I was thinking the same thing. Is the content gzip'd on the server? This could be a nice (i.e. evil) way to send a very small response to the browser that would pretty much kill it.
a slightly more evil version would be to perhaps do:
var x="...2 billion of the same character...";
This should compress very well to gzip, but will likely to exhaust the browser's memory (??)
Interesting, but the wikipedia article mentions that antivirus libraries protect against those. Couldn't find much on wikipedia or otherwise talking about browsers or zip libraries that have built-in protection for this...
Ping of death was +++ath0 which causes a dialup modem to hang up.
I have no idea why most modems did this. But by god it was a lot of fun on IRC when I was 14 or so. I still remember the hex string for +++ath0 you'd need to pass into 'ping -p', haha..
The "proper" Hayes AT drop-back-to-command-mode sequence was +++ followed by a long pause (1 second or so). Any characters sent during that pause time would invalidate the attempt to switch to command mode. So theoretically this shouldn't happen. However, lots of cheaper modems seemed to not check for the pause, so sending +++ATH0 would make them switch to command mode and immediately process a Hangup command ... not pretty :-).
Specfically, that pause was the part of the Hayes AT command-set that was patented. Therefore lots of manufacturers who didn't want to licence the patent but wanted to have 'Hayes AT compatible' on the box just didn't bother implementing the timeout-cancellation bit.
a slightly more evil version would be to perhaps do:
This should compress very well to gzip, but will likely to exhaust the browser's memory (??)