Hm, I've never heard of anything along those lines, and this really seems like the sort of thing that Java's designers would not
want to let you do as it would open the door to all sorts of abuses. 'Course that's when they were thinking that
Applets would be important in the world. For trusted applications, I suppose it's not unreasonable to allow access to stuff like this. Except it's inherently pretty OS-dependent, no? I'm guessing that to do something like this you'll really have to find OS-specific solutions, accessed through Runtime.exec() or maybe JNI. Unless someone else knows of a nifty new capability added somewhere in one of the recent JDKs...