No it’s not just your next door  meddling aunty who likes to know what you do with the time of the day but there is a whole world out there, keeping tabs on you. If you are a celebrity the tabloid hunters are counting your each step. If you are a politician no journalist or TV reporter is going to let you exhale in liberty. If you are a sportsman, people will catch you at every nook and corner and either rave about your latest play or, those who have much more cheek, would give you tips as to how you could make your catch better. But if you are a commoner like me, then you are still at a risk of having your privacy breached courtesy of the wild worldwide web (makes a cool tongue twister, no?). Actually the minute you have your computer connected to any network be it a LAN or the internet…you come under the surveillance of the technology Interpol. Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who said:

” You are born free but everywhere you are in chains”

In the case of getting connected, you happily embrace this chain…take the good with the bad. However there is quite an interesting perspective to all this sniffing and sneaking, it gives you a much larger domain to pull great gags on people around you ….Having been in a very computer oriented university with the hi-tech geeks around, there were continual trick or treating within the networks….I can recall a few incidents, others I have forgotten but these playing around of the young computer scientists and engineers often make me smile whenever I think about them.

I remember how a mail asked for the Valentine’s day to be celebrated in the university forwarded by an elderly now expired (God bless his soul) teacher of ours. According to the mail everybody was to wear pinks and reds to show the spirit of the day. Our poor teacher was the one who was shocked the most when he discovered he had sent the mail!

I also remember the various notices that were often posted on the website announcing there to be a holiday the next day and by none other than one of our professors…but it was never them, however it was fun to have a day off and with the best of the excuse…Superway said it was so. Not to mention that sometimes you typed in the official website’s address and get routed onto some fashion advisory website!

Hina once told me how she scared the hell out of a friend of hers when she got to controlling her computer from her own. Her friend did get a bit of a shock since rumors about a spirit roaming our campus were floating around a bit, as result of a tragic accident that happened last year.Then at another instance Rakesh once told us about how they took back at a fellow webmaster who had taken away someone’s shoe…or maybe it was his own shoe that was snatched away during class. Anyways, whenever the poor victim logged onto the university’s website using his password the URL was routed to a page showing  a picture of a shoe!

Also it was Hina yet again who once proudly told me that they were making a virus as an assignment….and though I can’t specifically remember but I’m sure there must have been cases of home made viruses let lose on our poor Xeon and the crash of all the computers being fed from it.

There is a quartet of my juniors of whom, two take hacking as a hobby…lemme not take their name for the world is too small and on the net, even smaller! Now this one person really likes to get into peoples’ inboxes and read their mails..talk about being nosy…but since I like them too well so it doesn’t make me angry either. This young guy once while talking to Lubz very casually remarked: “Oh Lubna Baji your password is like__________ and what’s more you have it for ____________ “  Lubna stared at the naughty boy and then laughed it off, afterall what was her password if the guy had snooped into the mailbox of our own Mr. Microsoft . Well Imad was on their hitlist too but he is totally very wise for them even…hard to believe but true

A friend of mine who was a senior, was once trying to tell me how I could hack a password while chatting but since I’m not much of a chatting buff and unfortunately too full of conscience and not to mention a dunce at times I paid little heed to what she said…although I was immensely impressed that she had tried this good deed quite a few times.

Being at the server end is a much coveted position….being on good terms with the network Incharge of our university, Rakesh and Om did a survey of the sites that students visited, for a stats project. They smugly claimed while giving the presentation that they had omitted the student numbers of few students to keep their privacy. Even though much effort was made to block a few sites from being accessed on Xeon, but using the proxy every other person had Orkut open on their computers….thanks to the WiFi setup throughout the uni’s premises the laptops gave much more ease to work around too.

Well these little harmless digging in gives us something to laugh about but on a more serious note, how vulnerable everything has become…the digital data is always at a risk of falling into the wrong hands. I researched quite a bit about DES algo for my FYP and though it seemed complicated to a novice like me but even the 3DES, its successor, has also been broken using the brute force. Port knocking is a fave with the techies and putting a flag in another system a challenge they all like.

What amuses me is the fact that the plunderers of the cyber world are no stupid, ignoramuses, they are the well learned, digital world’s geniuses. It’s a war between the enlightened and the well enlightened…a very balanced and a fair clash. Some other time maybe I’ll list down geeks who wreaked havoc with the famous banks, firms and databases just for the heck of it but for the time being let me leave you with this thought:

“Big brother is watching you……”