IMO this is one of the best and brief answers of the thread. Given the extreme lengths to which hackers et al go to to develop things to cause havok or to just see “I wonder if I can do this…”, if there was an exploit to do this very thing, we’d be hearing about it now.
One can bring up some anecdotal evidence of a magic “HD destroying code” or “modem inferno code” or “monitor destroying code”. And in theory, it looks like some of them could work. But I also know some pretty sharp people who purposefully tried several of these exploits from detailed instructions, repeatedly, and never once succeeded. The Linux monitor thing was one of them - they tried on half a dozen monitors, and never did anything worse than produce a really bad whine.
The vast majority of computer owners do not look into the details of things like this. They trundle down to Dixon’s or Best Buy and just grab a system. The office environment is, sadly, in a similar situation. Often the people in charge of purchasing computers for large companies are completely ignorant of the details of the systems, and buy from whichever company gave them the best gifts. I personally in my life have spoken to a man who claims to have purchased more than 2000 of one type of PC because the vendor gave him 2 free tickets to San Francisco for a “product demo”, which consisted of tours of the winerys of Napa Valley with his wife.
Look at how many people blindly go down and pick up Windows XP because “it’s the newest Windows”? And yet, from my alarming experience with XP over the last 3 months, XP is an OS filled with a frightening and Byzantine array of security holes, security layers that are poorly understood, insane quirks that change key system properties without notice and without apparent cause, “spyware” built-in by Microsoft. It seems like every other day I discover a new log file intended to track something I do on my computer. And the stability is absolutely laughable compared to WinNT, which is a truly sad thing to say. I would never willingly have had a machine with XP for those reasons, and yet my company blindly forces us all too.
I have no doubt that if the Government mandated a “self-destruct” code on computers such that if so much as one MP3 appeared on the harddrive or one JPG of Britney Spears dressed a Catholic Schoolgirl appeared in IE, my company would order them just the same, with no hesitation. And Mr. and Mrs. Average would continue to buy new ones every 3 years, because “now Windows has tint control!”
Unless you are a multi-billion dollar corporation, your real property rights are only what the multi-billion dollar corporations permit them to be. That’s not how the law is written, but it is how it works.
I think Hatch is talking about the future. So, yes, i would say its possible. If Intel can make an ID chip, then they can surely put in other things that would let remote computers access your Intel CPU.
Of course, they could just find another security leak in MS Outlook & use that too
Viruses have been targeting the boot sector and file allocation tables of hard drives for a long time now. For example, Rocko has been around since 1992.
As far as I know, there’s still no simple or inexpensive way to recover the entirety of the data lost after a FAT is corrupted. That effectively “destroys” the system as it existed, doesn’t it?
Yes, it seems to me that for the average person “destroying” your computer means erasing your files and making it impossible to boot to Windows. If you press the power button and the machine makes funny beeps and you get an unfamiliar black screen with white text and your mouse doesn’t work then that counts as destroyed, at least as far as Orrin Hatch is concerned.
Personally all the ansewers i have seen on here are technically based on could you destroy ,render useless a pc of some vintage. What I am not seeing in regards to the original post is the scare mongering that this discussion will engender.
So out of population of 300 million , say around ten million techies will be safe, if this does or could exist. That leaves somewhere around 150 million soccer moms that want something done , oughta be a law.
Just remembering the Y2K scare ramping up towards the end of 98 and then ratcheting up severely towards december of 99 , that this bill or idea is meant to terrorize people if its implemented.
Almost there. Hatch’s point was that the cops wouldn’t be involved.
So a better analogy is:
Merchandise wholesaler believes you have stolen goods on your person. The wholesaler’s people seize you, strip you naked, burn your clothing, and tear apart your house – not to look for the goods, but just because they have a (law-defined) reasonable belief that you have them. You have no recourse under criminal or civil law.
(Also note that it’s the wholesaler who does this, not the manufacturer nor the retailer.)
