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#1
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Any claims of Forceware 52.16 monitor damage yet?
Well, where are they? A thread on rage3d.com traced how apparently 3
reports (one guy posted to 4 web forums) started the belief that the ATI 3.8 drivers could damage monitors. That same forum also references a report of someone with a recent generation (GeForce 5900 series I believe) board that claimed monitor damage as well after a software change (obviously not ATI drivers). How long before some dude with a defective monitor begins the whining? If it is that easy, why hasn't a trojan been written to destroy monitors by forcing repeated refresh rate changes and deliberately ignoring DDC info? Why wait for this alleged accidental monitor damage to occur when you can code for it deliberately? Easy to do if these claims are the case--I would think especially easy under the architecture of Win95/98. I want proof! Show me the trojan! I want to email my enemies the monitor destroying trojan! Will ATI Catalyst 3.8 and NVidia Forceware 52.16 not deliver unto us the Purger of Inferior Monitors with Cheap Relays? A Final Solution to the Monitor Problem is surely at hand, is it not? Angry Rabbit with many CRTs |
#2
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I find it hard to believe.
The vast majority of monitors made in the past 5-10years (it does vary from one manufacturer to another), have inbuilt protection against 'out of bounds' specification of horizontal or vertical refresh rate. They just go into power saving mode if the refresh rate is too high. It used to be a problem in the early late 80's and early 90's, but not now. Interestingly, the a similar problem applied to old RLL and MFM hard drives. Those old drives needed to be 'parked' before being shut off or moved. This was accomplished with a program that sent the hard drives read/write head to an un-used sector of the disk, so if the head did hit the disk, no data would be lost, and no fragments of magnetic coating got knocked off (which would then act like a little bullet ricocheting around an operational drive). The sector that was used to park the head was typically the very first or last on the disk. Some smart are wondered what would happen if he wrote a program to send the head to a non existent sector... It worked like this. Say a hard disk has 5200 sectors. The nasty software would send a command to the drive that told it to send it's head to sector 9999. You can pretty much imagine what happened. Head snapped its arm and bounced around the rotating drive like a 1 mile wide meteorite bouncing across a city.... Ouch. Thankfully IDE put paid to all that nastiness. There were tricks like this for all sorts of computer gear. Printers were a favourite, as were most peripherals with moving parts. The faster they moved, the better. ;-) "Angry Rabbit" wrote in message ... Well, where are they? A thread on rage3d.com traced how apparently 3 reports (one guy posted to 4 web forums) started the belief that the ATI 3.8 drivers could damage monitors. That same forum also references a report of someone with a recent generation (GeForce 5900 series I believe) board that claimed monitor damage as well after a software change (obviously not ATI drivers). How long before some dude with a defective monitor begins the whining? If it is that easy, why hasn't a trojan been written to destroy monitors by forcing repeated refresh rate changes and deliberately ignoring DDC info? Why wait for this alleged accidental monitor damage to occur when you can code for it deliberately? Easy to do if these claims are the case--I would think especially easy under the architecture of Win95/98. I want proof! Show me the trojan! I want to email my enemies the monitor destroying trojan! Will ATI Catalyst 3.8 and NVidia Forceware 52.16 not deliver unto us the Purger of Inferior Monitors with Cheap Relays? A Final Solution to the Monitor Problem is surely at hand, is it not? Angry Rabbit with many CRTs |
#3
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Replicant wrote in news:dqiipvg1aa28la5b3sjjjpvghvthid3bqh@
4ax.com: On , Angry Rabbit scribbled: Well, where are they? http://lists.bilkent.edu.tr/cih/alert.htm IMPORTANT: Anyone running Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows 98 should read this notice. This June, a new virus called Win32/CIH (or PE_CIH) first appeared, and it was discovered on Bilkent campus machines in late December. The virus infects Windows 95 and Windows 98 executable files, but NOT files on Windows NT or any Macintosh or UNIX / Linux computers. The virus contains highly destructive code, which triggers on the 26th of April. Some versions, believed to become active on the 26th of each month are also mentioned in literature. The virus code attempts to overwrite the flash-BIOS in infected machines. If the flash-BIOS is write-enabled (and most Pentium powered PCs have a writable flash-BIOS), the overwriting renders the machine UNUSABLE because it will no longer have a BIOS. The effect can be easily described as a hardware problem and any hardware damage caused by the virus is not covered under manufacturers' warranties. http://www.tech-forums.net/computer/topic/1881.html In the past 6 months I have been witness to 2 comps that have suffered actual hardware damage from viruses, http://www.pcmech.com/show/os/188/2 Viruses don't infect computer hardware such as monitors or computer chips; they only infect software. They can, however, damage certain types of hardware such as flash-memory. Not quite the same thing. You can easily reprogram the BIOS chip with a EEPROM writer. The chip isn't damaged. This is no different than a virus that reformats your hard drive. There is no "hardware" problem just because malicious software invokes various IDE commands to rewrite your drive. There is no hardware damage and the system has worked as DESIGNED. Maybe people should think about how smart it is to have software- reprogrammable ROMs instead of hardware jumpers on the motherboard that need to be moved to enable EEPROM writes. If you have no PROM writer, you're hosed and will have to implore the manufacturer for a fresh BIOS, but I see nothing here where you can destroy a BIOS chip (ie it fails to write/erase with a EEPROM writer). I still await the deliberately programmed trojan that will destroy monitors. Something that allegedly happens by accident with Forceware or Catalyst drivers should be doable to code intentionally into a trojan for a catastrophic attack that destroys monitors. (Were VESA 2.0 BIOS upgrades in the 1990's for PCI cards ever accused of destroying monitors??) This trojan should be able to destroy monitors of multiple brands including ones that are manufactured well, not just a few brands (like the LG CDROMs mentioned in the other post). The other post with Linux & the LG CDROM does get closer to the spirit of what I'm getting at, though that sounds like a problem with the manufacture of the CDROM rather than the Linux, obviously. Show me the monitor destroying trojan! What driver programmers have (allegedly) done by accident, must therefore be doable on purpose! Angry Rabbit |
#4
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So you don't think it's possible for someone to write a virus that writes to the registry and force your monitor to do 200mhz refresh rate on the next reboot? No, because no videocard supports 200MHz refresh rates. Besides, any monitor worth a damn will simply display an "out of scan range" or similar message if you feed it too high a refresh rate (mine does and it was manufactured in nineteen ****ing ninety eight!). If a high refresh rate kills a monitor it's because it was a ****ty monitor. Complain to the manufacturer, this is something that is clearly unavoidable if it is properly designed. |
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