Buggy HTML5 Storage implementation fills up your hard drive in minutes
HTML5 localStorage was designed to allow websites and services to store larger amounts of data on a computer system. It is supported by all modern web browsers and used frequently by sites to save larger amounts of data on a system. All browsers have fixed limits in regards to the data that a domain can save on the local system. Google Chrome limits it to 2.5 Megabyte, Firefox and Opera to 5 Megabyte and Internet Explorer to 10.
According to the standard, this limit should be per origin so that the storage is shared between the root domain and all subdomains.
Feross Aboukhadijeh discovered a glitch in the implementation of HTML5 storage limits in Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari that allowed him to fill up the entire hard drive of the computer system with data in minutes.
The affected browsers do not limit the storage per origin, so that malicious sites that use lots of subdomains can fill the hard drive in these browsers easily.
The only browser that is not affected by this is Mozilla Firefox which has implemented the standard correctly.
The researcher has created a proof of concept video and site that demonstrates the issue.
The hard drive may be filled by up to 1 Gigabyte per every 16 seconds. The speed depends on the hard drive used and the overall performance and activity of the computer at that time.
Note that 32-bit browser versions may crash before the hard drive is filled completely. The demo site features a button that you can use to reclaim the disk space that has been filled by the script running on it.
It is definitely a scary sight to see how fast the disk space fills up with data on the test site.Bug reports have been filed and while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the issue will be resolved eventually.
It needs to be noted that this can't be misused for malicious activities. While it is bad enough that your hard drive gets filled to the brim in minutes, it is usually a matter of seconds to recover the storage space again.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.