Re: Java reboots win95

[dleblanc () MINDSPRING COM (David LeBlanc)]

At 11:33 AM 1/17/98 +0100, Joe =?UNKNOWN-8BIT?Q?Lindstr=F6m?= wrote:
> Java applets causes win95 to reboot
> -----------------------------------
>
> (If this is known stuff, i appologize)
>
> I have successfully been able to reboot several win95 machines
> with a simple java applet. All the applet does is to try and load
> new browsers with the showDocument(url, target) function. When
> trying this on IE3 i only needed one loop with showDocument to
> make everything freeze, with 10 threads all doing the same thing
> my computer immediately rebooted after initializing the applets.
> In IE4 and Netscape you need more threads, and i also used a
> web page with more applets running at the same time.
> They have the same effect though, it either hangs or reboots.
>
> I have only tried this with relatively slow computers, but my guess
> is that if you add more threads to each applet or more applets to
> each webpage more powerful computers will be effected too (if they
> aren't already).

Hey!  That was fun!  It ate all my RAM and swap (except about 100k) in less
than a minute.  Had to kill Explorer, but NT just came right back.

I'm sure it could cause mayhem and panic in less experienced users.  Be fun
to send THAT one to internal...  Nah - I'd rather not have the admin try to
kill me.

Java is sooo much safer since it is in a sandbox...  Yeah, right.

I bet it would cause a fair bit of consternation on a UNIX that didn't have
any ulimits set, esp. if someone were running as root.

Your conjecture about faster computers is correct, but what it seems is
that the faster computer (this is a P6-200) just kills itself even more
quickly.  I bet a nice old 386 would thrash around for a while before it
ran out of RAM.

Maybe the stupid sandbox needs to have definable limits as to how much of
what it can gobble.


David LeBlanc           |Why would you want to have your desktop user,
dleblanc () mindspring com |your mere mortals, messing around with a 32-bit
                        |minicomputer-class computing environment?
                        |Scott McNealy