The Tale of the Mechanical Virus
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with At my work, it’s very common for people to share things at meetings by connecting their laptops up to the meeting room projectors. The typical meeting room has one or two projectors, with handy VGA cords that come out of the conference tables. For the Mac users, there are DVI to VGA adapters, since Macs have a different type of video connection than the PC laptops.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that I was suddenly unable to present via the projecter at meetings. I plugged the VGA cable into my Mac via the adapter, but nothing happened. No amount of button pressing, settings fiddling, or cable jiggling seemed to fix the problem. It was really annoying, but I chalked it up to the fickle projector gnomes and used someone else’s computer instead.
Soon afterwards, I noticed that other people’s Macs were refusing to project as well. Person after person would plug their Mac into the projector, but to no avail. What was even stranger was that the affliction only seemed to affect Mac users. PC laptop users laughed at us as they projected with impunity.
What gives? Well, last week, I finally discovered the problem.
If you’ve never seen a DVI port before, it’s a long thin port with lots of pins arranged in a rectangular pattern. These pins on the cable plug into matching holes on the computer. The pins are relatively close together, so the holes are separated by thin walls of plastic with metal contacts.
The problem I discovered was that one of the thin walls between the holes had broken and bent down, forming a ramp. When I plugged the DVI adapter into my computer, two of the pins went into the same hole, and the projector could no longer understand the output from my computer.
However, it doesn’t end there. When I plugged the DVI adapter into the broken socket, the ramp formed by the broken wall bent the corresponding pin upwards, forming a wedge with the adjacent pin. Then, when any other Mac user plugged the same adapter into their own computer, the pin wedge would press down on that same socket wall, breaking it and bending it down in the same fashion.
What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters. An infected adapter will infect any computer that uses it, causing that computer to infect any adapters that it comes into contact with in the future, etc.
Apparently, I’m far from the first person to identify this mechanical virus. I sent out an email about it and heard responses from others who had experienced similar outbreaks in other offices.
The hilarious thing about this whole situation is how similar the reactions and consequences are to a real virus. For example, once the virus was discovered, people began to take measures to protect themselves. I just started checking every DVI adapter that I used on my computer (being careful). Others got their own DVI adapters and started using them exclusively (using protection).
There are still bent pins and broken ports out there, but hopefully in time we can stamp out the virus for good.
1
Wasn’t the Zip drive “click of death” also a mechanical virus?
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The click of death was one. There are others. Some VGA or other “D-shell” style connectors would break in this manner.
While whether or not this actually a “virus” would yield many, many hours of fascinating debate, I’m going to have to say “no”.
Why? Because it doesn’t actively seek to copy itself.
4
Actually, it’s more like a prion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion) than a virus. It takes a healthy pin (protein) and bends (refolds) it, creating an unhealthy pin. The unhealthy pins propagate by coming in contact with healthy pins. It looks like we’ve discovered Chronic Bending Disease.
5
This same thing happened to some communications hardware in one of my previous employers’ server closets. A major pain, to put it mildly.
6
This should only affect MacBook Pro users. MacBooks don’t have DVI, they have Mini-DVI. The Mini-DVI oddly looks a lot beefier than a DVI port. Anyone hear any reports of *that* getting a similar “virus”? I guess I’ll stick with my own adaptors for now.
loquacious: I think you’re seeing volition where there is none. A virus can’t actively seek to replicate because it has no consciousness. Both just replicate because that’s all they do. A computer virus was designed with malicious intent, where this probably wasn’t. But biological viruses have just evolved the way they did, so requiring malice for a “virus” doesn’t work either.
7
I’ve got a real example of a self-propagating hardware virus that affects Macs particularly:
Shorted Firewire ports.
If a firewire cable is inserted upside down (easy on most any PC, or any G4 tower), it will kill the port on both the device and the computer. In some cases, one side of the connection will become viral, killing any port you plug it into.
I’ve seen four outbreaks: the first had a DV camera kill Firewire ports on a lab full of Powermac G4s, the second (a WiebeTech drive) and third (a DV camera) killed only the ports on the devices, and the fourth (a LaCie drive) killed 3 firewire ports on two iMac G4s before I caught it.
Keep an eye out.
8
This problem has happened ever since plug-in connectors were created. I work with many large multi-pin connectors in “patch panels” that allow you to rearrange the signal flow between computers and to/from other peripherals so that you can select the specific configuration you want for a given task from a large selection of devices all running into these panels (you can even connect panels together to get even more complex configurations). We have had this “virus” whenever some dufus jammed his device’s connector into one of the more-widely-used patch-panel connectors, bent its pins, and didn’t bother to tell anybody, causing that spreading virus of bent pins whenever anyone else used that connector, unless he/she carefully inspected his connector and the matching “anti-connector” in the panel for damage. I got to the point that I always automatically checked the pins both before and after each time I used a connector so that I wouldn’t be part of this problem, but some people didn’t seem to care what they did to others. If I accidently bent a pin (it happens), I would carefully unbend it and verify it worked before I left. The “Commons” in the electronic world.
Nathan Okun,
Computer Engineer,
NSWC/PHD, Port Hueneme, California
9
Ironic that it happened to Macs. Several years ago I read a story (just searched and can’t find it online) where Steve Wozniak was working late one night when Apple was very young. From memory:
One of the wall sockets was mis-wired. Wozniak plugged a printer into a computer that was powered by a different wall socket. That blew the printer. Testing to see if the printer was the problem, he plugged it into a different computer. The now-damaged printer blew that computer. He then plugged another device into the second computer, which blew that device. I think there were two or three more tests. In fifteen minutes Wozniak had blown up nearly half the equipment in Apple’s office.
10
Reminds me of the mechanical virus in Zip disks, which spread “the click of death”
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» The Tale of the Mechanical Virus at hobartimus.com
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So there aren’t any PC users there that use DVI ports on their laptop?
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The “click of death” wasn’t a virus, as it didn’t spread. It was just an inherent problem with the early Zip100 drives, so it was just a matter of time until it happened to you. The pin-bending virus has been around for a long time, though. I remember it happening with the 68-pin “Honda” connectors used on SCSI devices in the mid ’90s: a bent pin would bend part of the female connector which would bend the pins of any other male connectors you plugged in. It could get round an office very quickly.
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For it to actually be a virus, it would need to be true that a damaged Mac, when plugged into a healthy projector (or display or connector) could cause that projector to be damaged in the same way as the original.
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@Vas: Hmm, I’m not sure that it affected all early Zip100 drives. I bought one, used it with my Amiga until I upgraded to three different Macs, all still with SCSI. I never had an issue with the Click of Death, and I’ve still got the drive, somewhere. Never had a bad disk.
Best peripheral I ever had.
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The Click of Death wasn’t guaranteed to happen. I had two ZIP 100 drives that got it, one internal SCSI, one external parallel. I still have one external SCSI that works fine, and a number of internal ATA and external USB (which are slightly later vintage than the original SCSI and parallel models,) that work fine.
But the click of death was propagating. A disk that CoD occur on it got a bent disk. That bent disk then bent the read head of the next drive you put it in, spreading the CoD.
As for mini-DVI computers not being susceptible, true. The actual COMPUTER would be fine. But the mini-DVI-to-full-size-DVI adapter wouldn’t. (Although if you’re smart, you’d just use a mini-DVI-to-VGA, bypassing the bad DVI adaptor in the conference room.)
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19
My local computer fix it up guy used a mechanical pencil (sans lead) to rebend some pins on a processor I’d screwed up.
It worked beautifully, thought I might pass this along to anyone else wanting to fix a “mechanical virus”.
20
Another mechanical plague that’s easy to spread once the pins mutate is on Compact Flash cards. I had a client experiencing a rash of CF casualties until I noticed that one of his CF readers had a bent pin. As with your DVI, the bent reader’s male pins borked the card’s female connectors, which then bent the pins in other readers. The Mechanical STD: serially transmitted disease.
Daniel Eran Dilger
RoughlyDrafted.com
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[…] alwaysBETA » The Tale of the Mechanical Virus Who knew DVI ports on a Mac could be vectors for a destructive virus? (tags: dvi mac apple projector virus mechanics) […]
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Very clever bit of reasoning. Mechanical virus indeed!
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Good story, guess PC laptop users can be a little smug about their outdated ports this week.
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As someone who works in both IT and occasionally A/V, I’ve seen every variation of this sort of thing. In A/V, you always glance at a plug before inserting… the pins on VGA cables in particular are so easy to bend.
It’s the overall scenario that changes a typical A/V problem (though DVI is usually more hearty) into a bizarre virus. The elements of the projector’s function, the mixed Mac/PC environment, and the particular slot that broke were all necessary to cause the infectiousness and the mystery.
Now just imagine if someone tried to make a hardware virus.
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It sounds more like a prion than a virus to me. A prion is a protein which reproduces by coming into contact with certain other proteins and encouraging them to change form into a copy of itself. It doesn’t actually reproduce like avirus, which injects it’s DNA into a cell which then acts on the instructions.
29
Mechanical virii used to happen with 2 GB Iomega Jaz drives. I administered a student lab that relied on Jaz drives. When a drive would become mis-aligned the cartridges would mis-align with that drive. Those cartridges could then mis-align other drives. Very weird. Without admitting a defect, Iomega let me return over 100 Jaz cartridges and probably twenty drives over a month or so.
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This would affect PC users that have DVI connectors too. Laptops such as the Dell XPS series have both ports.
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billpapa.org Reading (b)log » Blog Archive » Mechanical Viruses
[…] What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters. An infected adapter will infect any computer that uses it, causing that computer to infect any adapters that it comes into contact with in the future, etc.alwaysBETA » The Tale of the Mechanical Virus […]
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I’ve seen PC notebooks with a DVI port instead of VGA (my classmate was surprised that he couldn’t connect to the projector).
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35
I ran into a mechanical virus on some cheap motherboards in the early 1990’s. A keyboard stopped working with machine A one day. We plugged it into machine B, which had a working keyboard; it didn’t work on that machine either. We plugged previously working keyboards into both machines; now they didn’t work. It was apparantly a weird, vendor-specific issue on the motherboard and on the keyboard. We ended up replacing something like 4 motherboards and 6 keyboards.
36
I used to encounter an identical issue with HD50 scsi cables (specifically it happened to a company that had tons of iomega Jaz drives) . .They ended up messing up bunch of their cables, a handful of scsi adaptors and 2 jaz drives.
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Only Macs at
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Whew. Glad that I wasn’t infected at the last convention I spoke at. It would have spread all through Salt Lake by now…
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impormation virus
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Hmmm, making a virus.
I recall in my mis-spent youth “developing” (never put it in the wild) a virus that consisted of putting a staple in a 5.25″ floppy.
Said floppy when inserted in a drive spun around and the staple damaged the head. When putting any floppy into the drive after that, the bent head physically scratched the disk. I suppose it would really be “half a virus” as the drive would only destroy disks after that as it would have no way to put staples into other floppies.
Maybe when we have electronic paper/advanced robotics etc. we might see self-replicating hardware. But then would it be a software virus distrubiting itself by hardware …..
42
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