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Your CPU Will Explode
Crowdpleazr1 writes "In case any of you were still opening up email from people you don't know, the Weekly World News is reporting that you could now be killed by a malicious email virus that will alter the molecular structure of your CPU, making it explode!! Of course, as a person who understands these newfangled computer things, even I can not imagine what evils those hacker people can come up with. I think I'm going to go hide in my Y2K compound now. "
They ran out of free AOL hours.
In the novel Fight Club, a character is assassinated with an exploding monitor. The assassin drilled a hole in the picture tube and poured petrol into it; when it was next switched on, it went kaboom.
No idea how accurate that is, though it'd be a bit hard to do remotely.
I think it's called a "Nth complexity binary loop".
...says that demons can possess anything with a brain. Apparently that now includes computers. According to the Georgia clergyman...
Ahh. That would explain why I've never seen a Georgia clergyman possed by demons.
**>>BELCH
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/ja rgon/html/entry/HCF.html
because they are (snicker) only 2 bits away from encapsulating these email attachments in a special armor piercing packet.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I think it is possible. Years ago, I plugged a ribbon cable in backwards and was rewarded with a loud bang. Disassembly of the equipment revealed a plastic DIP IC package with a small crater where the silicon die used to be. The reversed cable had resulted in +15V and GND being swapped on the chip power pins.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It was the Motorola 6800. The HCF instruction did not destroy the CPU, it caused it to go into a state where it continually incremented the contents of the memory address register. This was actually useful for debugging external address decoding logic. A hardware reset would restore normal operation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I found the article and his post to both be funny.
You will notice that the frontpage post has a foot next to it. That means that the link/story therin are to be considered funny. I thought it was so hilarious I emailed it to all my friends, some of whom will actually BELIEVE it. That makes me laugh even harder.
Everyone has different taste in humor. (I know some people that don't find Monty Pyton funny... They SCARE me.)
You may complain that slashdot is getting worse. Maybe it is. Every thread nowdays has a few posts in it lamenting about how slashdot has gone downhill. Really? Slashdot is just a linking system generated buy the COMMUNITY'S submissions. If that is the case, then we, the internet (or perhaps to some degree the free software) community are the ones going downhill.
Slashdot is just an indicator. Something to think about at any rate.
I guess the best point to make though is that if you don't like something on slashdot, just stop reading those parts.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Such an exploit could be done... however it would rely on the Men In Black (tm) sneaking into your house some time beforehand and installing a "special" expansion board inside your machine. I'm thinking a simple PCI board with several pounds of plastique attached would do the trick... then later, when they know you're in front of the machine (i.e. they detect your computer retrieving HTML pages or something) they send your computer the detonate command... Still want to buy that Riva/TNT board? ;^)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"Instead of blowing up a single plane, these groups will be able to patch into the central computer of a large airline and blow up hundreds of planes at once. "
"central computer"? somebody remind these people the FAA's air traffic controller system is still using 1970s equipment based on vacuum tubes..?
::laughs until he cries::
the quality of these tabloids has really gone down.. Back in the Day there was an article in WWW about a dog that had been specially genetically engineered to be used as a mop. It was really, really shaggy, and its hair was exactly like mop fibers (they had a "picture"). The idea was that you'd pour soapy water on the dog, and it would walk around the house and clean the floor behind it.
But that was a long time ago. Now things are a lot harder for the tabloids in the Post-Lewinsky Era. What with the mainstream media these days posting regular front-page stories about Oral Sex and tech articles so blatantly clueless and inaccurate it boggles the mind, the tabloids have really had to stretch to keep up with a respectable level of relative trashiness. Which is how we get this-- in order to appear even more clueless and inaccurate about technology than an average newspaper, they've had to stoop to writing that would be unsurprising to see in the Onion.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is not a virus, it is actually Microsoft's new Active Demolition technology. (Formerly called Schrapnel Linking and Embedding - SLE) It is another example of Microsoft's commitment to inovation.
--Shoeboy the microserf
Hey now! Stop clowning around! The Weekly World News happens to be a very respectable paper. It has the highest circulation in the world!
;)
If they say a virus can blow up my CPU, hey, I'm unplugging my LAN from the Internet pronto....
My journal has hot
The Bat Boy is on the loose! According to the article, people in Wheeling, WV. are in deep doo doo.
Everyone unplug your replicators!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
This must be a mutant form of the old UPS virus, which slowly stole and accumulated small packets of your line charge - too little at a time for you to notice, and when sufficient had been accumulated, exploded with devastating effect.
That's why I cycle the power on my UPS every night and let any unauthorized excess charge drain off.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
From NT4 SP4:
Q170817 Windows NT Causes APC Smart UPS Battery to Discharge
Isn't this just crazy?
My sysadmin sent me just such a mail bomb (not sure why) but I opened the attachment with pine, telneted in so *my* computer wasn't effected...
The above statement is a little misleading. It is not saying that there is a feature in Windows that does not require a reboot to take effect. After it alters the CPU, you still need a reboot. Obviously it can't ask you to reboot or you will be suspicious, so it just runs the BSOD code (which, contrary to public belief, is not always caused by a bug, but is also a way to trick you into doing a reboot after one of Microsoft's surprise upgrades.)
Let's see how many people post replies without actually reading the article and realizing that the newspaper is a tabloid.
I have seen a co-worker plug in an EEPROM backwards.. We figured out what was wrong when the machine wouldn't boot, and we saw it emitting light from the little UV window.
Yeah, when I was younger (sort of the geeky version of a "punk kid"), I used to have fun hooking chips on old circuit boards up to the wrong voltage and making them blow up. It smells terrible though. (probably causes cancer, too).
:)
Anyway, the smoke you refer to is called "magic smoke". It's trapped in side each chip and is what makes chips do what they do. When you see the magic smoke escape from the chip, it magically no longer works.
--GnrcMan--
It wasn't even that spectacular. Upon executing an HCF instruction, a Motorola 6800 began ignoring other input and toggling the address lines in a binary sequence which amounted to a free-running binary up counter.
Motorola didn't talk about it much, but the speculation at the time was that the feature allowed testing portions of the CPU chip before committing them to the expensive process of putting them into actual IC packages, by merely applying the proper combination of voltages to the data lines and starting the processor.
The "Halt and Catch Fire" mnemonic was a minor joke based on humorous compilations of bogus IBM assembler opcodes (JAA = Jump Almost Always, et cetra).
On the other hand, in that era it was rather easy to commit Stupid Computer Tricks like telling a floppy drive to seek track $FF and run the heads hard off the end of the ballscrew, or destroy monitors by writing the wrong sync timing to a video controller. The latter can still be done with a fast video card and low frequency monitor, of course.
It was neat watching early EPROM chips actually glow when the processor or program timing the programming pulses failed.
Most people are not that stupid. The ones that are.. well.. they ARE funny
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Ok look i have a friend who's friend actually had his computer blow up on him. Man it was toasted, video card, hard drive, DVD player, sound card and all!! The monitor is not even working any more! Who knows that these people can do next, I mean this guy was lucky he was not in his dorm room..
So I am telling you all to take care not to let this happen to you. Now here are a few more things about the virus you must know....
1) If you have a AMD K-7 or Intel P3 ( 600 Mhz and above ) you are at the highest risk! I mean you have the fastest chips that take the most power and are they huge!!! So if you have these chips and would like to protect yourself please contact me and I will be able to help get these things off your hands!
2) All other hardware is also at danger and i can help get rid of that stuff too!! Specially U2W SCSI drives.
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
one of the best parodies of the newbie chicken little phenomenon embodied by this was the satirical "bad times" forward. for those who missed it, it one ups "good times" by proclaiming that bad times will screw up the tracking on your vcr, screw up your freezer so your ice cream melts, etc. amusingly enough, the new album by the group "laika" contains a song called "bad times" in which the singer recites the forward in a smooth and sultry voice over lounge jazz. worth checking out both for the humor value and the musical value...
I just opened an e-mail message with the subject of "Good Times" and the contents of my hard drive got erased. I'd better go find that new virus that melts my CPU so I will have another thing to upgrade.
The deadly computron radiation that will be released when this happens. My brother-in-law survived the explosion caused by this email, only to die a few days later from computron radiation poisoning.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
> you can't make silicon explode.
Speaking as someone who has blown up 10 555 timer IC's in the last couple of weeks, YES YOU CAN. Only the low power kind, though. And electrolytic caps blow up reeeal nice, too...
-- Religion is a major weapon in the war against reality.
Not only that, but it was written in C on a Powerbook! :)
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Many aeons ago (mid 80's), when my older brother was learning how to program on our kickin 8mhz PC-XT clone with EGA graphics and a truly caverous 20 meg harddrive, people would ask me "So, what is he writing?"
:)
I regularly told people that he was writing a virus that would alter the internal wiring of their cpu, causing it to melt or possibly explode after a significant period of exposure - thus, explaining the occasional crashes of our system
Man, seeing an email virus that does the same thing really takes me back . . .
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Monitors don't use lasers! They use "cathode rays" which is not a laser. Cathode rays happens when you run electricity through a vacuum. Aligning them into a single point on the back of the screen would make a bright dot, then the phosphors would completely ionize and turn a healthy black. This is what happens in monitors when the same image is on them for a long time. This effect can be seen in old video games and ATM machines. In order for it to burn through your head and screen you'd need to run several megawatts through the circuitry and put a metal plate behind your head. Then MAYBE it would burn through your head, though if you attempt it you probably deserve it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Right after she left, a man came in and wanted to speak to the "browser administrator." The girl at the front desk asked him, "you mean the website administrator?" and he said "okay."
I used to think the stories about people like this were fake. Like the people who, when asked who their ISP is, reply "Netscape!" But now I know that they are real.
I mention this only because these are the types of people who would believe a story like this. Like the guy I used to work with, who was bragging about how smart he was, because on December 31 before he left work, he unplugged the computer and the monitor from the wall. He was bragging, you see, because he had "saved" the computer from Y2K.
Ya really gotta be careful around these people and technology...
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
Maybe they attached the virus when you click that link, and BOOM!
If the virus can set a system semaphore it can gain exclusive access to common resources AND MAY PERFORM ATOMIC OPERATIONS!!!
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
My gosh, you're right! Well, I'm simply not going to stand for this. I'm cancelling my subscription to the Weekly World News immediately. Furthermore, I'll be writing a letter to the editor to let them know exactly how I feel. It's sad really, they used to be a quality newspaper. I mean, they're the ones that broke the scoop on Satan excaping from hell and killing 26 people (26 people!!!). Now that was investigative reporting. But with this, they've lost my trust and they've lost a customer.
Outraged,
U. R. Rube
--GnrcMan--
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Can your IM do this?
This story's obviously fake! I mean, it's supposedly an e-mail virus, but no virus could infect a system as robust and secure as Microsoft Outlook, right?
....
Right?
-Denor
We have a problem, and it is serious. The following item appeared in a major newspaper recently, quoting Arnold Yabenson of the National CyberCrime Prevention Foundation as saying:
"Instead of blowing up a single plane, these groups will be able to patch into the central computer of a large airline and blow up hundreds of planes at once."
It seems clear to me that Yabensen is referring to the Realtime Online Flight Logistics (ROFL) system we developed for Vultee Aerospace. As several of us who were involved in the PLC coding for the FADECs recall, there is extensive logic embedded in the onboard systems governing how fuel is supplied to the engines. If this Yabensen has guessed that the Denial of Realtime Kerosene (DORK) features that permit fuel starvation (on ground, I might add) he may be aware of the firmware issue raised by Ross Scott during final rollout.
Public Relations:
Ted, I want your people to find out who this Yabensen is. I've never heard of him, although the paper seems to think he is a credible source. It is crucial that we head this story off at the pass--divert the press with another story. I like the "air ambulance for sick kids" story you mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but if this story looks like it is going someplace--particularly someplace like network TV newsmagazines--I am willing to authorize another remote fuel starvation incident of a TV news helicopter.
Software/Host Systems:
Ed, I want you to contact Dave Stearns at Vultee and mention, gently, that somebody has been talking about ROFL and DORK. This is a good opportunity to pitch the Phase III enhancements to ROFL that Marty Eisenreich and his team have been working on. We don't want to scare him (Stearns is *such* a ninny) but this is something we can use to move that project along. The simplest solution to this whole exercise is starting Phase III of ROFL--it will give us control of the entire code base, as well as the source code repository system. Any legacy code that might conceivably trigger the Dump Overboard Hydrogen (DORK-DOH) logic can simply be excised, and the problem gets excised with it. If Stearns starts whimpering feel free to contact George Demetrios directly. We need to move on this!
Hardware/CMOS Systems:
Joanie--what was the name of that little nerdy guy who wrote the EEPROM code for DORK? Could he be Yabensen's source? Find him. Ensure his compliance--or his silence.
Legal:
Arnie, we are innocent as lambs. There is no problem, there is certainly no legal problem. We have contractual protections, we have statutory protections, we have constitutional protections. Or we'd better. Review our position on this, list our options in the event that this becomes public, and be prepared for five minutes in the Thursday meeting (and *only* five!).
Everybody:
No matter what, we have to stonewall this. Nobody talks to anybody, except to scoff at the source. It didn't happen, it can't happen, it's not possible. No reputable company would do such a thing. We're a reputable company, ergo it could not have happened. If word of this leaks onto the Internet, we are doomed.
I want status reports and memos from all dept. heads at the Thursday 3 o'clock.
John
P.S.: Sue tells me that Arnie, Mike E., Ted, and Sylvia have not yet sent in their travel requests for the "Ethics in Corporate Business" seminar. This is required in Q2, people. It's important that we set the ethical example for our employees.
Nah, it is War Games style... as you guess the digit, you keep it... i.e., if a 5 digit code was 98255
:)
You would check 0-9, get 9, then 0-9 (stopping when you got 8, etc)...
So the hackers had at most 20 more codes to check, and E[X]=10...
Phew!
Alex
But then your box exploded
Pity the poor fool
Erm... 5-7-5... that looks about right to me :-)
Does it bother anyone else that this story is right to an account of a kidnapping perpetrated by a "real-life Zombie"?
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Ok, so this is just something some guy at work told me, but supposedly, his 486 overheated and exploded. The chip was mounted in a platic socket with some space between the plastic and the chip which sealed air-tight. The heating caused the plastic to burn enough so that the smoke had nothing better to do then build up pressure and pop! off went the CPU a few feet. I assume that the soccket design was later revised so that it didn't seal. Can anybody corroborate? Does anybody really know how to spell corroborate? I think I'm going to have a corroborated beverage now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think I have a fair amount of experience in the field, and I've seen some viruses that have damaged my hardware beyond all hope of repair:
5/21/94 - While engaging in the "Make Money Fast!" program back in college, an angry mob of Academic Computing staff stormed my dorm room and took out my computer with baseball bats. I'm afraid to do the chain letter thing anymore.
4/7/96 - I was caught by my coworkers while sending out copious amounts of spam endorsing the Barney the Purple Dinosaur fan club. My managers took out my machine with liberal applications of their baseball bats. I'm afraid to touch anything plush and furry anymore.
2/15/98 - While viewing pr0n on my notebook in the Deep South, a preacher ripped it out of my hands and beat on it mercilessly with a baseball bat. I'm afraid to jerk off anymore.
12/21/98 - I had gotten my AV up and running on my home PC, and was showing a special episode of Pokemon which had recently been withdrawn in Japan. I was showing this to some neighborhood kids, all of whom entered epileptic fits when watching a random sequence of flashing lights. That afternoon, several irate parents came over and smashed my computer with baseball bats. I'm afraid to watch cartoons anymore.
1/1/00 - While watching DVDs on my notebook, a bunch of DeCSS fanatics got upset because I was supporting "The Man". After losing my portable to a swarm of swinging baseball bats, I quickly developed an adverse reaction to the Movie Industry.
4/1/00 - I secretly set my roomie's X Server's scan refresh rate to 200 KHz. The monitor caught fire after he came back, and he spent the rest of the night hitting the machine with a basball bat. I guess this virus also affects Linux.
Now, I know that no one likes an alarmist, so I'm going to talk about it like calm rational creature...
WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This VIRUS seems to culminate in the *imminent* DESTRUCTION of one's computer via baseball bat!!! Don't let it happen to you! *SEVERAL* people have had their computers PHYSICALLY DESTROYED. You can protect yourself by giving out 100 copies of this letter, and fortune may smile on you; just add your name to the list below and send $500 to each person on the list.
1. Bill Gates
1 Microsoft Way
2. Paul Allen
1 Microsoft Wy.
3. Warren Buffet
3864 Skaru Yew Ave.
4. Solomon Kevin Chang
2107 W. Commonwealth Ave. #414
Alhambra, CA. 91803
When I receive payment, I will send you your very own Anti-Virus kit: a genuine 9mm Smith and Wesson Sigma Enhanced with two Hi-Cap Magazines filled with hollow point bullets. Instructions for use are an extra $60. Don't wait! Act now!
Skevin
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Damn those hackers! I know all about them, I've seen Hackers and The Net (Sandra B. is one hot computer expert! Rrrowr!), so I don't doubt anything I read about the abilities of these super mastermind criminal geniuses.
I hear new cars have computers in them. I oughta visit my local dealer and have him remove the computer from my car. I'm sure the hackers can use my cell phone to 'download' a program to my car that could cause it to blow up. If the dealer won't remove it, I'll get a paint scraper and shave all those funny little black rectangles off the circuit boards myself!
I sure am glad the Weekly World News is on top of this threat. They report all the stories that the other newspapers won't touch, but that's because they aren't afraid of exposing the truth! I'd better get back to the supermarket, there might be some stunning new development in the Jon-Benet Ramsey case (last I heard, it was the mom!) or biblical prophesies my pastor hasn't told me about. Glory!
Fortunately I was runing Windows in VMware so it only virtually blew up, but had it been runing natively... scary.
On the atari jaguar, there was a certain series of instructions that when executed repeatedly would cause the chip to overheat. While it wouldn't explode per say, it could pop out of it's socket.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Microsoft confessed responsibility today for the epidemic of exploding CPUs, which they attribute to a bug in their new "Hardware Upgrade Wizard." CEO Steve Ballmer explained in an interview today on MSNBC:
"Microsoft has recently been severely criticized for 'bloatware,' or large, resource-intensive programs which require modern, high-performance systems to achieve adequate performance. But we at Microsoft are devoted to bringing our customers new, innovative technologies, to take users 'where they want to go today.' And since the hardware exists today, giving us the opportunity to work out our new visions for twenty-first century computing, we feel it is our obligation to use it to the maximum degree possible."
"However, we're fully aware that this trend toward greater functionality, and hence toward greater complexity and size of the code, might leave our customers with 'legacy systems' in the lurch, so to speak. So we have spent over three hundred million dollars in a secret project to develop our unique and patented 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard'. With this exciting new technology, we can remotely rewrite the traces in the silicon substrate of you CPU chip while it is running!. The 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard' is capable of engraving components in-situ right upon the silicon chip of your own old, obsolete CPU, with a feature size of less that 0.07 microns. Thus, even on the relatively small chip in a 386 CPU, we can fit the entire circuitry of an up-to-date Pentium III chip; and since the trace size is so small, that new re-engraved chip, with over eight million components, actually runs cooler and with a smaller current consumption than it did, pre-re-engraving, when it was a 386 with a mere 360,000 components. Thus any putative problem arising from the yeast-like growth of our code base becomes, simply, 'no problem.'"
"And we decided, rather than releasing this new application for download from our website, instead, in the playful spirit of April Fools, we would surprise all our faithful customers by remotely upgrading their old, slow PCs without their knowledge, so that the next time they turned them on, the lucky users would discover that they now enjoyed, absolutely for free, the sizzling performance of a new, state-of-the-art system!
The method we used to remotely install the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard' was a variation on the standard "Melissa" email trojan-horse, using the exclusive 'Virus Propagation Wizard' built in to every copy of our popular, best-of-breed Outlook email client software. Our engineers started sending out our little surprise gift on Sunday, March 26, 2000."
"To our dismay, reports started filtering in over the next few days about a small, unforeseen bug in the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard,' somehow un-caught in our extensive beta testing program, where the energy released in the course of the in-situ re-engraving, rather than being released slowly and being drawn off and dissipated by the heat sink, instead is released all at once over a period approximately equal to time it takes photons to cross the width of the chip, in a fashion similar to a Q-switched laser, resulting in a violently exothermic burst of hard radiation."
"All of us here at Microsoft are deeply sorry about the property damage and loss of life caused by this unforseeable software 'glitch.' However, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. We at Microsoft explicity deny any legal liability for any unfortunate side-effects of the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard.' Anyone who was affected by this software malfunction clearly must have clicked through the license agreement for Microsoft Outlook. You will see, in section 114A, paragraph 32, line 178, of the license agreement for Microsoft Outlook, a clear disavowal of any responsibility 'for damages or injuries arising from the use of the Software.' Thus we are clearly exculpated from liability for any resultant damages."
"In other words: You bought it, now you eat it! Suckers."
Recklessly courting a libel suit, I remain,
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I heard some guy's beowolf system was attacked by this virus...leveled an entire city block.