Can some software physically damage hardware?
Problem
I know a question similar to this one has been asked before however it was about installing a 32bit OS on a 64bit laptop. My question is more about damaging the hardware. I was wondering if there was a way of interfacing with hardware from the OS or Terminal layer in a way to damage it beyond repair (actual physical damage, not just faulty hardware). Could you bypass security measures and run a CPU so hard that the ceramic actually breaks? Could you write or interface with a HDD in a way that would cause physical damage to the platters? Could you mess around with memory and fry RAM? Can you blow a NIC? I'm interesting in knowing the limit to which the software can reach when looking at a system as a whole.
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1 Fix
Fix for: Can some software physically damage hardware?
When actually running programs, the load on the CPU can cause the core temperature to rise. While newer technologies have some effect (dynamic frequency & voltage scaling), this is still mostly because certain instructions use different electrical pathways in the microprocessor (as opposed to when the processor is simply in an idle or low power state). There have been various power viruses written in the past, which take advantage of this fact to repeatedly execute specific machine code which d…
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