[El Gato]

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

Does the good senator, and Clinton apologist, think that computers explode or at least shoot out sparks and smoke, when something bad happens in the software? If so, he's been watching too much cinematic sci-fi.

The very most that could happen is that the hard drive could be wiped. (i.e. somehow execute a DOS commnad FORMAT C:\. Be a bother, but if the music pirate had merely backed up his hard drive to some external media, he'd not be "hurt" at all. I would think the sale of external hard drives, which could be disconnected when not being used to backup the regular drive, would skyrocket. Of course you'd have to run a malicious virus scan just before doing the backup. :)

Then they'd probably make possession of an external hard drive in conjunction with a high capacity virus checker a federal felony.

[Myrddin]

The current vintage of high speed processors comes on motherboards with "jumperless" configuration. You can diddle with the clock speeds and voltages to the CPU via software. If you set the voltage to a value higher than the CPU can tolerate, you could destroy it. A low level format of the hard disk before initiating the CPU destruction with overvoltage would pretty well torch the machine. At the minimum you would need to replace the CPU and reload all the data to your hard disk. A less damaging action might be to erase the FLASH BIOS on the motherboard. It doesn't take much code to do that.

[randog]

The very most that could happen is that the hard drive could be wiped.

I was thinking along the lines of erasing the BIOS. You're truly hosed at that point.