why can't I crash browsers by embedding the same page in the page?

[Peegee]

assume for example that eoff allowed html file embedding (good thing it doesn't). The rest will be in pseudocode:

html
body
embed src="same file name as this file"
/body
/html

When I thought of that, the first thing that came to mind is 'infinite loop leading to an error. Yet it doesn't do that. Sometimes it doesn't embed, and sometimes it embeds once. Why once, and not a million times?

[crono_logical]

Try iframes instead. I'm not responsible for what happens though, since I've not tried that myself so dunno how browsers would behave

[Big Ogre Umaro]

I got a windows nt4 machine running IE5 to crash by making a page with infinite frames like that, but I think browsers are smarter than that now. Not sure, though.

[Doomgaze]

Try <a href = "http://www.gentoo.org">this,</a> you foolish IE user.

Wait, what?


Actually, I'll mess around with this tomorrow to see what it does. The browser shouldn't matter, since that's handled on the server side. I think it is, at least.

[Baloki]

Embed scripts are mainly a netscape feature
while bgsound and Iframes are mainly an IE feature.

Edit: Please note the words in bold.

[crono_logical]

Used to be rather, since I get both in Mozilla, and iframes in an old version of Opera

[Doomgaze]

I was thinking of SSI. Silly me.

*tries that*

EDIT: Ok, with SSI, the file CAN call itself - however, when it tries to call itself again, you get a [an error occurred while processing this directive] message and it continues on in the called file.

[Dr Unne]

Server software probably has built-in safeguards against recursively obliterating itself through included files like that.

[Endless]

Javascript is the way to go to saturate memory. Just put a variable that you increase in an infinite loop and there you go.

[Peegee]

okay thanks. It doesn't work with either embed src or iframe

*learns javascript*

[Doomgaze]

Originally posted by Dr Unne
Server software probably has built-in safeguards against recursively obliterating itself through included files like that.

It's always more fun if you make your host's server melt down.

[crono_logical]

Originally posted by Pureghetto
okay thanks. It doesn't work with either embed src or iframe

*learns javascript*

I think IE has safeguards against that - if a script runs for too long at too high a CPU load, it'll pause the script and ask if you want to terminate it or not

[Rainecloud]

Just out of interest, PG, why do you want to do this? O_o

[Caltrap]

I don't really know how to do this in javascript. I think its got safeguards against it, but I did it accidently in php, so if your really that interested, I can tell you how I did it in php

Out of 15 records I had, when the computer crashed it was on record 75000 or so

[Dr Unne]

It's not hard to write a program to crash a server, but yeah, I'd question why you would want to do such thing. My hosts, for example, will terminate the account of anyone who makes a habit of doing things that eat too much resources.

Anyways you can use a fork bomb. Note, I hope you aren't stupid enough to do this, and if you are, don't blame me.

#!/usr/bin/perl
fork while 1;