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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

#101

Post by avaer »

It's very easy to lock up your browser or machine with WebGPU, it happens on Windows too. You'll do this by accident constantly in a big WebGPU project, until the Chrome GPU trace/renderdoc/nsight shows some crazy deadlock bottleneck you have no hope of understanding at the browser level.

GPU driver engineering has received a tiny fraction of the resources of CPU engineering, while being significantly more complex. And GPU users will not pay for performance hits that better the architecture, they will just buy the other guy's GPU/use their driver. So it's a race to the top with performance and race to the bottom with architecture and stability.

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

#103

Post by chrisjj »

socalgal2 wrote: post #93
zelphirkalt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a regular user knows how to block a specific website or never click a link leading to it again? And what about the ads people, adding such a thing if you don't load their ads? I think this point of view is making it a bit too easy.

A user doesn't need to know anything other than "when I go to site XYZ.com my computer freezes. Guess I won't go there again" > I think this point of view is making it a bit too easy. It's been 15 years since this was possible. How many times have you heard of this being an issue? Again, it's self correcting. Site freezes machine, user stops going to site. There's zero incentive to do this and tons of incentive to no…

> A user doesn't need to know anything other than "when I go to site XYZ.com my computer freezes.

Not true, given any unknown link or button press can redirect/go to such a site.

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

#104

Post by amatecha »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #100
davkan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man I had forgotten about last measure. I remember multiple times scrambling for the power button.

And also the more innocent “You Are An Idiot, hahaha hahaha” page that would sing those words and spam pop up windows with white and black text blinking, that would float around the screen. Every time you click close on one window, two new ones pop up. With that one, Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Task Manager, kill iexplore.exe was usually all you needed to do thankfully. No hard power off necessary.

I was just talking about that one with someone a few days ago! Amazing hahah XD I still remember the song and was singing it while laughing profusely at how obnoxious that site was!

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

#105

Post by germandiago »

eliwang wrote: post #66

Jesus Christ! My mac reopen the windows when it restarts. And it opens the Deathray again! I had to quit safari immediately I saw the dot below its icon. And it took me yet another restart to fix the weird problems in other apps.

Thank you. I was tempted to press but I was afraid of making a mess. I won't.

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

#107

Post by xingped »

socalgal2 wrote: post #93
zelphirkalt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a regular user knows how to block a specific website or never click a link leading to it again? And what about the ads people, adding such a thing if you don't load their ads? I think this point of view is making it a bit too easy.

A user doesn't need to know anything other than "when I go to site XYZ.com my computer freezes. Guess I won't go there again" > I think this point of view is making it a bit too easy. It's been 15 years since this was possible. How many times have you heard of this being an issue? Again, it's self correcting. Site freezes machine, user stops going to site. There's zero incentive to do this and tons of incentive to no…

I think a lot of HN commenters are way too disconnected from the average person. You're making a big assumption that a user will even connect the dots until the same thing happens multiple times, if even then. The average computer user is extremely bad at connecting cause and effect on their computer. Think of how many times you hear "my computer is broken!" when actually it's something like the printer was unplugged/turned off and they were just having trouble printing a document (or, if you are so disconnected from average users/people, the answer is _this happens a lot_). Even what we think of as simple stuff completely befuddles them.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

wpm wrote: post #61
iAMkenough wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still impacts macOS 27 release candidate.

Yes, but it didn't kernel panic my computer, it just forced WindowServer to quit, but it "helpfully" reopens all of your windows/apps, so it reloads the tab that caused the deadlock to begin with, rinse and repeat. It's always funny to me when you put computers into such states. Last time I was tickled this was was when I nuked the TCC database permissions for Zoom while in a meeting, sharing my screen, using my micr…

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