killer pokes

Noun

killer poke (plural killer pokes)

1. Any method of inducing physical harm to a computer or peripheral by software means, especially by inserting invalid values into a control register or by building up harmonic oscillations in a hard disk, etc.
   • killer poke n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see poke) into a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can...[1996, Eric S[teven] Raymond, comp., The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 270