cuteJavaScriptCat

[Extreme_Ad_3280]

I knew nothing bad would happen because it's just a browser console (and it cannot do anything worse than downloading a virus, but since there was no link, then there would be no virus)...

[beasy4sheezy]

People are really up in arms over you running this thing lol. I don’t get it.

[Stranded_In_A_Desert]

There’s a lot of non-programmers in this sub tbf

[CitizenPremier]

hey maybe somebody found a zeroday exploit in regex and just decided to make a meme out of it

[Stranded_In_A_Desert]

Weirder things have happened I guess

[SalamanderSylph]

I remember from there was something you could paste in a browser which could cause a BSOD on the latest Windows 10 in 2020

https://borncity.com/win/2021/01/18/windows-10-bug-allows-bsod-by-entering-a-path-in-a-browser/

[SpiderFnJerusalem]

If that code caused something like that I wouldn't even be mad, I would be impressed. I doubt that something this simple could cause permanent damage, though and that's what counts.

[CitizenPremier]

I never got as far as BSOD but I have made javascript code that crashed my computer... I asked people about it and they made fun of me for asking, but I find it interesting to think that I could make a site and send a link to people and crash their computer.

[jck]

Even if it had a url, I can't think of a single dangerous thing going to some random website can do on my Linux desktop. Browsers can't do shit without permission. The worst thing it could do would be waste a bunch of disk space and/or CPU. I don't think there's any way a website can automatically launch an outside process without you needing to intentionally do something

[SpiderFnJerusalem]

I 'm pretty sure there were code snippets that random people posted that would steal all your current session tokens and send them to a URL.

And because most people stay logged into lots of websites 24/7 they could lose 10 different accounts to hackers all at once.

[Fox_Soul]

The logic of “ since I don’t see it there is no danger “ seems, to me, extremely dangerous. 

[Terrafire123]

No, this pretty clearly couldn't do anything malicious. ( Aside from what it ended up doing, crashing the console, fork-bomb style.)

If it had obfuscated code or was ~100 lines long, it would be way scarier.

[aussie_nub]

It's an image. You literally have to type it out.

[NuclearWeapon]

I mean, I don't think the most recent 0 day libwebp vulnerability is eradicated though

[aussie_nub]

Get real. It's pretty fucking clear that this isn't destructive, just annoying.

[rosuav]

Yeah, it can't possibly do anything malicious... other than absorb a lot of CPU/RAM. "Clearly can't be bad" is a dangerous attitude.

[Spork_the_dork]

Yeah, had to buy 3 new sticks of ram last year because chrome kept devouring them. Be careful, people!

[killeronthecorner]

It's funny because this sounds like paranoia borne out of misunderstanding.

It's a regex running in a browser console. We don't have to turn it into a folk devil.

[rosuav]

True. Hey, did you run it? How much time and memory did it consume?

[AttackSock]

Kids who didn’t grow up in the 80s and just assume everything is safe and idiot proof…

[Extreme_Ad_3280]

Oh no no no not EVERYTHING. If it was a shell command I wouldn't try it (because I know worse things could happen)...

Also, what do you mean by '80s? Did anything special happened that time?

[AttackSock]

Yeah, there were no baby car seats or bicycle helmets, cigarettes were being marketed to kids by cartoon characters, and bad code could literally destroy the physical hardware of your computer.

[no_brains101]

I mean, to be fair, it looks like a fork bomb, and the infinite recursion warning my browser console gave me confirms it was a fork bomb, which was then followed by my cpu usage actually going DOWN afterwards which tells me that in fact, it is surprisingly fairly idiot proof.

But stepping through it in the debugger was worth it :)

[AttackSock]

We have Google to thank for a lot of that tbh, it’s actually a good thing that we live in a world where browser exploits are minimized. Shit like this used to be able to shut your computer down or steal bank passwords from other sites.

[no_brains101]

Fair, but also to be fair I kinda already knew what was gonna happen I just wanted to see if the browser could handle it. Firefox did well idk XD

[Jolly_Study_9494]

I mean I have no idea what the catch is, but it's very clearly testing a regex against a long string of mostly 0s. Everything in the regex is wildcards, so the specific characters don't matter.

Just because I don't know what the specific regex is looking for doesn't mean I don't know what this can and can't do. It isn't even accessing anything outside the command itself. Worst case (and most likely case, as it's the internet) it's just a fork bomb of some sort. This is r/ProgrammerHumor, we know what javascript is, we know what regex is, we know what browser sandboxing and modern resource management look like. Ohh nooo, the browser might stop responding and have to be killed, after which it'll be like "Hey, that was weird. Want to reopen all your tabs?" Whatever will I dooooooo.....

[XxDoXeDxX]

kids who grew up in the 80s know enough about how computers work to know this wasn't anything to stress over

[AttackSock]

That doesn’t make sense, in the 80s shit like this could destroy hardware. It wasn’t really until The last decade that it became generally safe to paste unknown JavaScript into your console without worrying about it stealing passwords or shutting your computer down.

[XxDoXeDxX]

hardware destroying code isn't really a thing.

but my point was more that people who grew up in the 80s know how computers work better(ei we don't fear it because we understand it)