NationStates Jolt Archive


Frustrated hacker develops "device that allows you to stab people in the face..."

Perimeter Defense
10-02-2008, 16:57
Associated Press Interlink ipv6-2019:54bb:a1bd::ffff:ffff$)
June 5, 2019

"I'm going to become rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the Internet."
-Traditional

This classic quote has been circulated around the internet for decades and has been the secondary punch line of many jokes spawned in the interlinked melting pot of various classes of humor. Of course, it has never been taken seriously by anyone, owing both to its general impossibility and total lack of morality.

Until now, that is.

19 year-old Mary Allison Yorktown is a member of the hacker group "EthaLOL," a group famous for its 2016 attacks on the Bigtopian governmental intranets. Yorktown herself is notable not only for her most famous achievement, the "eBay eBuy" attack, but also the development of a real-time solution for true global illumination lighting through geometry shader raytracing.

Yorktown, sometime last May, was chatting online with her friends over IRC, when all of a sudden a "troll" just came into the channel and started spewing "absolute nonsense and insulting racial slurs" in her words. She was not new to this experience, nor was it an isolated or rare incident; according to a 2018 survey, 94% of all internet chatters encounter a troll more than twice a month. This, however, was the last straw for Yorktown.

"I couldn't take it anymore," Yorktown said on the experience. "My channel, #theeinsteincode, was the subject of much trolling from those bastard Christian conservatives and maybe an ideological flamebaiter or two ever so often. We try to act politely when they present their broken arguments about The Einstein Code and call us 'hellbound 'till you renounce your dark faith' but sometimes it just gets too rough."

What was Yorktown's solution? Why, a device - software, rather, that allows anyone to stab anyone else in the face over the internet. Well, not technically, of course.

"Most new monitors today," Yorktown said, "have little microcomputer controllers for display units. They're for signal processing sometimes, or adjusting contrast values or otherwise. As much as this is a commonly known fact. However, what most people either forget or don't know is that the monitor computers also receive and process raw instructions from the GPU or video card. Since the computers often control power supply and voltage or otherwise, one can use the GPU instruction-sending method to up the voltage on the monitor, causing overheating, malfunction - perhaps even explosion. And this is where the 'stabbing people in the face over the internet' part comes into play."

Yorktown's software basically hits a target computer, acts as a 3D application, enters high-performance commands into the video card, and sends over-voltage request commands to the monitor through the display port. Soon, the monitor should explode, resulting in glass shards flying in the face of the target user.

"Of course, this needs some hacking skills," Yorktown warned. "You'll need to run the software on the target computer remotely, and how you do that is no longer up to my program. This software just does the stabbing for you - it's your job to get the knife in place."

So far, the quoted statement has been prophecy of the highest precision on both counts on Yorktown's part. She has widespread fame in the internet community, and only six days after the release of her software, has already taken $2 million in income, not revenue!

Yorktown's software retails at $29.99, under the name "Remote Stabber Pro."