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Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?

21 points by bbuffone ↗ HN
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.

39 comments

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cperciva
Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.
niyazpk
Then what?
themic86
Oh, you didn't hear? He with the largest digit wins.
cperciva
I guess I lost, then. I computed the quadrillionth bit, but it turned out to be a zero.
randomwalker
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

cperciva
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.

randomwalker
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 :-)

cperciva
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.

icey
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.

randomwalker
Just read that comment again, I meant the largest 7-tuple of primes in arithmetic progression. Otherwise that doesn't make any sense :-)
mooism2
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.

bretthoerner
Up-modded simply because of all things in the world you chose to seed _The Wire_. <3
ejs
Update all the people with ie6 to something newer
bbuffone
Now that you mention it, I can't think of anything better for humanity.
cperciva
You have a very limited imagination.
stcredzero
I don't think that Conficker is going to be making an impact on world hunger very soon.
ObieJazz
Replace all copies of IE with a skinned, renamed version of Firefox that calls itself IE 9.
nwinter
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.?
streety
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.

dmanxiii
Folding@home. Or other peoples homes.
chaosmachine
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...
blakmatrix
fix the economy :)
Steve0
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.
themic86
How much would everyone have if that happened?

My guess is somewhere around $50k.

Shamiq
Maybe, but would it retain its real worth?
ars
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.

themic86
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.
_b8r0
Skynet. Self-awareness is only a few million more bots away...
friedbaloney
Put up fake april fool's day websites in place of popular sites. Oh, wait... nevermind.
juliend2
1-setup the biggest cloudcomputing host.

2-profit.

jgrahamc
Crack the encryption on someone's DomainKeys implementation so that I can sign mail as coming from them. Then successfully spam the world.
tdm
Domainkeys/DKIM for IIS/news
tptacek
With apologies to Nate Lawson: delete any website, blog post, message board, or email thread that talks about Conficker.
mccon104
the first rule of conficker...
umjames
...is also the second rule of conficker
themic86
Place billions of orders to small breweries around the world and have them shipped a select few small towns.