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Tech

These Silly Games Take Advantage of a Weird Bug in Chrome

Beware of the trees, and the link of death.

Bored at work? Come crash your browser for fun!

On Friday, a security engineer found out that simply adding some seemingly random characters—%%30%30—to any link would make Chrome browsers crash, not just when clicking on the characters, but even when just hovering over them in a web page. (We're not showing you a live link here cause we don't want to alienate you, our dear reader.)

To illustrate this major bug, some developers have made two extremely silly, but also kind of addicting, games.

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The first one challenges you to go through a maze, following a bear emoticon, and avoiding the tree emoticons, which have links containing the characters that cause the browser to crash.

The other game, called the Link of Death, is even more wicked. Once you click on it, a red bubble displaying a URL that contains the crashing character chases your mouse tracker. You can try and avoid it if you want, but—SPOILER ALERT—eventually the bubble catches up with you. There seems to be a way to defeat the game, but we'll let you figure it out.

The bug was discovered by Andris Atteka, who reported it the Google Chromium team, which is now working on a fix.

"There are going to be crashes all over as a result of this," wrote a Chromium developer.

Our colleagues at the British tech tabloid The Register, also know as El Reg, have a good write-up on how the bug actually works. In essence, Chrome doesn't know how to handle those characters, which make the URL invalid.

The bug apparently affects not just Google's Chrome, but every other Chromium-based browser, such as Chromium, Opera, and apps such as Atom and Slack, which are built with Electron code. The bug doesn't affect the mobile version of Chrome, however.

Have fun!