On: What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmer...

[benburton]

If I recall correctly, the primary method of "punting" was to send an instant message with a bunch of unclosed HTML tags, which the client's renderer wouldn't be able to handle and would crash the AOL application.

[bryans → benburton]

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.

[todd3834 → bryans]

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

[WillyF → benburton]

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.

[jcpham2 → benburton]

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

[Scoundreller → benburton]

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.