JavaScript infinite alert prank lands 13-year-old Japanese girl in hot water

Enlarge / Edge makes it easy to break out of infinite JavaScript alert loops.

Japanese police in the city of Kariya have questioned and charged a 13-year-old female student for distributing malicious code online after she linked to the code on an online message board. The malicious code in question? An infinite loop that popped up an alert message, immediately showing a new message each time you click OK.

Those curious to see the code can see it in action here, though it's probably unwise to visit on mobile browsers, as they don't seem particularly tolerant of this kind of prank. Every mainstream desktop browser seems to handle the malicious page without incident. Edge, for example, offers a checkbox to prevent the page from being able to show subsequent dialogs, and Chrome lets you close the tab in spite of the alert box. The code itself is extraordinarily simple; it's literally nothing more than an infinite loop and an alert box that prints a kaomoji and a short message that translates as "It's no use closing it so many times."

for ( ; ; ) {
window.alert("aa_aaafafafaf\ni1/4 afIaf)=aaa\ni1/4a aa=a\n`/aa)\n(afIi1/4\naae-aaaceaaTMaiww\nm9i1/4i1/43/4D"i1/43/4i1/4af-a(R)afaf1/4i1/4i1/4\nabyaaf (@0_Infinity_)")
}

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