The great geek tragedy

A gift horse can be deadly dangerous, even if you don’t look it in the mouth…

Why does history repeat itself?

As always, technology answers this question best. The fact is, if history was made only once, we would still be trying to figure out how to carry around the monster DynaTAC 8000x mobile phone in our pocket and Bill Gates would still be crying himself hoarse that he never said anything as dumb as 640K of memory being enough for anybody.

However, according to Karl Marx, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” That’s the reason why the first Trojan horse that was introduced to man resulted in the great Greek tragedy - and the one that followed it in the technology era ended up being a geek tragedy.

It all started with the Trojan War when the Greek soldiers sneakily gifted a large wooden horse to the city of Troy as a peace offering. The battle-weary residents were polite enough not to look at the gift horse in the mouth, but they should have looked at its gut. Perhaps they thought that the horse didn’t have the stomach for a fight, but they were wrong. By midnight, the horse’s belly spewed Greek soldiers who jumped out and conquered the city. The incident ended up contributing an important phrase to the English language, without which Martin Scorsese and Ram Gopal Varma would have felt quite lost – the dark underbelly of crime.

But more importantly, creating a diversion and slipping through the strongest walls, or firewalls - as the case may be - of security would become a dreaded nightmare in the future. The malicious programs that get into your computer pretending to be harmless, and then proceed to create havoc were aptly named after the Trojan horse. The only difference was that while the original Trojan horse had more to do with the doors of the walled city of Troy, the ones that followed, like Stuxnet, busied themselves with Windows.

What makes these Trojans so God-almighty powerful? Well, if Zeus, the king of the Gods, couldn’t escape the trap of deception, how could mere mortals? Zeus was distracted by the beautiful Hera while the Greeks emerged the stronger force in the Trojan war. And for this blunder, Zeus was cursed to lend his name to a Trojan – the Zeus Trojan horse – that would gain notoriety in the banking sector because of its exploits in collecting personal data and passwords.

The concept of creating a diversion and hoodwinking many evolved during the churning of the ocean, when a ravishing beauty named Mohini deceived the asuras while the devas ended up having all the nectar to themselves. The incident set a bad precedent - soon a legion of Trojans and viruses named after beautiful women was unleashed to haunt the internet. Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Anna Kournikova, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Aniston and Beyonce Knowles – in their cyber avatar - teased, trapped and tormented millions.

The geek tragedy not only brings us a truckload of Trojans, but also three vital lessons. One, the perils of resorting to deceit and subterfuge are many – just look at what is happening to Greece today. Two, fortunes keep changing. Troy may have lost the war, but has made its presence felt across the United States - over 30 states in the country have a city or town named Troy. And three, never take English phrases too seriously. One hears of ‘shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted’, but in the case of the wooden Trojan horse, it was quite the opposite - the door was stealthily opened after the horse had come in.