Below, I've included what would have been the first post in a series of posts I wrote about the badBIOS controversy in October 2013. I found the evidence in support of badBIOS to be unconvincing and I was concerned by how popular badBIOS became despite those obvious shortcomings. This wasn't a situation where an overexcitable press ran with a story that turned out to be inaccurate; the most early and adamant believers in badBIOS weren't reporters, they were ITSEC professionals. How were so many of us publicly duped by what was essentially a conspiracy theory? This post doesn't address badBIOS directly. However, badBIOS was presumed to somehow involve the manipulation of computers using acoustic transmissions. This post provides some historical context behind a strain of computer science research in this field and shows how commonly held beliefs about the feasibility of these attacks were generally inaccurate at the time of writing. In future posts I would have explo