Oh, great-- like computers don't crash enough on their own without people spending time and money trying to help the process along. Faithful viewer Kent Hull pointed out a ZDNet article on HERF guns, nasty things that can be cobbled together from parts available at the local hardware store. HERF stands for "High Energy Radio Frequency," which, when pointed at a computer, has roughly the same effect as a Taser does on somebody sitting naked in a bathtub. (Not that we've Tasered people while they're bathing. That would be rude; at least wait until they dry their hair.)

Where were we? Oh yeah, HERF guns. So yeah, you just point this unwieldy thing (consisting of a car battery, a parabolic reflector, a horn antenna, and a couple of automotive ignition coils) at a nearby computer, flick the switch, and watch as a "20 megawatt burst of undisciplined radio noise" makes that system crash, crash, crash. The semi-portable one demonstrated at the ominously-named convention "InfowarCon '99" was effective from twenty feet away, though the creator claims he's built larger ones that were capable of "crashing computers and disabling automobiles [!] at a range of 100 feet." Sure, the G4's classified as a weapon by the U.S. government, but how is it on defense?

While today's homebrew HERF guns are a little too bulky to sneak into an office building to wreak havoc, more powerful ones could be used in drive-by pulsings. Scary stuff. And you just know that at some point some enterprising young thing's going to design a "pocket HERF gun" that fits in a briefcase and can crash a computer from five paces, and start selling them over the Internet as "the joy buzzer of the new millennium." Sigh. Then again, Kent poses an intriguing question: "Wonder if they can tune it to kill just the Wintel boxes?" But on second thought, in our experience Windows tends to crash if you look at it sideways, so maybe Wintel-only HERF guns are superfluous anyway.