

Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do? - bbuffone

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.<p>Email resignation letters to everyone's boss.
Insert Porn into everyone's PowerPoint slides<p>Pretty lame that's why I asked the question.
======
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.

------
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...

~~~
jlees
Or Rick Astley.

~~~
run4yourlives
Same thing no?

------
cperciva
Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern
computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.

~~~
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.

------
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

------
friedbaloney
Put up fake april fool's day websites in place of popular sites. Oh, wait...
nevermind.

------
dmanxiii
Folding@home. Or other peoples homes.

------
biohacker42
Downvote non-HN type stories at HN.

------
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

------
iuguy
Skynet. Self-awareness is only a few million more bots away...

------
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.

------
juliend2
1-setup the biggest cloudcomputing host.

2-profit.

------
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.

~~~
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.

