The other day I was screwing around on the AIM Linux client and I did the following which I found interesting (note: I use parentheses extremely often for clarification):

I hit the "Decrease Font Size" button a 'bunch' and when I hit enter/send AIM froze for a moment then disappeared. After further trial/error testing it seems that the magic number is 22 (for me). AIM didn't offer any error message or obvious crash out, only indication was that the AIM client exited. Being somewhat new to Linux I'm not sure how to go about finding logs for events such as this (anything that will provide deeper info, or if there is one). I'm testing this on Red Hat 7.1.

Further experimentation revealed that it also works for the "Increase Font Size" (again with the magic number being 22) and I also got the "crash" (I'll continue to call it this whether it truly is a crash or not) from "Bold" but could not duplicate the results later (with bold, increase font size was duplicated).

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I've yet to see a valid purpose for this flaw (if it is one) but further tracing by those of you who are more adept than me could reveal something. If the client is a binary then you'll have to watch the DMCA of course : ).

I'd like to know what others can do with this:
IE: can you simulate the results I got?
find the cause for this?
etc...

Note: I did notify AOL with this exact message minus the part following the ******* line.

-DarC KonQuesT