Artificial Intelligence?

[Thing]

"One night, we were having a pillow fight in our underwear," Rivinoja says. "We looked over and saw that the computer had somehow turned itself on and started filming us." ...

"I can only theorize that somehow, a new computer virus combined with new operating system software to, in effect, bring this computer to life, with a consciousness not unlike our own."

[Adron]

Sounds like a nice trick played by the Stockholm University computer science guys

[j0k3r]

Sounds like BS to me.

If it really did happen without them knowing (which I doubt), I agree with Adron that some guys probably took control of hte computer with a backdoor or something, and that the computer was left on.

[K]

You may want to check out what the Weekly World News is first before pointing out how completely impossible the story is  

[Adron]

It doesn't sound impossible at all. Sounds just like what you get when you ask the guy who put the program there to investigate exactly how a program that secretly records video got there

[iago]

They said the computer turned itself on, which is impossible.  Although I love this conclusion:

After eliminating all other causes, one bizarre possibility emerged: The computer had developed some kind of rudimentary artificial intelligence and used it to launch -- on its own -- a pornographic Web site

Also, WWN never tells the truth.

[Skywing]

They said the computer turned itself on, which is impossible.  Although I love this conclusion:

After eliminating all other causes, one bizarre possibility emerged: The computer had developed some kind of rudimentary artificial intelligence and used it to launch -- on its own -- a pornographic Web site

Also, WWW never tells the truth.

Most modern BIOS' have an option to boot the computer up at a certain time of day.

[iago]

They said the computer turned itself on, which is impossible.  Although I love this conclusion:

After eliminating all other causes, one bizarre possibility emerged: The computer had developed some kind of rudimentary artificial intelligence and used it to launch -- on its own -- a pornographic Web site

Also, WWW never tells the truth.

Most modern BIOS' have an option to boot the computer up at a certain time of day.

I've never seen that before; although I've never seen a modern BIOS so I guess it's possible

[Adron]

Most old bioses do too. Well, any bios that can wake on an event. The RTC in a pc has been able to generate a wake up event for a long time. And now you can set the computer to turn off and wake up in X hours with a win32 api too!

[Yoni]

Most old bioses do too. Well, any bios that can wake on an event. The RTC in a pc has been able to generate a wake up event for a long time. And now you can set the computer to turn off and wake up in X hours with a win32 api too!

I've seen options in the BIOS to wake up on modem ring, on LAN (for NICs that support it), and on keyboard/mouse, but not on timer event... Maybe I missed it though.

How do you do that using Win32 API?
(Point to built-in Windows GUI option if one exists, I don't care much about the exact function call/API details)

[Adron]

No GUI option that I know of, you'll have to use API. Many scheduling softwares can do it though.

You can use SetWaitableTimer, see:

fResume
[in] Specifies whether to restore a system in suspended power conservation mode when the timer state is set to signaled. If fResume is TRUE on a platform that does not support a restore, the call will succeed, but GetLastError returns ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED.

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

wwn = tabloid...