Mozilla firefox use karna".

[Don't forget -- this was a guy I mistook to be a cleaning boy, and worried if he'd be upto switching on the photocopy machine and doing the duplex copies I wanted...]

Middle-aged men with gray hair are not expected to suddenly break out in a joyous jig, so once again, I restrained myself and, with as much disinterest as I could feign, asked him "kyon"?

And he said "virus aa jaate saab". With one hand still operating the copy machine, he demonstrated what were clearly meant to be a series of nasty popups with the other hand -- I can't describe it in writing, you'll just have to imagine it.

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This is it guys. When kids who look like cleaning boys in internet cafe+xerox+STD/ISD shops start telling people to use Firefox instead of IE, MS is done for.

World domination can't be that far away... YEEEHAAAW!