There was a page in the early 2000s called the most annoying website in the world. It showed a very large (but finite: the site itself estimates 30-45 minutes) number of alerts. It also a prompt for your name and referred to you by your name.<p>At the time I knew only HTML so I was blown away by a web page "talking" to me, and by inspecting the source I learned about the script tag, alerts, prompts, loops and variables.<p>When it came out, the main browser was Internet Explorer, which became unresponsive until you got rid of <i>all</i> of the alerts. You could of course use Task Manager, or hold spacebar to go through them quickly, but most people didn't know that.<p>Edit: holy smokes it's still up!<p><a href="http://mr.g.graham.tripod.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mr.g.graham.tripod.com/</a>
I live in Japan and I've read enough horror stories between the police and foreigners that I'd just like to say, don't mess with police here. They are very nice and polite, until they are not. They have been under heat multiple times for apparent human rights violations, which include indefinitely detaining people until they confess of the accused crime.<p>Another beautiful quirk of Japanese law is that you can be held liable for crimes even if you have absolutely nothing to do with them, just by virtue of being family of the person who committed them, like in train suicide [1] or having some (even fairly removed) family member who was in the Yakuza<p>[1] <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/families-fined-for-suicides-in-japan-1.1104002" rel="nofollow">https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/families-fined-for-su...</a>
Warning: Don't click this if you don't understand what it's doing. You may have trouble closing it.<p>GH pages link: <a href="https://hamukazu.github.io/lets-get-arrested/" rel="nofollow">https://hamukazu.github.io/lets-get-arrested/</a>
Or if you want to get arrested in Russia you can go this way<p><a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/02/10/russia-sentences-teens-over-terrorist-plot-to-blow-up-minecraft-fsb-building-a76328" rel="nofollow">https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/02/10/russia-sentences-t...</a>
Kudos to the Japanese girl, I did the same thing once, wrote a three line BASIC program that printed "Your computer has a virus" repeatedly and the school admin panicked and shut down the computer lab for a week, giving us all extra time to write our papers. I didn't expect that but I gladly accepted the extra time.<p>My best prank though was I had this one math teacher with short temper and a really nasty attitude, but almost no computer literacy. So one day I stopped by his computer and turned the bright setting on his monitor all the way down. The next day the school admin came by and tried to fix the computer and failed. A week later someone from the DOE came by and tried to fix the computer and failed. A week after that they put the monitor in a box and shipped it to IBM. About six weeks later the monitor came back from IBM, they unpacked it, made sure the computer booted to the DOS prompt, then walked away. On the way out of class I stopped by the computer, turned the bright setting all the way back down, and the whole cycle began again. Mr. McNasty had to manage things on paper that semester.
This guy must be the most dangerous criminal alive: <a href="https://github.com/aaronryank/fork-bomb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aaronryank/fork-bomb</a>
> Japanese authorities sentenced a 24-year-old man to one year in prison, suspended for three years, despite the man making only $45 from his exploits.<p>> Japanese police have brought in, questioned, and charged a 13-year-old female student from the city of Kariya for sharing browser exploit code online.<p>>Japanese police also arrested a 17-year-old boy in February 2018 for creating malware that stole the passwords of cryptocurrency wallets, and another 14-year-old in June 2017, for creating ransomware, and later sharing the code online, despite the teen never using the ransomware in any attacks, and later admitting to having created it as a curiosity.<p>Insane huh! This will not solve the problem, but will just increase police hostility. No wonder, why people disdain them.
Reminds me of this hilarious account from somebody who made a MySpace worm in the day<p><a href="https://samy.pl/myspace/" rel="nofollow">https://samy.pl/myspace/</a>
I wouldn't be so quick to think this isn't also illegal in the USA. For instance, it is illegal in Illinois to:<p>Sec. 17-50. Computer fraud.<p><pre><code> (a) A person commits computer fraud when he or she knowingly:
(1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, or a program or data, with the intent of devising or executing any scheme or artifice to defraud, or as part of a deception;
</code></pre>
It could be argued that linking someone to the pop-up, making them think the site they were going to was normal, and then getting hit with an uncloseable pop-up was "a deception".
Odd, just closing the tab is enough to get rid of the "menace". I tried this in Firefox on Linux (my "daily" browser), Chromium on Linux, Firefox on Android and Chromium on Android. Those browsers were around in 2019, they supported tabs. I know the Japanese police suffers from a lack of crime - a luxury problem if there is any - but this... is taking that suffering to an unfortunate conclusion.<p>Alternatively, IE6 is still big in Japan and this turns out to be quite effective in bringing it down.
NYC 90s republicans would be proud of this extreme broken windows policy. Interestingly the murder rate in Japan is down 90% from the USA murder rate, while the GINI coefficient is 30 and 41 respectively.<p>There are many other factors that can account for a crime increase of course, but I wonder if this kind of policing is helping to keep crime down. And I wonder if Japanase think so and support these policies.
I assume this is all about this:<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/japanese-police-charge-13-year-old-girl-for-infinite-javascript-popup-prank/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/japanese-police-...</a>
Let me play the devils advocate here:<p>Why does it matter that what she did was a "simple" hack that didn't require exploiting fifteen CVEs at once?<p>It's akin to pulling away the seat of a teacher who wants to sit down.<p>Everybody is technically capable of pulling the seat away, it does not require any special skills.<p>You still get in trouble if you do it.