Trojan

Has Tom lost his mind? Surely everyone knows what a Trojan is? Yeah, maybe – maybe not. I’m going to tell you anyway. To get the obvious out of the way, a Trojan was a resident of the port town of Troy. The remains of the Troy Homer wrote about are now to be found in Northwest Turkey (but this is also the subject of some argument among archaeologists).

Of course, they are famous for being stupid enough to fall for the Trojan Horse gag. The Greeks had lain siege to the town of Troy for around ten years, and the Trojans were getting rather bored of it. The Greeks built a giant wooden horse and hid some soldiers in it, led by Odysseus and somehow managed to convince the town that it was a gift and that the siege was at an end. The Trojans naturally proceeded to celebrate the end of the siege by getting squiffy as skunks and as they fell into a drunken stupor, the Greeks jumped out of the horse and gaily hacked them all to death – but not the women and kids, they were nice like that. There used to be n English saying ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and this is a reference to Virgil’s classic telling of the story, not the unreliability of our Hellenic cousins.

Trojan also happens to be America’s leading brand of condom (something I didn’t know until I researched the word a bit). They are famous for their “Magnum” brand – for the better-endowed gentleman. Ladies, please form an orderly stampede. In fact, the Magnum is only around 6mm longer than the regular sizes – not so cocky now, eh big boy? I also discovered that the standard condom length is 197mm – I wondered why there was always so much slack. I digress…

Something you ought to know (if you didn’t already) is what Trojan Horse means in the fun world of computers. Put simply, it’s a method of deploying software onto your computer which will either execute immediately and screw things up for you, or will stay in your system so it may then be controlled by someone else. A lot of the “spam” emails received are sent via “zombie” machines which have been compromised by trojan programs. This method is popular because it makes the spammers practically untraceable. Here’s how it works: You receive an email with the subject “sèé mè n@ked” – right off the bat, the spelling should set off a warning, but no, not always – human nature is a strange beast. You click on the attachment and may be redirected to a web site selling cheap fake watches, Viagra or anything else that turns a quick buck. The trojan program is executed in the background (i.e. it installs itself invisibly), and then you’re in trouble. Worse still, you don’t get to see anyone naked. The question you have to ask yourself is “whom do I wish to see naked, and how badly?”. It could be Anna Kournikova or Brad Pitt (unlikely) or Prince Philip of the UK (equally unlikely and quite a harrowing mental picture to boot). The top and bottom of it, boys and girls is: don’t click on anything you don’t trust. Here endeth the lesson.