[ExI] blue screen = hard disk crash?

[Anders Sandberg]

spike <spike66 at att.net> , 29/6/2014 7:28 PM:





“Lerner walked into her office one day and her computer screen was blue. Her hard drive had crashed.”

 

Questions please computer hipsters: 

 

- Does a crashed hard drive cause a blue screen? 
Bill's point is relevant. A lot of people are just as bad at explaining what happened to their computers as they are at explaining their medical problems:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/14/readers_corner_register/So the blue screen might have meant a computer not working rather than a system crash. Or a blue wallpaper on a non-working computer. Or that he had heard somebody saying the computer was dead, and assumed that all dead computers have blue screens. 
The technical issue is messy, "BSoDs can be caused by poorly written device drivers or malfunctioning hardware, such as faulty memory, power supply issues, overheating of components, or hardware running beyond its specification limits." - I can imagine some badly written software causing a crash if the disk is not where it is expected to be. But generally, I would not expect a BSoD for a disk crash, just a lot of dialogues offering reformatting. 





It would be interesting to me if this whole thing could be cracked open by the IRS’ computer failure reports.  We just look at that report plus the reports of the six other critical disks and see if their users reported blue screens on the same day.  If so, it suggests a targeted virus of some sort (ja?)  If they all simultaneously suffered some mysterious mechanical failure that day (such as from impact with the floor or a 12 pound sledge hammer) we are on to something else, but the point of this post is that Americans should not brush off that question. 
Yup. By now even foreign media are starting to perk up their ears. The Economist had an article about DiskGate. So it will be interesting to see how accountable they will be held.
The more I learn about the 5th, the crazier it seems to be: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2545 (the core anti-self-incrimination ideas in Anglo-Saxon law are a treasure, however).
It is worth recognizing that it is very tough to pursue this kind of case even in fairly nice administrations. The "Tsunami tapes" were a long running thriller in Swedish politics a few years ago, as a commission tried to determine who knew what when during the confusion after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. The cabinet office first claimed they had the relevant files, then that they had been deleted, then somebody found tape backups, which immediately led to people invoking national security issues - all very obvious CYA tactics. In the end, after much wrangling, politics and conspiracy theory, the commission's conclusion were that the cabinet did have a lousy emergency organisation - the thing people had been trying to cover up and hence had generated all the drama - but that the tapes were not even needed to demonstrate that. It wouldn't surprise me that the real chain of events in IRS was something like this.

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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