The internet has always produced ever more ingenious ways of ruining people’s days, and now there’s a a new bug going around social media.
It’s called crashsafari.com which takes the form of a link that will crash almost any smartphone when opened, whether Android or iOS.
It works by typing thousands of characters into the address bar, taking up all your phone’s memory and causing the browser to crash or the device to reset.
The bug is made up of four lines of code and uses an HTML5 JavaScript function called history.pushState to crash even desktop computers.
Currently social media users are busy spreading the link around in the guise of a short URL, so be careful what you click on.
There’s no danger of any real lasting damage, but you will likely have to perform a reboot of your device before the browser will work again.
Have you been caught out by crashsafari.com? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
