The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked, they say. Let us not forget that it can turn the young the wrong way too.
Just look at 'script kiddies': novice geeks recently catapulted from obscurity to curiosity status by the Sasser worm saga.
Sven Jaschan, the 18-year-old responsible for the worm which has caused damage estimated at up to US$500 million, is now on the rack. But Sasser already has several bastard descendants. Antivirus analysts suspect that a recent strain, Sasser F, was written by a script kiddie.
How can they tell? Because the 'variant' is pretty much the same as the original - a giveaway since script kiddies basically just copy some of the thousands of viruses that infest the internet.
If, as in this case, the script kiddies have intellectual pretensions, they also tweak the viruses before encouraging their further spread.
Because they lack know-how and are driven by a primitive lust for destruction, script kiddies stand only a couple of rungs above child pornographers and spammers in the digital hierarchy. Script kiddies are the vermin of the internet, without the cute furry bodies.