The Zana Zen

One can create an ecological computer virus.

• The Printer Virus – The virus will schedule it’s destruction event to a certain date, it needs to do it’s job without interference. It will detect when the computer is idle for a couple of hours and the local time shows that it is early in the morning. It will send an ACPI event to turn on the printer and start printing on low quality to waste as much paper as it can.
  The results can be devastating, if it will spread to 1,000,000 computers covertly and print 25 pages on average at each computer it infected. Then the earth will loose 25 * 1,000,000 * 100gr = 2,500,000,000gr of paper which is 2756 tons (907kg a ton) of paper. According to enote, each ton of paper is equivalent to 17 trees, so it turns out to be a total waste of ~49,000 trees!
• The WiFi Virus – It’s job is to fry out human beings, the virus will transmit nonstop until someone will feel bad.
• Power Consumption – A virus can be designed to use as much power as it can by turning off ACPI (or using it to it’s advantage) and using the hardware (especially the disks) in an excessive way. Higher power consumption equals to higher power plant duties, they’ll burn more oil and pollute the environment.
• The Subwoofer Virus – This one plays a continuous low frequency sound. In accordance to the theory of chaos, a hurricane will be created somewhere

The product of 1,000,000 infected computers can really create a difference, even with small things.

It’s nice to have fun about it, but now you can guess what a stupid bug(?) in Yahoo Messanger for example with millions of clients world wide can do.

There is a web service which is called StatCounter, it gives it’s users a free log of their website’s statistics.

The problem is that the log size is limited to the last 100 visitors. StatCounter collects statistics by running javascript in the visitor’s browser. When you open an account at StatCounter, they giv you e a piece of javascript to put at the footer of your website, this javascripts collects the interesting information from the visitor’s browser and sends it to StatCounter for logging.

Bypassing the 100 limitation is kind of easy, because you can open multiple projects (each is limited seperately) for the same website. now, If you’ll open 10 projects, you’ll get 10 pieces of javascript. You should put a different JS for different visitors, anytime a new visitor comes (you should rotate the JS), the problem is that you’ll want to put the same visitor in the same StatCounter project, so you’ll have to maintain a table that translates IPs to the correct pieces of JS. My estimation is that it takes something like 20 minutes to setup such a thing with PHP/MySQL.