Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

Bai Yuhang looked at the flyers soaked in vegetable soup in the trash can, thinking about their contents, and a contemptuous smile inadvertently appeared on his face.

"JS123.com," Bai Yuhang read the domain name aloud, flicking the paper with his finger, "They couldn't even be bothered to change the slogan, 'A homepage that understands netizens better'? These guys from the Geek Alliance, they wasted their four years of university education."

"I can't stand this anymore." Zhang Jian slammed the broken chopsticks on the ground, his face turning a deep purplish-red. "What the hell is this? This is blatant robbery! You wait, I'll go back and write a script to ping their crappy server to death. They dare to copy us? I'll make sure they can't even open a webpage!"

"I'm going too!" Liu Jing rolled up his sweater sleeves to his elbows and pointed randomly in the direction of the school. "So what if they're seniors? We have people and money now. I'll call Brother Zhao and we'll go straight to their dorm and confront them. If they don't give us an explanation, I'll make them crawl on the ground."

The room instantly filled with a pungent, gunpowder-like atmosphere. Even the usually docile Zhang Qingheng clenched his fists, as if someone had snatched his freshly steamed bun.

"Sit down, all of you."

Bai Yuhang's voice wasn't loud, and he didn't slam his hand on the table, but the room instantly fell silent.

"Third brother, that's illegal. We're a company now, not a hacker gang. Fifth brother, that's thuggery. Blocking the gate and fighting? And bringing people from outside the school with you? Do you want the school to expel us all?" Bai Yuhang lit a cigarette, but didn't smoke it, just held it between his fingers. "Know yourself and know your enemy. Let's see what this imposter really looks like. Let's go back to school and check out the computer lab."

The group of seven entered the library's computer room with a menacing air, each exuding a frenzied aura that startled several girls chatting on OICQ nearby, causing them to immediately fall silent.

Bai Yuhang randomly picked a computer, skillfully entered the plagiarist's website address, and pressed enter.

At the bottom of the screen, the browser's blue progress bar began to slowly crawl. One bar, two bars...

Five seconds passed, and the page was still spinning.

"Is this dial-up or a slow grinder?" Wan Lianghao couldn't help but burst out laughing. "At this speed, the webpage won't even load before it's too late."

Three seconds later, the page finally popped up.

It really does look like it. At first glance, it's almost identical to the "Qihang Navigation" page. The perpetual calendar, weather, and stock information are all positioned exactly the same.

"Shameless, utterly shameless," Zhang Jian muttered under his breath as he leaned closer to the screen. "They didn't even bother to change the color number."

Bai Yuhang didn't say anything, but reached out and grabbed the mouse, right-clicked, and selected "View Source File".

A dense mass of code popped up, a mess like a pot of overcooked noodles. Numerous redundant scripts, illogical form nesting, and even several unknown Google pop-up codes were secretly loading in the background.

"This code is rubbish." Zhang Jian glanced at it, and his anger instantly vanished by half, replaced by the disdain typical of a technologist. "Is this the level of the senior 'Geek Alliance' team? They blocked the main thread just to get a 'GG' error message."

"The more interesting part is here."

Bai Yuhang moved his mouse to the "Fast Navigation" homepage, where the prominent "Stock Quotes" section was displayed. The index above showed "1768.23," which was yesterday's closing stock price data.

Next, he clicked the small red arrow next to the number.

no response.

Then click on the "Auspicious for Marriage" option on the "Perpetual Calendar".

Still no response.

"What's wrong?" Liu Jingda leaned closer. "The mouse isn't working?"

"It's not that the mouse is broken, it's that my brain is broken." Bai Yuhang shook his head with a smile, hovered the mouse over the image, right-clicked, selected properties, and said, "See? This is an image, in JPG format."

The computer room was silent for a second, then erupted in uproarious laughter.

"Holy crap! A dead image?" Wan Lianghao laughed so hard he almost choked, slapping his thigh. "Did they hand-draw it in with Photoshop? You call this a function? It's just like pasting up a New Year's picture!"

"This is what they call 'it's easy to draw the skin of a tiger, but hard to draw its bones.' Bai Yuhang closed the webpage as if it were a bad joke. 'Those who learn from me live, those who imitate me die. These idiots only see our interface, but they don't know how many scraping scripts are running in our backend, or that Lao San and Lao Si stayed up two nights writing regular expression matching code. I think these people are nothing to fear.'"

Zhang Jian was so angry he was completely speechless, and even felt a little sorry for his competitors: "So we're competing with a bunch of graphic designers and front-end developers."

The group burst into laughter again.

"But don't get too excited yet." Bai Yuhang's smile faded as he shut down his computer. The black screen displayed several young faces. "We could crush this bunch of college student scramblers with one hand. But have you considered what if tomorrow it's Sina or Sohu that's copying us, not 'Geek Alliance'?"

The laughter stopped abruptly.

"That's a technical team of hundreds or even thousands of people. They have money and servers. If they wait until they realize what's going on and take our system, then use their portal advantages to promote it, our traffic will be instantly overwhelmed." Bai Yuhang turned around and glanced at everyone. "At that time, we'll become irrelevant imposters."

"What should we do then?" Zhang Qingheng asked in a low voice, his hands crumpling the straps of his backpack.

"We have to run. We have to run faster than all of them, and we also have to have something they don't have."

Bai Yuhang took out his black notebook from his pocket, placed it on the computer desk, and opened to the latest page, on which were drawn two more complex architectural diagrams.

"To deal with this kind of low-level plagiarism, and to prevent the giants from entering the market and kicking us out, we need to speed things up."

He circled two words heavily on the paper.

"Qihang Music Station. Qihang Alumni Directory"

"I know about music sites, you know, the MP3 download sites we were talking about before." Wan Lianghao pushed up his glasses. "Then what's an alumni directory?"

"That's our moat, the new feature page I plan to add." Bai Yuhang's eyes were sharp. "The navigation site is a tool, used and then left, no emotion involved. The music site is a link, to keep users coming back often, increasing stickiness. But the alumni directory is about personal connections, about relationships. If every user invests their personal relationships here, then no one can steal that user away. But this thing is difficult to develop; user relationship recommendations require a core algorithm, which I'm already brainstorming. Now, let's work on the music site first."

He looked at Zhang Jian and Wan Lianghao: "Third brother, fourth brother, starting tonight, don't sleep. We're going to wage a blitzkrieg. Let's go back and work on this, pack our things and head to the internet cafe. While 'Speed ​​Navigation' is still photoshopping images on their website, we need to build real nuclear weapons and launch them."

"Damn it!" Zhang Jian's eyes blazed with renewed fury. This time, it wasn't about discrediting them, but about crushing them. "Let them see what a technological barrier really is."

"Fifth Brother, don't just sit around doing nothing." Bai Yuhang turned his head. "Go find Brother Zhao and explain the situation to him in person. Ask him to help spread the word. Tell him that the new 'Speed ​​Navigation' has nothing to do with us, their website is full of dead links, and it's a counterfeit product. We need to join the propaganda war too."

"Don't worry, I'm good at swearing." Liu Jing chuckled, a sly glint in his eyes.

When Bai Yuhang stepped out of the computer room, it was already dark outside. He glanced back at the brightly lit teaching building, where the so-called "Geek Alliance" was probably gloating behind one of the windows.

Unfortunately, they chose the wrong opponent and the wrong era.