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Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

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Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#61
post #59
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that this is the product of scale. Looking at some of the bugs coming out of Apple lately and how they respond to them (assuming it's really a trend and not just a run of bad luck) it feels like they're slipping into a culture where individual feature teams are making emotional or schedule-based decisions about security without central guidance. A good example is the recent bug on MacOS where a low-privile…

You're just making assumptions. All we know is that there's a failure. We don't know what kind of and how many errors triggered the failure, nor do we know what the faults causing the errors were. We certainly don't know what kind of hazard analysis they did and what kind of mitigations they have in place, nor do we know whether they accepted a specific amount of residual risk for e.g. economic or market pressure rea…

> Without this information, it's pointless to talk about how things feel or seem.

Au contraire! Without this information we can only talk about how things feel or seem.

Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#63
post #60
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sent this link to my phone and the character is in the meta-title, which then crashed my phone. It works! Now how to fix it...

Option 1: * Have someone else send you a message * Click the notification and it'll open their message * Navigate back and delete the corrupting message Option 2: * Sign up for the ios beta program (free) https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ and install the latest beta which isn't impacted.

Thank you!! I tried deleting the conversations through the settings and no luck. Will try these now

Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just making assumptions. All we know is that there's a failure. We don't know what kind of and how many errors triggered the failure, nor do we know what the faults causing the errors were. We certainly don't know what kind of hazard analysis they did and what kind of mitigations they have in place, nor do we know whether they accepted a specific amount of residual risk for e.g. economic or market pressure rea…

> Without this information, it's pointless to talk about how things feel or seem. Au contraire! Without this information we can only talk about how things feel or seem .

Au contraire yourself. Your statement that this is the only thing we can talk about, does not contradict the assertion that talking about it is pointless.

Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#65
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just making assumptions. All we know is that there's a failure. We don't know what kind of and how many errors triggered the failure, nor do we know what the faults causing the errors were. We certainly don't know what kind of hazard analysis they did and what kind of mitigations they have in place, nor do we know whether they accepted a specific amount of residual risk for e.g. economic or market pressure rea…

> Without this information, it's pointless to talk about how things feel or seem. Au contraire! Without this information we can only talk about how things feel or seem .

Exactly. One can discuss and imagine all they want without full information and it's very normal and socially and personally productive. I'd refrain from issuing final judgements unless you have "all the info" but that's pretty obvious.

Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#67
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without this information, it's pointless to talk about how things feel or seem. Au contraire! Without this information we can only talk about how things feel or seem .

Au contraire yourself. Your statement that this is the only thing we can talk about, does not contradict the assertion that talking about it is pointless.

Remind me not to invite you to parties ;)

Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuzzing finds bugs, using a safe language precludes them.

What constitutes a safe language? Is Rust safe?

Not by the parent's definition, anyway. Rust code certainly has bugs; I know, I've written some!

Now, if they're talking about memory safety bugs...

Re: Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages

#70
post #12

I've never done any fuzzing personally, but wouldn't this be discoverable internally during testing? I would think that they would attempt sending all possible characters, especially because they've had issues with this in the past.

Well of course they could have done that. To be honest, though, if someone on my team suggested we implement an automated test that tries sending every Unicode character (and it would be applied to every interface of every app and API, right?) I would have objected that this was an over-complicated, over-engineered solution that will probably be too slow. I'd argue that a set of test data selected to cover a range of…

> Generally, I think you'll get more efficient, effective, useful tests if you tailor the test data sets to the problems you see rather than going for blanket coverage.

Sure, but fuzzing and "throw everything and the kitchen sink at it" type testing will generally expose logic bugs you weren't aware existed. Aka the unknown unknowns. Its not like this is an either/or proposition, you could run the fuzzing type gauntlet tests every week or so.

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