I remember a video where they went through scyscrapers zooming into a room, where life was moving on and there was a screen inside a room and there was something running on it. I never understood how this was tanked. It was revolutionary.
The subscribers to simulations from the pr0n-industry and the billions of lonely humanoids will suffocate in their VR-headsets, if we don't think about sensors to watch their oxygen-levels.
Back in the day it was Windows, that had a hard limit on how long it could run in one pass. I forgot when it began and ended, but happily AI helped out to investigate back in time.
The bug primarily affected the Windows 9x family of operating systems:
Windows 95 (all versions)
Windows 98 (original release)
Windows 98 Second Edition (SE)
While there were separate reports of similar 497-day overflows in Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, the "classic" version of this bug that most people remember is the 49.7-day limit on Windows 95 and 98.
Why 49.7 days?
The issue was a classic integer overflow. Windows used a 32-bit counter to track the number of milliseconds since the system started.
This counter was used by the Virtual Device Driver (VMM) to manage system timers.
The maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer is: 2^32 - 1, which equals: 4,294,967,295 millisec.
If you convert those milliseconds into days: 4,294,967,295 / 1,000 = 4,294,967 seconds
4,294,967 / 60 / 60 / 24 ~ 49.71 days
When the counter hit that maximum value, it would "wrap around" to zero. Because many system services and drivers were waiting for the counter to increase to a certain target time, they would suddenly find themselves waiting for a number that had already passed or was now mathematically impossible to reach in their logic. This caused the "hang"—the mouse might still move, but the OS could no longer process tasks.
When did it start and end?
Started: With the release of Windows 95 in August 1995.
Ended: Microsoft officially fixed the bug with a patch in 1999 (Knowledge Base article KB216641). Windows Me (released in 2000) was the first in that specific family to ship with the fix included, and the transition to the Windows NT architecture (Windows XP and later) eventually rendered the specific underlying cause obsolete for home users.
> Windows Me (released in 2000) was the first in that specific family to ship with the fix included,
With all this, Windows Me was the most unstable, crashing several times per day, although there were, on HN, reports that in some configurations was stable.
Owning such images on your computer or phone or anything brings you straight to a raid and court in Germany. I believe in the whole EU, but iam not absolutely sure, because not my concern typically. But what to do, if you have that on your timeline unwanted and this is transmitted and in your browser cache. Technically you now already violated the law.
Good luck explaining you need excemption because of Elon, you couldn't do anything about it. The law especially at this point is rigid for a reason. I don't know of any excemption for anybody. Not young people, not mums, not teachers that wanted to help in disputes between pupils. This leads directly to court if it gets known - that's what the law says.
This basically means, you can not use X without knowing you are 1 step away of breaking local laws and end up in court for browsing X.
Theoretically the prosecuters could now ask for the IP-adresses of the people that accessed the images in the EU and so forth.
A few weeks ago i saw a repo in Github that had closed the issue-board and explained the users: to move on to the discussions.
If the discussion leads to the insight, that this is worth a feature, the maintainer will implement it.
I think the same goes for PRs. If you think you have made something cool, then discuss it and offer your implementation and the maintainer makes it fit with you to integrate.
On the other side, if you want a feature it just doesnt have, simply forking it and updating from the source-repo is fair enough.
bash? :) iframes, a little dashboard, or nowadays you use something like mcp-browser-use, chrome-devtools-mcp with your llm of choice and write skills for that.
If it has APIs, you dont even need that browser-engine at all.
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