Re: Crashing Win9x

[chaser () MEWL NET (Troy Ablan)]

This also means a malicious web site or anything else that launches a web
browser can reference file:///c:/nul/nul and get you a nice BSOD that
crashes the VFAT driver before you can see what happened.  Unfortunately,
this seems to "permanently" crash the disk I/O routines and eventually
requires a hard reboot.

On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Alun Jones wrote:

> This has been a known awkwardness in Windows (and indeed
> anything based on the DOS underpinnings) for some time -
> we've had code that specifically checks for "CON", "PRN"
> or "AUX" for several years now, although one of our
> competitors actually makes a selling point of the idea that
> users can come in and write directly to your printer
> through their FTP server!
>
> Essentially, the word from Microsoft has so far been for
> apps not to create files called CON, PRN, AUX, COM1-4, LPT1-
> 3, or CLOCK$ (sorry if I've missed any).  There are,
> however, a few ways and means to create files of such a
> name, and they've proven traditionally to be a little
> tricky to remove (of the same order of trickery as creating
> a file on Unix with a leading '-' character).
>
> Sadly, there's no function that I'm aware of to tell you
> whether a file name is reserved or not, and each such
> device name is assumed by the OS to exist in every folder
> on your system.
>
> Alun.
> ~~~~