Can a program harm your computer?

Asked May 06 '12 at 22:00

Active May 06 '12 at 22:00

Viewed 125 times

Possible Duplicate:
Is it possible to permanently damage the hardware by software?

Browsing the mono sources I stumbled uppon this comment:

/* don't run the resulting program, it will destroy your computer,
 * just objdump -d it to inspect we generated the correct assembler.
 */

What harm can it do?

edited May 23 '17 at 11:56

Community

asked May 06 '12 at 22:00

Try compiling it and running an anti-virus program on the resulting binary. The programs have heuristics that may catch whatever it is that this thing is doing, and I'd expect them to report it to you. – ZeroOne May 06 '12 at 22:04
Do you mean physically harm it? Sure, you can wear computers down by running resource-intensive programs. – GManNickG May 06 '12 at 22:05
1

Hardware, that can be destroyed by software, deserves destroying. – nothrow May 06 '12 at 22:05
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a person would need to know what's going on in `x86-codegen.h` – vol7ron May 06 '12 at 22:07
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@Yossarian Just flash the BIOS of your PC with some random data. It deserves it, as you say – Gunther Piez May 06 '12 at 22:25
In general yes, you can harm your computer with software, is it easy or trivial? Not necessarily. – old_timer May 06 '12 at 22:46
why does this have an assembly tag? – old_timer May 06 '12 at 23:17

0 Answers0