Japanese police have apparently arrested a 13-year-old girl for “copy-pasting” a link to an infinite loop code.
The teenager who studies in a junior high school in Kariya-shi, Aichi Prefecture, was arrested by the Hyogo Prefectural Police Department — because they found the girl guilty of posting an “unlawful program” on the internet.
The unlawful program in question is simply a JavaScript snippet which manipulates the alert popup to run infinitely and clicking on the malicious link could crash a user’s application or system.
Japanese police is charging people for _posting link to a site_ that run
`for(;;){window.alert(‘lol you can’t get rid of this message even you keep closing modal’)}`
because it’s “unlawful program”
— Mariko Kosaka (@kosamari) March 4, 2019
On finding the post which contained the link, Japanese police examined the logs and traced the girl. She is now under protective custody on the charges of “spreading electric record of unlawful instruction” since March 4.
On interrogation, the girl justified her actions by saying “if someone clicked (on the link) it would be fun.”
In addition to this arrest, the police arrested two more suspects for posting the same link on different bulletin boards. Following which, the policemen raided the residences of a 39-year-old unemployed man from Yamaguchi Prefecture and a 47-year-old construction worker from Kagoshima Prefecture.
It is to be noted that the teenager and the other two men did not write the code themselves and the arrests were made just for posting it.
As soon as this news hit the internet, netizens took to Twitter to express their angered views on the same.
Joking aside, Japan implemented “computer virus law” in 2011 that people has been warning it could be misinterpreted in ridiculous way. 13yo girl to got caught for _just posting link to infinite loop that she didn’t write_ and I’m furious as used-to-be-13-girl-on-the-Internet.
— Mariko Kosaka (@kosamari) March 5, 2019
Horrible crime! Why not ‘while(true)’ for the loop instead??
(In seriousness, this is crazy ?)
— Guy Waldman (@guywald) March 5, 2019
Some tech-savvy Twitteratis even offered to give a presentation on web browser and security to the Japanese Police to help them gain some knowledge.
While others decided to take a dig at the policemen from Japan.
probably not in ie6
/* hides */
— Francis ? Gulotta (@reconbot) March 5, 2019
