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

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

#21

Post by LoganDark »

hyperhello wrote: post #14
hyperhello wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Why does everyone hate this comment? Attitude? I can’t figure out the wavelength here. I’m just commenting.

An infinite loop in JavaScript causes a different issue. It doesn't cause the rest of your tabs to stop working too. Or allegedly the entire rest of the OS though I can't reproduce that.

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

#22

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hyperhello wrote: post #14
hyperhello wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Why does everyone hate this comment? Attitude? I can’t figure out the wavelength here. I’m just commenting.

> Why does everyone hate this comment?

"It's just" dismissals are annoying when they're blatantly wrong. An infinite-loop counter in Orion.app shouldn't cause my entire machine to freeze, down to being unable to force quit.

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

#24

Post by anakaine »

itstrueitried wrote: post #20

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.

Shall we term this a Denial of Memory attack. Then in order to Contain it we have a ConDoM fix?

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

#26

Post by StilesCrisis »

hyperhello wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Blowing up a browser tab with bad JavaScript is not considered to be a problem. But kernel panicking the computer is different--this brings us back to the bad old days of MacOS where a buggy program could force a freeze/restart at any time.

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

#28

Post by StilesCrisis »

hyperhello wrote: post #14
hyperhello wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Why does everyone hate this comment? Attitude? I can’t figure out the wavelength here. I’m just commenting.

Because kernel panics are a wildly different class of bug than breaking one browser tab. An "Oh Snap" is the designed outcome of a JavaScript infinite loop. Crashing the whole computer is not.

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

#30

Post by bittercynic »

LoganDark wrote: post #17
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.

On my M1 MacBook Air with MacOS 12 it hangs. The mouse pointer still moves, but I can't bring up the force quit dialogue, and couldn't get anything else to work either. A youtube video in another tab kept playing until I held the power button to force a shutdown.
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