#zipbombs

ZipIt, a project that appeared as part of The Wrong’s "Scripting the Other” pavillion, warns the user:

Before clicking download disable all preventive settings of your browser and now do the same with any anti virus programs running! These steps will help you get the huge potentialities on unzipping the bomb bellow!

When one opens the generated zip file (careful to not actually unzip it), ten folders are revealed inside, labelled 10-1 through 10-10. Each of these holds a set of ten folders: 9-1 through 9-10, to 8, to 7, a countdown leading to the final set of text files, each named zero.txt. All together, there are 10 ^ 10 of these zero files, or 10 billion; each one is 100MB in size, and completely composed of repetitions of the number 0. Expand these to full size and you get 1EB of data: an exabyte, equivalent to 1024 petabytes, where a petabyte is itself 1024 terabytes -- enough to fill anyone’s consumer harddrive (in 2017 anyway) with zeros. As promised, the potentialities were revealed to be huge -- and all packed into a 29.6K file.