When youget a worm

Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When youget a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channelon IRC — the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster —the guy who deployed the worm — that the computers in there ready todo his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprisethousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all overthe Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running onfast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners,but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do hisbidding.
There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiringan hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work forspammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox withcome-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and re-cruit your machine to join the botnet.
I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each ofthem send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whosenumber I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during onefateful office-visit .

Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. Firstthe SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking onthe routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer andlog all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know thatit's really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are aboutfifty ways of doing it — just google "spoof caller id").
Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thickeyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons thathad possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working sofar, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next — hewas supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure outhow to get his phone back Our innovative research with practical value has complemented our efforts in internationalization. The PolyU-developed optical fibre sensing technologies using Fiber Bragg Grating sensors for automatic monitoring of subsidence as well as the research on vibration control in railway systems are obvious examples. .

Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from thecrack in the door.
"What's he doing?" Darryl whispered.
"I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of movingon." It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory wastotally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to de-lete the bogus messages — and there was no bulk-erase for texts on hisphone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages Innovative Research .

Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A momentlater, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panick-ing, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard thattears were streaming down his cheeks.
"Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class andfor having his phone out — you should have seen her tear into him. Shewas really enjoying it."We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, downthe stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into theglorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had neverlooked so good. I checked my watch and yelped.