Hacker News Reader

The unclosed tags were one method, and the other was applying a different formatting to every character. Even one or two messages of maximum length was enough to crash the client.

Another was abusing certain attributes like setting the font size to 99…99 or an element with a very large width

An IM with repeating <h1><br> tags until you hit the character limit was good for about 30 seconds of lag/freezing on the Mac client. 10 of those in fast succession would pretty much make you have to restart your computer.

This is how it worked and 486 PC at the time would happily overflow AIM32.exe and stop responding thanks. Sanitize those inputs!

I discovered a punter on MSN messenger.

You could use swear words by substituting the ascii equivalent for a letter.

So looking at the ascii chart, I was wondering if BELL would do anything but it didn’t.

However, NULL would boot all my friends offline and re-boot them off as they auto-re-logged in except myself.