If you’re on a Mac, and use Chrome, and if you’re not sure if you have Assyrian turned on, definitely don’t click this link. Just doing so could cause your whole browser to crash, and the culprit is a 13-character snippet that couldn’t seem any more innocuous.
The bug is super-obscure. It only occurs if you’re running Chrome on Mac — nothing happens in Safari, Firefox or any other browser. However, if you are running Chrome, these 13 characters will crash your tab (don’t worry, we’re just using a screengrab):
Here’s the amusing bug report, straight from Chrome’s own developer repository:
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Any page with [Removed so this article loads for everyone] will crash the Chrome tab on a Mac
2. Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard
What is the expected result?
Expect it not to crash
What happens instead?
It crashes
If you don’t have Assyrian language files installed, the bug doesn’t seem to work. Instead, it will show 13 blank rectangles instead of the tab crashing: ▯▯▯▯▯ ▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯▯.
Nevertheless, this is a serious exploit. As the developer who discovered it notes, “You could imagine someone spamming this message in Hangouts/Gmail and just straight-up force crashing all Mac Chrome browsers. Someone could post this on Facebook, and force-crash all Mac Chrome browsers that saw it.”
Expect Google to fix this Chrome bug soon, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Source: Google
Via: VentureBeat
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
3 responses to “This 13-character string will kill any Mac’s Chrome browser dead”
I believe that’s actually Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. Actual Assyrian is used on websites where three days after you visit them, you die.
That is actually Aramaic not Assyrian. I know this as it is my mother tongue.
Wikipedia:
Aramaic |ˌarəˈmeɪɪk| noun [ mass noun ]
a branch of the Semitic family of languages, especially the language of Syria used as a lingua franca in the Near East from the 6th century bc. It replaced Hebrew locally as the language of the Jews, and though displaced by Arabic in the 7th century ad, it still has about 200,000 speakers in scattered communities.
ܝܘܚܢܢ ܒܝܬ ܐܦܪܝܡ