Every piece of software accumulates errors over time that even escape the attention of its developers. I imagine many of our readers remember the famous 'c:/con/con' on Windows 98, but today it's Google Chrome's turn and its variants. A specially crafted web address with just 16 characters sends the browser into the depths, causing the tab to hang, and in most cases, the immediate loss of the session.
Can anyone say that a piece of software is 'finished'? By this I mean it reaches a definitive development state, needing no further correction or optimization. While there are examples of very stable programs that work perfectly several years after launch, the truth is that there is never a formal 'completion'. The subject of bugs is chronic, and the best we can aspire to is reducing their impact, focusing our attention on the most critical components that guarantee security. This is particularly delicate among web browsers, and their expanded role in today's computing.
The 16-Character Bug
With that in mind, the idea that Google Chrome can crash with a link of 16 characters or more is somewhat astonishing. In recent days we have seen variants of that link, but the general format is roughly this: http://a/%%30%30. The key is in the second part of the address, the '%%30%30', and even if we try to insert this code alongside a valid root (for example, http://neoteo.com/%%30%30), the result is exactly the same: Chrome crashes. It has been reported that several builds of Chromium fall to their knees before this mysterious poison, but it was possible to verify that the latest version 47.0.2517.0 makes a different transformation of the URL, and avoids the crash entirely, yielding a common 404.
What Causes It?
What causes this error? Where does it come from? In very relaxed terms, the bug is generated by a problem when interpreting the encoding in a URL, due to what appears to be an old piece of code in Chrome. It has already been established that the bug causes no security issue, and a strong proof is that someone turned it into a kind of online game, since a simple hover over the link provokes the crash. Wait for the next update, and everything should be fine.
