Kahat Cabir slow bhai sad ho!

An italicised look at a day in an age where mobile phones get viral. The News straight up. Our views in itals.


There is good news and bad news. First the good news: the commwarrior.a virus isn't spreading as fast as initially feared. The bad news: it IS spreading, however slow.

Researchers at F-Secure, a Finnish mobile security firm, who have been analysing the code reported on Tuesday that while the infection does send itself on to other phones using the multimedia messaging service (MMS), it does so very slowly, leaving a time delay of anything from 15 minutes to several hours between propagation attempts. Analysis has revealed that the infection is not spreading rapidly because of coding flaws in its design.

"This thing has been out since January and if it operated at peak efficiency we would all have had it by now," said Mikko Hypponen, head of F-Secure's laboratory.

"Another factor holding it back is the relatively low number of people using MMS. Here in Finland most people get MMS as standard, but that's not the case for most of the rest of the world."

Yes, dear Hypponen, we in India do not get MMS as standard and we always regretted it. We have changed our minds now. Who knows what message has an inbuilt commwarrior to destroy our smart phone? The trouble with emails and now MMSs is that we are tempted to open them, even if we aren't sure about the content. Those tricky names like realhotgirl don't help either.

The virus is also capable of spreading via Bluetooth to other mobile phones. Once on a mobile and activated the virus displays the text 'OTMOP03KAM HET!' This is Russian and means roughly "No to braindeads."

OK, now Russian Guy, who are you calling braindeads? Your virus is a dud. Couldn't even write a virus right, you lazy bum. It can't even spread itself properly.

The first ever mobile phone virus, proof of concept code called Cabir, also originated in Russia.

Hey folks by the Moskva, don't you have other things to do like killing some Aslan Maskhadov. Come on, get off our mobile phones, man. These phones aren't Chechen rebels.

It was thought to be the work of the 29a hacking group, well known for writing proof-of-concept viruses with no harmful payloads.

What no harmful payloads? Cabir turned all those sexy 6600s into turtles, they are slower than a vodka-laden Russian. Besides Cabir ate a lot of battery. And by the way, the virus' name sounded like one of our great poets. And w take offence to that.