The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac • Hacker News Board

Apple Silicon Macs have a lot of GPU problems. I find that after running any significant GPU workload, the entire operating system starts getting super slow until a reboot. Even if the entire process tree that ever touched the GPU has been completely terminated for days.

Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#16

Post by LoganDark » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 11:57 PM UTC

monster_truck wrote: post #8

Remember when that unicode string nuked iOS 7 and you could set it as your SSID to get them stuck in a loop? good times.

Kinda reminds me of that wifi network with a funky name from Doctor Who that gets you uploaded to the cloud. (episode: The Bells of Saint John)

Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#17

Post by LoganDark » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 11:58 PM UTC

slicendice wrote: post #12

I want to click it so bad, but I can't bring myself to do it.

For me it just caused Safari to stop working until I quit and restarted it.

Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#18

Post by LoganDark » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 11:58 PM UTC

SahAssar wrote: post #7

hyperhello wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Usually you can't freeze the whole system UI with an infinite counter though. I'm pretty sure normal JS browser processes are not supposed to be able to do that.

It only froze Safari tabs for me. Not even Safari's own UI except for the web pages themselves.

It did do it to all tabs though.

Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#19

Post by mikestew » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 11:59 PM UTC

hyperhello wrote: post #5

[flagged]

There's more to it than just a loop. If it was just a loop, it would peg a CPU core and be done with it. But you'll have to reread TFA to find out how it takes out the window server, thus freezing the rest of the system.

Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#20

Post by itstrueitried » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 11:59 PM UTC

    while (true) console.log('this will freeze/crash dev tools')

For more of a "I've been hacked!" effect, load infinite 3D models in Three.js that have millions of vertices each. You get those black boxes where the system has so low RAM it can't even draw the browser window.