You may at least be aware of web sites and publications
like "The Anarchist Cookbook" which are aimed at folks who want
to generally cause mayhem for whatever twisted reason turns them
on. Maybe they hate the government or some company or their
neighbors, etc.
You can read all about how to build various bombs and
home-made weapons or commit sabotage if you don't blow yourself
to kingdom come, first.
I am no great student of that sort of thing so I may
have missed something, but if I were going to tell someone how
to stealthily destroy electronics right in plain sight, I would
advise them to smoke cigarettes around the equipment. These need
to be the plain tobacco variety because if you smoked pot, you
might forget why you were doing it and stop too soon, but plain
tobacco smoke is a God-send for the saboteur.
When I was an electronics technician with our Audio
Visual department, all my shop mates and I absolutely hated to
work on equipment that had been around smokers.
The smoke particles are a few microns in size and float
in the air. The nicotine in the smoke makes a sticky film on any
surface it touches so the particles along with good old dust now
have some goo to help them stick to both horizontal and vertical
surfaces.
Since the gunk is airborne, it goes everywhere the air
goes and fans help propagate the disgusting sludge in to any
place open to the air. It goes in to sockets and eventually
makes them intermittent. It goes in to controls and makes
volume controls scratchy and intermittent much sooner than they
would get that way with no smoke around.
Switches fill with crud and get harder to move or they
also stop working properly.
Yes, cigarette smoke is fantastic for slowly ruining
electronics so if you break the hermetic seal on a disk drive in
a smoky environment, it almost guarantees failure.
Travis Siegel writes:
> Your post reminded me of something that happened several years ago.
>
> My sister was in need of a computer, so I loaned her my spari 286 machine.
> These things were workhorses, and I never had a lick of trouble out of
> this
> thing in the 10 or so years I had it, these things took a beating, and
> kept
> on working. Well, 3 months after my sister got ahold of it, it quit
> working. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why, since of all the
> machines I'd loaned her, each and every one got toasted in various ways,
> and none of them ever worked for longer than a year. I'd expected this one
> to last considerably longer. Well, after some initial investigations, and
> some questioning, I discovered she'd decided the hd needed cleaned. Why on
> earth she came to this conclusion I have no idea, it had been working just
> fine, but since both her and her husband both smoked, I guess she figured
> it needed cleaned to get rid of the smoke.
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