[7566] in bugtraq
Re: Object tag crashes Internet Explorer 4.0
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alan Cox)
Fri Aug 7 17:39:06 1998
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 20:00:16 +0100
Reply-To: Alan Cox <alan@LXORGUK.UKUU.ORG.UK>
From: Alan Cox <alan@LXORGUK.UKUU.ORG.UK>
X-To: djsd100@cam.ac.uk
To: BUGTRAQ@NETSPACE.ORG
In-Reply-To: <E0z4Mja-0007EY-00@taurus.cus.cam.ac.uk> from "David Damerell" at
Aug 6, 98 10:53:22 am
> This isn't even remotely true; and isn't made more valid by randomly
> mentioning the Turing problem (something tells me our Mr. Leach is not
> a computer scientist himself.) A fairly brute-force approach to their
> detection would be simply to keep a count of how many times each
> object had been displayed, and start throwing them away when it
> exceeded some limit - quite high for, say, images, to allow for the
The whole problem isnt one of completion but resource management and is
classic computer science operating system course stuff. It doesnt matter
if its 5000 recursive frames or a 50,000 x 50,000 gif the remote site
tries to feed you or if its javascript tries to open 50,000 windows. At
the end of the day the job is to prevent the unsafe data from the internet
harming the machine or significantly impacting its function. Thats straight
forward resource counting and a dialog box to say "Too complex"
[Btw 50,000x50,000 blank gifs compress VERY well and folks might care
to play with emailing them around a bit]
