Hacker barks up wrong Zee

(Wrote this a long time back -- in 2002, I think, when Zee TV's website was hacked)

"This is the last time we are warning India to take off their hands from Kashmir…If you don't hear this your missiles and your nuclear weapons will be targeted at u."

If you try going to 'zeetv.com' and get this message, be assured that neither your computer nor the Zee network is to blame. A hacker who's less smart than he'd like you to believe, (he thinks Kashmir becomes Pakistan's territory if a mouse is clicked) hacked into zeetv.com and put out material such as the passage quoted above.

But he made one mistake: zeetv.com isn't the Zee site. "Our website is 'zeetelevision.com', somebody is just squatting on the domain name 'zeetv.com'," said Sainath Aiyar, Zee's spokesman, talking to The Hindustan Times. People at Zee say that the squatter's identity is a mystery. The only thing they know is that he's based in the US. "We've told our offices in the States to look into the matter," says Aiyar.

They might want to check with a Mr Rahul Dholakia of Tulip Drive, New Jersey. Dholakia bought the URL (unique resource locator — that's name, in English) 'zeetv.com' in 1998, through an Australia-based domain name registration site called oznic.com. The going rate for a registration on this site is currently $24 a year. Dholakia is probably paying even less, but he wants three 0s added to $24 in order to sell. Zee TV's problems with anything that involves adding zeros just don't seem to end. Incidentally, 'zeetv.net', 'zeetv.org' and 'zeetv.co.uk' have also been taken.

But there is a faintly sinister angle to the break-in. The hacked site has a list of items, most of which link to the website of the Kashmir Liberation Cell, government of 'Azad Jammu and Kashmir'. This site regularly puts out inflammatory material on Kashmir in the hope that somebody will read it. And the hacker would surely have been lauded for generating some traffic for it by his Pakistani friends.

Educated visitors, however, would be shocked at the poor quality of the content: the hacker appears to have every dirty word in his vocabulary, but lacks the English to string them into coherent sentences. Even so, he does seem to have a sense of humour. Here are a few samples:

Q: How do you disable Indian missiles?
A: Cut the rubber band.
Q: How can you tell when an Indian is lying?
A: His lips are moving.

These are generic jokes, and are absolutely hilarious if you swap 'Indian' with 'Pakistani'. Which brings us to the other crucial mistake the hacker made: he didn't give zeetv.com, the look and feel of Zee’s official site. As and when an Indian condescends to try the same sort of stunt with PTV, our edge in infotech will show.