Why One Random Web Address Can Crash Chrome

Why One Random Web Address Can Crash Chrome

As it turns out, one sixteen-character garbage URL is enough to bring Google’s mighty browser crashing to its knees. Here’s the computer science behind the bug.

As Tom Scott explains in the surprisingly understandable video above, it’s all to do with how computers parse binary files. The %30%30 at the end of the URL gets converted into a NULL character, which somewhere down the line throws a bug and crashes the browser.

[YouTube]


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