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Japanese Police Charge 13-Year-Old Girl For Sharing 'Unclosable Popup' Code Online (zdnet.com)
"Japanese police have brought in, questioned, and charged a 13-year-old female student from the city of Kariya for sharing [links to] browser exploit code online," writes ZDNet. An anonymous reader shares their report:
The code was a mere prank that triggered an infinite loop in JavaScript to show an "unclosable" popup when users accessed a certain link, Japanese news agency NHK reported yesterday. The popup could be closed in some browsers -- such as Edge and Firefox on desktop -- but couldn't be closed in others, such as Chrome on desktop and the majority of mobile browsers.
The popup was hosted in several places online, and police say the teenager helped spread the links... The teenage girl did not create the malicious code, which had been shared on online forums by multiple users for the past few years. NHK reported that police also searched the house of a second suspect, 47-year-old man from Yamaguchi, and are also looking at three other suspects for the same "crime" of sharing the link on internet forums.
Ars Technica found a tweet suggesting that the code was actually written in 2014.
The popup was hosted in several places online, and police say the teenager helped spread the links... The teenage girl did not create the malicious code, which had been shared on online forums by multiple users for the past few years. NHK reported that police also searched the house of a second suspect, 47-year-old man from Yamaguchi, and are also looking at three other suspects for the same "crime" of sharing the link on internet forums.
Ars Technica found a tweet suggesting that the code was actually written in 2014.
I call boroshilt.
The popup could be closed in some browsers -- such as Edge and Firefox on desktop -- but couldn't be closed in others, such as Chrome on desktop and the majority of mobile browsers
Maybe Microsoft should re-think that plan of re-writing Edge to use Chromium instead of their own engine.
It is a crime. Japan has different laws. Deal with it.
"13 year old girl in Japan discover's simple browser exploit. Authorities react by arresting her."
When I was a kid I had javascript on my homepage that would open your CD drive. I'd probably be looking at 10-20 these days, eh?
They might be insane and immoral...to you. To them it it is quite sane and moral. Sanity and morality is what the group decides. The fact that it is not the same as yours means that is YOUR problem. You don't like it? Don't go there. That group has decided to make their own rules as to what is what. For you to attempt to impose your own beliefs is the height of entitlement.
So some language feature is being misused by the some app. But the OS should have some sort of intervention to cut in and terminate the errant application. So why is that not possible?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not life, just 10 to 20
hail the JS trickster from 1996.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Back then the fun hack was to edit someone's .login file so the first line was logout. Back in the days of VT-100 tubes connected to VAXen running Unix.
Half the shit we did back then would get us tossed in jail for 10+ years now.
No shortage of murdering kids in the country where there's a massive shortage of murders in general? Have you seen then murder numbers?
Citation or crawl back under your bridge on the "lack of shortage of child murderers in Japan".
Google and other search engines should pay attention to this. Obviously, linking criminal math is a crime!
one example is not a citation backing up 'no shortage of murdering kids'
I have been seeing annoying (theoretically-)impossible-to-close, uncaught-by-blockers pop-ups for years when accessing certain (cough) sites. The "fix" is easy: kill the browser and/or the given popups. On Windows, some browsers even allow you to close unclosable-otherwise windows by right clicking on the task-bar icon and selecting the window you want (I guess that this has its own thread, unlikely the top closing button on the popup windows). To not mention the tiny issue that this is about JavaScript and well... you could just disable it!
Firstly, creating infinite loops is one of the simplest actions you can perform in programming; actually, it is usually an error or the result of a bad approach in general or in that case. Freezing an application with an infinite loop is one of the most trivial things anyone can do (why publicly releasing a very simple piece of code is relevant at all?!). On the other hand, if an infinite loop can freeze a given GUI, it would mean that the creators of that piece of software haven't done a particularly good multi-threading work (and I am say that despite not being precisely a GUI expert myself). Secondly and as explained above, there is nothing innovative about this thing. And thirdly and more importantly, presenting charges against anyone of any age and with any intention for something so ridiculously inoffensive says a lot (about the ignorance) of the given administration/administrator.
I guess that the we are now in a world where just a word ("exploit") and a baseless-assumption (e.g., young people know how to do stuff with computers) is enough to invent a non-existing something. On the bright side, this seems a win-win situation. The administrator/administration (unmotivatedly) gets an image of zero-tolerance with cyber-criminals. The girl gets her 15 minutes of fame, likely to be very positive, mainly lately and by bearing in mind that we are talking about a young female in a men-dominated field who is (slightly-) against the system.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
In other news Japanese police arrest man for wearing a bow tie.
I have no intention to read the article (just being honest), but it seems dumb to punish a person for pointing people there and doing nothing about the sites hosting the content.If the page wan't there people would just get a 404 error, not an unclosable popup. And can't those affected just close the app?
I refuse to sign
if that stuff already is cause for police questioning, what the hell...
this is a prank, you know, like the one where you say 'press alt-f4 for admin rights' in a chat channel, no harm was done, chill out.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
You provided excellent evidence for my point. Not only did you show no evidence for high number of child murderers, but you had to dig thirty years back into the past just to find a single murder case.
The difference between modern civil societies and barbarism is that even in event that this was your daughter, if you're a decent human being, you will be able to say something among the lines of:
"This was an abhorrent crime, but we have a justice system and I'll let that manage the response".
Not that I'd expect a sociopath such as yourself to understand.