Originally posted by Sephiroth@Jun 19 2003, 12:03 AM
zone is hands down the better coder than me, so i may be wrong, but, the only way they could destroy a drive while windows is running on it would be assembly, they would have to directly interact with it through assembly language and wipe it from there, which would cause the machine to reboot, obviously
That depends if you mean destroy or erase. Two entirely different things. Any program can delete data providing it is run with administrator privellages. It needs to delete data file-by-file, which takes longer than simply overwriting the first few sectors, but its possible none the less.
What programming language its written in is irrelevant. All compilers first translate your code to assembly language, and then its encoded in a bytecode understandable by your proccessor. The thing is windows intercepts requests to access the hard drive directly. That can be gotten around by installing a custom driver that provides raw disk access functionallity (although not easy to do transparently on new windows versions). Not that its even neccessary to use raw sector access to delete data, the windows API includes functions to delete files etc.
Destroying a hard drive is much more complicated. There may be flaws in individual models, but there is no standard "self-destruct" command present in all harddrives
. Some viruses attempted to write to the same sector over and over continiously until it got 'worn out', but thats a crude and very unpredictable method, and the hdd activity will get noticed weeks before it causes damage.
And the concept of an MP3 doing this is again ridiculous. There may have been vulnerabilites in MP3 frame parsing on some players, but they tend to get fixed very shortly after they are discovered, and a malicious MP3 probably wont affect more than a tiny fraction of PCs - not to mention as soon as its hyped up, everyone will patch their players or install an AV program, and itll be the end of the threat. Knowing the RIAA's technical skillz, their malicious MP3 is probably a "Really Good!1!1! - New nude pix britney!1!.mp3.EXE".
It will never happen, and I am sure the RIAA is aware of this. The thing is they are winning a different battle - if rumours like this circulate, many computer novices will believe them. Somewhere out there there will be parents stopping their kids from trading MP3's because they read that it will destroy their PC. Somewhere there will be company managments who decide to crack down on sharing, because they are mislead they will lose property. These tactics are entirely psychological. They do not need to actually have any of this malicious capability - they just want people to believe they do.