Meaning of killer poke | Babel Free

Definitions

Any method of inducing physical harm to a computer or peripheral by software means, especially by inserting invalid values into a control register or by building up harmonic oscillations in a hard disk, etc.

Examples

“killer poke n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage⟳ on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see⟳ poke) into a memory-mapped control⟳ register⟳; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and crash⟳ analog electronics in the monitor⟳.”

“[F]rom what I recall⟳ the "killer poke" was POKE 59458,62 […] [W]hat it did was change⟳ an I/O line from input to output. The line connected to a signal related to vertical sync. The ROM routines that wrote to the display would wait⟳ until it was in vertical blank to avoid⟳ the "video snow⟳" that otherwise resulted. The killer POKE would fool it into seeing the display always in vertical blank so it would write⟳ whenever. […] That this stressed the electronics was clear from the fact that the brief stint in the "killer" mode (a fraction of a second) often produced a bright flash⟳ followed by a dimmed and shrunk video display that would re-expand to its former self over the course of two seconds or so. Of course the later hardware also had the video snow⟳ thing fixed and the ROM no longer checked for vertical retrace, so the killer POKE disappeared.”

“Is frying someone's laptop remotely with a killer poke even possible? Even if it is, it may not achieve⟳ the desired effect, says Dave Dittrich, a computer specialist at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory, who is a specialist in the topic. "How expensive is it to buy⟳ a new one? $500? Cyber is not the same as physical when it comes to disabling 'weapons' to remove⟳ a threat."”

CEFR level