Absurd Cases of Cyber Crime
Infinite Loops, Bugs and Responsibility
Recently a story broke about a 13 year old female student from Japan being charged for publishing a web page that ran a script which showed an alert message in an infinite loop which looked like this.
Frankly, It’s as ridiculous as it gets and at first I figured there was something lost in translation between the original source and Ars Technica’s take on the story but others have been reporting the same story so under the assumption that it’s true I just have to say it’s a truly bizarre case.
Basically the “malicious” code in question boils down to a single line of JavaScript code being hosted on their own webpage.
while (true) { alert("beep"); }Nothing malicious happens when you run it, at best it’s a mild nuisance. Most browsers will actually present a checkbox as seen in the screenshot above which will prevent further messages from popping up once checked and hey at the end of the day one could always close the browser tab.
The whole case is just bizarre, heck if anything this girl could be a rock star developer in Silicon Valley, she’s following the principles of modern web development to the letter, pop-ups and modal dialogs all the way.
