The Vault Of Souls

Our elections are the biggest event (magnitude wise) ever in the world. And the level of detail and importance each vote is given is truly remarkable.

I read this recently and really started admiring the earnest and conscientious effort the Election Commission puts to the electoral process and the belief they have in the system.

POLLING IN THE VALLEY!!

During the III Phase of the current elections, In Kashmir and Ladakh area, there were two polling booths which were at an altitude of 13,000 feet and the air force helicopters were not able to land there. So, the EC had to dispatch 6 people in 2 parties for the booths. These parties had to walk on foot in knee deep snow for 40 km to reach the booth. They walked for 2 days (obviously stopping for food, rest and sleep!!) to conduct the polls. They took satellite phones with them in order to communicate with the EC. But the most interesting fact was this: “there were just 37 voters from that place!!”

Special arrangement was made for the counting as well as the parties that went were not able to come back.

This is called DEDICATION!

Hats Off to the Election Commission!

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last week, you would have witnessed the wholesale hysteria over the recent swine flu. All this panic over a simple strain of flu got me pondering over what it was like in the IT industry whenever there was a computer virus that took the form of a pandemic in the computer world.

Searching (or rather “Googling”) the topic, I came across certain viruses that were pioneers for the technical mischief makers in their own times. Though these viruses were not the most widespread or effective (though some of them were), they were the innovators and the ones that stick to our mind and bring back memories…. Not all of them happy!!

Here are the HONORABLE MENTIONS:

CREEPER: It was the first network virus released in the mid 1971. Although 1971 is a prehistoric time in the computer world (no MICROSOFT no APPLE), It sure did harass a lot of people. It was developed by bob Thomas and spread over the ARPANET (the precursor of the internet).
To delete the creeper another piece of code was written called the REAPER (the first ANTIVIRUS!!) .

The creeper was basically a harmless virus; It only displayed a message “I’m the Creeper! Catch me if you can!!, no theft no payloads….those were happier times.
Perhaps another sign of the simpler time was that creepers creator not only wrote the virus but also the antivirus Reaper.

BRAIN: It was the first virus written for Microsoft’s DOS. It spread to its peak in 1991.It was originally written by two Pakistani brothers Basit and Ajmal Farooq Alvi for their biomedical software to prevent its piracy. Later the code for brain was separated and ‘redistributed’ as a virus.

Elk Cloner: It was written by a 15-year-old high school student called Rich Skentra as a practical joke. Unfortunately for him the joke turned bad very quickly! It was the first virus for the Apple II system (and they say Apple systems don’t get viruses).

It was a boot sector virus and spread through what is now called a “Boot Sector infection”. It copied itself to the boot sector and spread to all future disks.

This became the most preferred method to spread virus in the pre-internet times.

Klez: It was born 10 years ago and is still doing rounds today. It basically spoofs email by randomly picking one Id from a previously infected machine. This virus spread thru E-mail. It duped the users to open the mail and once the malware was installed the users contact book was his!!