Poking Holes in the Net

Wherever you work these days, there's a good chance the computer network that carries your precious data is being maintained by an Indian computer engineer in Bangalore or Bombay. It's also likely that this engineer spends his days off—assuming his employers allow him any—watching the latest Bollywood movies. No reason to worry about any of this, right? There isn't as long as you don't read Hari Kunzru's new novel, Transmission , in which an unhappy Indian programmer is driven by job insecurity and his obsession with a Bollywood starlet to write a vicious computer virus and unleash it on the world. The...