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Can Gossamer Forum crash a client?

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Can Gossamer Forum crash a client?
I never really thought of this before, but I was under the assumption that since Perl runs on the server, if a script crashes, it should not affect a client computer running the script from the server.

Is it possible for a Perl scipt (like Gossamer Forum) to crash a client computer?

thanks - Steve
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Re: [SteveDe] Can Gossamer Forum crash a client? In reply to
Probably if they put some nasty activex or something in the code, but I doubt it otherwise....why?
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Re: [SteveDe] Can Gossamer Forum crash a client? In reply to
It can no more crash the client than an HTML page. If somehow it crashes, the client will either get some error message from the web server, or possibly it will just keep trying to get the page until the browser times out.

There was a bug in Windows 95/98 years ago - if you put something like <img src="file://c:/nul/nul"> it would crash the computer (it was a DOS issue, and since 95/98/ME are based on DOS...). However, as I said before, this can be done from an HTML page just as easily (if not more so) than a CGI script.

So, basically, no - there is no way to crash a computer from a CGI script unless the CGI script does something malicious which exploits a problem in the browser/operating system.

Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com