Curry-flavored code

"You got it?" Professor Zhang immediately perked up. "Quick, let me see."

Lin Yuan immediately pulled out his notebook and WeChat chat history. He didn't hide the communication process with OCR from his mentor. After all, he also had to consider that if something went wrong in the future, he would still need to rely on his mentor for protection.

However, Lin Yuan naturally couldn't reveal that he had discovered the OCR organization through a comment on Facebook.

Fortunately, after learning about the existence of OCR, it was much easier to work backward.

He followed the logical chain provided by the system. The system had actually found that a conference organizer, mentioned in an email Professor Zhang forwarded to him, had a cooperative relationship with OCR. Thus, OCR entered the system's search scope.

Lin Yuan naturally used that email as an excuse.

"I checked all the somewhat large conference organizers in the email you forwarded to me, and also looked into institutions related to these conference organizers. Among them, OCR, which stands for Open Computing Republic, was the most prominent.

Because they provide free cloud IDEs, a large portion of their target audience is university students.

And after I checked, its headquarters are in North America, and it has a permanent branch office in HK. Combining all this information, it looks very suspicious."

Lin Yuan was now essentially fabricating the problem-solving process based on the answer.

After all, a question like "How to find OCR" isn't a proper math problem, so there can naturally be many different solution steps. It all depends on whether one can come up with them.

"Look at its name, what is this 'republic'? Why does it call itself a 'republic'? What does it mean? This is not a name a proper institution should take."

"Hmm?" Professor Zhang's voice rose, "Dare to call itself a 'republic'? Does it deserve to?"

Lin Yuan continued, "And, look at this."

Lin Yuan pressed the F12 key on his laptop, which was currently displaying OCR's Chinese official website. Pressing F12 entered the web developer mode.

"You see, there's a control here that's set to invisible, and this control contains a lot of information."

Due to the current complex international situation, mainly because the Western political correctness has gone too far, there have been signs of contamination in some open-source projects. Lin Yuan has seen statements promoting political correctness more than once in open-source projects he downloaded, such as strange definitions of gender...

The tech community is no longer the paradise it once was, even GitHub. When you download a project from there and open the readme document, you might unexpectedly see a blue and yellow striped flag icon or a rainbow flag icon.

So, Lin Yuan kept an eye out and carefully checked the web source code of OCR's Chinese official website.

As expected, he uncovered some hidden content that is not visible during normal access but genuinely exists in the web source code.

This is like how some internet companies like to show off, secretly embedding recruitment information in their official website's source code or log files, like hiding beautiful glass beads, waiting for the fated to find them.

However, institutions like OCR clearly wouldn't have such good intentions. Lin Yuan guessed that the other party's official website was built based on the same set of code. And when this official website code was deployed to the Chinese network, it naturally needed to adapt to local customs, so certain content was set to invisible.

And this control, set to invisible, clearly displayed: we support Ukr**** (that most unfortunate place in Europe, that word really can't pass censorship). This is just too obvious, what legitimate multinational organization would openly touch political elements?

Lin Yuan didn't need to elaborate on why he suspected OCR, because the other party had already given themselves away.

Professor Zhang had already put on his glasses and was examining it carefully. "After all these years, how have these scoundrels fallen to using such methods? Back in the day..."

Lin Yuan felt that his mentor was about to enter flashback mode, so he listened quietly.

"Back then, their educational institutions were truly impressive. University professors could really disregard politicians. When we went to academic conferences, their professors would curse the president and criticize current affairs in front of their own foreign affairs personnel, leaving us young ones stunned.

Then many people fell for it.

No, that's not right. At that time, the other side was indeed terrifyingly strong, so it wasn't really 'falling for it.' Alas, everyone has their own aspirations."

Professor Zhang recalled old memories with much emotion.

"Now, many of their social and political elements have infiltrated open-source software. The tech field is becoming less and less pure, too deeply influenced by political factors. Thirty years to the east of the river, thirty years to the west of the river, we and them, it's as if we've switched places."

Lin Yuan thought for a moment and decided not to delve into political topics. So he changed the subject, saying, "OCR's official website also has a hint of curry flavor."

"You mean?" Professor Zhang asked curiously, "They outsourced this to the Indians for development?"

Although Professor Zhang is nearly sixty, his temper is sometimes like a young person's, blurting out "Indians."

"Yes, when I was searching their web source code, I extracted the list of programmers responsible for development from the version change information. Look," Lin Yuan scrolled the mouse, then pointed to a spot on his laptop screen, "all sorts of 'Singh' and 'Khan,' all curry-flavored names."

"Hahaha~~~" Professor Zhang was amused and his previous gloom from Gu Xuan was swept away.

"These Indians are really lazy. Useless things like comment information should be deleted. Just use a one-click deployment tool, wouldn't that work?"

In fact, it was true. When web front-end code is published, it can be compiled into almost unreadable JS code, just like a program being converted into assembly.

But, who told them to be Indians?

"After all, that's a magical country where an aircraft carrier can nod on its maiden voyage."

Hahaha~~~!!! The two, mentor and disciple, burst into laughter in the office.

"Honestly," Lin Yuan continued, "I guess the Indians were paid low wages and deliberately dragged their feet."

"Possibly. I don't even dare to fly when I travel for business anymore, just in case I'm sitting on a Boeing that smells of curry."

Lin Yuan understood what his mentor meant, because now Boeing even dares to outsource core code development to India. Not just Boeing, Microsoft also started playing this outrageous trick.

As a result, some time ago there was a global blue screen of death for the Windows system, which crashed countless train stations and airports.

Things that ordinary people find incredible are actually happening in this real world.

For the first time, Lin Yuan felt that the Indians were not entirely useless. If it weren't for their curry-flavored code, he would have had to rack his brains to come up with another self-consistent excuse to reasonably explain how he discovered OCR.

"Come, let me see how you successfully fooled them."

Professor Zhang then looked at Lin Yuan's WeChat chat history and email correspondence with the other party.

He immediately became confused, "Are the enemies so weak now? That's it? They fell for your bait just like that?"