Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

21 pointsbbuffone39 comments

Being that today is April 1st - April fools day - and also the day Conficker computer virus was to download a new set of instructions. I was thinking what would I do with the 3-12 million computers at my beck and call.

Email resignation letters to everyone's boss. Insert Porn into everyone's PowerPoint slides

Pretty lame that's why I asked the question.

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Update all the people with ie6 to something newer

Replace all copies of IE with a skinned, renamed version of Firefox that calls itself IE 9.

Now that you mention it, I can't think of anything better for humanity.

You have a very limited imagination.

I don't think that Conficker is going to be making an impact on world hunger very soon.

How difficult would it be to write a virus that fixed common system vulnerabilities? Could one write something that would run Windows Update, download Spybot and some other free antivirus programs to do a sweep, update Java and Flash, etc.?

Although I have no sources I was under the impression that the more sophisticated viruses already did this. Not for altruistic reasons but because they want exclusive control of the resources available.

I imagine it's similar to the biochemical changes that occur in a newly fertilized egg to prevent entry of additional sperm.

I could be wrong though. As I say I haven't exactly researched this.

Synchronize the system clock, set the volume to maximum, and then, at the right moment, and with perfect synchronicity, each computer would play back a prerecorded speech claiming to be a message from God...

Or Rick Astley.

Same thing no?

Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.

To those who might have missed what the parent is talking about, in 1995 a formula was discovered that lets you calculate the n'th bit of pi without calculating the previous n-1 bits. This surprised everyone.

The consequence is that you can compute the n'th bit in essentially linear time, and essentially constant memory. By traditional methods, computing the quintillionth bit would be unthinkable.

However, I doesn't look like the algorithm is parallelizable in a meaningful way. Any thoughts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe_formula

The BBP algorithm is not only parallelizable, it's embarrassingly parallel. Each term in the series can be computed independently of the rest.

In case you missed half of the joke: The PiHex project computed the quadrillionth bit of Pi back in 1998-2000... and was run by yours truly.

I sure did. Funny thing is, I was into this stuff back then (at one point me and another guy were chasing the record for the largest 7-tuple in arithmetic progression; we ended up with the second largest), so I'm sure I heard about your effort at the time. BBP survives in my memory a decade later, but not PiHex.

I have to say though, your original comment was definitely an obscure reference, even on HN :-)

I have to say though, your original comment was definitely an obscure reference, even on HN

I think a lot of people who have been here for longer than you were aware of my connection to PiHex -- it has come up a few times.

Not all of us keep our leather bound "Life and Times of Colin Percival" on our desks.

Some of us keep them under our pillows so we can have sweet, sweet cperciva dreams.

Just read that comment again, I meant the largest 7-tuple of primes in arithmetic progression. Otherwise that doesn't make any sense :-)

Then what?

Oh, you didn't hear? He with the largest digit wins.

I guess I lost, then. I computed the quadrillionth bit, but it turned out to be a zero.

Seed torrents.

Hey, if everyone's upstream bandwidth is being soaked up by _The Wire_, other viruses won't be able to use it to send out spam.

Up-modded simply because of all things in the world you chose to seed _The Wire_. <3

Put up fake april fool's day websites in place of popular sites. Oh, wait... nevermind.

Folding@home. Or other peoples homes.

Downvote non-HN type stories at HN.

Crack the encryption on someone's DomainKeys implementation so that I can sign mail as coming from them. Then successfully spam the world.

Domainkeys/DKIM for IIS/news

Skynet. Self-awareness is only a few million more bots away...

With apologies to Nate Lawson: delete any website, blog post, message board, or email thread that talks about Conficker.

the first rule of conficker...

...is also the second rule of conficker

Place billions of orders to small breweries around the world and have them shipped a select few small towns.

fix the economy :)

Was thinking along those lines. Start transferring money from all accounts to all accounts. Stop when everyone has the same amount of money. Should be fun for a while.

How much would everyone have if that happened?

My guess is somewhere around $50k.

Depends on if you mean M0, M1, M2, or M3.

If you mean M0, then assuming 300,000,000 people in the US it's $2,500 per person. If you mean M2 it's $25,000. And M3 is is a secret, but in 2006 it was about 35% larger than M2.

Defining money is a lot more complicated than you think, since the majority of the money in the world is in the form of debt, and it's not actually possible to share it around.

good point. I was doing a simple "how many 'dollars' are in 'circulation' / population". of course, most money isn't money, it is, like you said, digitized debt.

Maybe, but would it retain its real worth?

1-setup the biggest cloudcomputing host.

2-profit.

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