GC Warning

[jpwatson]

I recently received a warning on my PC that read "GC Warning: Removing nonexistent thread 25272".  The warning just appeared in notepad.  Does anyone know what this is?  Should I be concerned?

[Rob Pomeroy]

I think this is an error being produced by a garbage collector (memory management system).  Are you doing any programming?  What were you doing just before this happened?

[jpwatson]

My daughter was playing a game online.  I just happened to be standing behind her when notepad suddenly opened up.

[Aegis]

May we ask what site she was visiting, and what game she was playing at the time?

[jpwatson]

it was http://www.gogirlsgames.com (no porn lol) and she was playing some kind of horse game.  Goodness this sounds really bad.

[Aegis]

No, not at all!  The Internet is now almost incomprehesively large, and it's only a small percentage of the 'net which gets publicity of any kind -- Twitter, Facebook, etc., and p-rn.

[cat-bomb]

It could possibly be internet predators or just plain hackers hacking your pc using java apps. So were the games in java?

[JJ 3000]

Have you ran a virus scan since the message?

[jpwatson]

Yes, I ran a virus scan as soon as we closed notepad.  Nothing came up.

[BC_Programmer]

It could possibly be internet predators or just plain hackers hacking your pc using java apps. So were the games in java?

pure conjecture and speculation. "hacking using java apps"...  yeah. they would probably have better luck trying to hack into somebody's machine using a Doom configuration file...

[Rob Pomeroy]

pure conjecture and speculation. "hacking using java apps"...  yeah. they would probably have better luck trying to hack into somebody's machine using a Doom configuration file...

I suggest you Google "java vulnerabilities".

Back to the topic on hand, it would seem that this was an error generated by a failure of a program, almost certainly related to the game the OP's daughter was playing.  Nothing to worry about.

[BC_Programmer]

Java is essentially a safe language with good security features. A review of the US-CERT vulnerability database found no vulnerabilities that were not the result of implementation bugs [US-CERT 05]. Java and Java Virtual Machine Security [LSOD 02] and Securing Java [McGraw 99] also describe some Java vulnerabilities that have resulted from implementation bugs. However, there are a number of Java features and facilities that an unwary user might not realize could compromise safety.

It's basically not a question of wether vulnerabilities exist, but more a question of wether Java is ever the choice of a hacker, with all the sandboxes and tough security that is part of the specification. VB or another less strict language is often employed. Strangely even so it is not considered an "exploit" on the Runtime...


And, as Rob said this particular case seems more like one where the game was closed and a few threads were still running, and whilel trying to switch to another thread the thread was found to be nonexistent (it exited properly) and was thus deleted.