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Comment by vorotato | Hacker News Reader

and thus an exploit was born.

Ya, I cant imagine that they'd forget something like that. Certainly on my iPhone Siri stops listening, which should on the PC restart the fan.

I would be very entertained if you could melt chips with an overly patient Siri.

I'd assume it wouldn't be a timeout, but a higher temperature threshold. If the machine is on the verge of melting already then you wouldn't want to turn off the fans at all.

Thats a good point, and I hope thats what they do. Im not Mac OS familiar, can other applications ask Siri to listen in? If they pause fans regardless of temperature, then it would be interesting to see if damage could be caused by an app running hot then repeatedly going to Siri.

I bet theres a way to test their cutoff mechanism. Maybe someone could run some serious bench-marking apps (maybe more CPU bound ones) and see if Siri still kills the fan at high temperatures.

Could someone potentially damage their very expensive machine to satisfy my curiosity?

You are unlikely to cause any damage, although you might make the CPU speed throttle right down

AFAIK most systems have an emergency shutoff anyway, so if it gets too hot, the machine simply powers off. At least, my old desktop did.

If the machine is on the verge of melting already, it's likely just going to hard-shutdown below the OS level.

All this could really open them up to is a hard-shutdown, and I imagine they would have implemented this as a higher threshold, not a complete disable -- at least, it seems like a really easy problem to foresee and circumvent.

Great point. You might make it shut off, but you should never be able to damage anything, no matter how clever the OS tries to be.

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