Could be a useful way to force user-interaction-gated flows. A "your computer is infected, click this button in 10 seconds or it will crash" type button which, at this point, most modestly-knowledgeable users would know not to click. However, after seeing their computer actually crash when the countdown hits 0, perhaps they would be more inclined to click "allow" on whatever prompt follows when they see it again.
Of course, plenty of other uses. Disable your adblocker or we crash your computer. Watch the whole ad or we crash your computer. Click the follow button or we crash your computer.
Maybe I'm crazy, but "crash your computer" as a building block seems powerful enough to be a security issue. Is denial of service not a security thing anymore?
I encountered the same type of death freeze when trying (and failing) to run models in browser tabs, but didn't spend much time trying to understand how severe it is.
The code is just an infinite loop counter. You can cause all kinds of Safari issues with an infinite loop in JavaScript too, which is sure annoying when trying to figure out large codebases. There was a student in Japan who showed that you could do this trivially and they were arrested.
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.
https://oregontrail.ws/games/the-oregon-trail-deluxe/play/
Of course, plenty of other uses. Disable your adblocker or we crash your computer. Watch the whole ad or we crash your computer. Click the follow button or we crash your computer.
Maybe I'm crazy, but "crash your computer" as a building block seems powerful enough to be a security issue. Is denial of service not a security thing anymore?
I encountered the same type of death freeze when trying (and failing) to run models in browser tabs, but didn't spend much time trying to understand how severe it is.
Hope they don't disable WebGPU...