Too Funny For Words :)

[denny]

This page will crash Internet Explorer. This is quite possibly the single most pathetic Microsoft bug I've seen yet  :)

(yoinked from olithered's journal)

Update: apparently this will also crash Outlook and anything else which uses that library to render HTML content. I feel a .sig coming on ;)

Comments

[zotz]

It's not a bug, though, is it? It's clearly been implemented clearly and purposefully by someone, for reasons that presumably seemed to make sense at the time.

Reminds me a bit of the BBC Micro's undocumented "on error crash" statement.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The guy who posted it to Security Focus says it's a fucked up pointer - which doesn't sound like a deliberate behaviour to me:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/319360/2003-04-20/2003-04-26/0

[zotz]

Well, assuming that it's specifically recognising the keyword "crash", doesn't it strike you as odd that it does exactly that, in a relatively non-exploitable way?

Given that it's doing exactly what it's told to do, I'd guess that it's deliberate.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Mine doesn't use the word 'crash' - it uses 'microsoftsucks'. You can put anything as the last symbol apparently.

[olithered.livejournal.com]

The word isn't important. Anything invalid will work...

[zotz]

Fair enough. That wasn't mentioned in the articles I read, for some reason, and as we don't have IE in the house any more, I haven't tested it.