Comment by sgentle
14 hours ago
Could be a useful way to force user-interaction-gated flows. A "your computer is infected, click this button in 10 seconds or it will crash" type button which, at this point, most modestly-knowledgeable users would know not to click. However, after seeing their computer actually crash when the countdown hits 0, perhaps they would be more inclined to click "allow" on whatever prompt follows when they see it again.
Of course, plenty of other uses. Disable your adblocker or we crash your computer. Watch the whole ad or we crash your computer. Click the follow button or we crash your computer.
Maybe I'm crazy, but "crash your computer" as a building block seems powerful enough to be a security issue. Is denial of service not a security thing anymore?
You could probably make a pretty believable virus page with this. First you freeze the screen, forcing the user to force reboot. Then, when the system boots again and reopens the website (at least Safari does), you go full-screen and show a "your computer froze because of a virus" screen.
Making the user force-reboot the computer would make the usual fake AV shtick a lot more believable.
> Is denial of service not a security thing any more?
It is, but only when a big corp isn't doing it. X is allowed to deny you service without an account and Reddit is allowed to deny you service without uploading your personal documents to Persona.
That’s not what denial of service is.
denial of service is when service is denied
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what about when big companies drown the web with crawling activity, forcing webmasters to implement fingerprinting and thus massively delaying actual users from accessing webpages that would otherwise load instantly?