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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

#71

Post by softawre »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #13
13of40 wrote: 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…

Within the context of the previous comment, this is a great comment. I read it six times in rapid succession and it keeps flipping between being a supporting arguement for and against the parent comment.

I like to call that a blue/white rebuttal

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

#72

Post by reaperducer »

nebula wrote: post #25
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #14

This isn't the first time a weird sequence of Unicode characters has caused the text renderer to crash and create problems for iOS users. This is why we shouldn't be writing new code in C.

I checked the character, it is anything but weird. It is a valid character in a language used by millions of people. For those curious: It is a Telugu character; Telugu is one of several widely spoken languages in India.

I guess it depends on your definition of "widely spoken."

According to Wikipedia, the number of people speaking Telugu is 0.97% of the world. It's not even a statistical margin of error.

Still, how hard can it be to have a machine step through all of the possible combinations of every iOS-supported character set and jam them into iMessage to see if they're failsafe?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language

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

#73

Post by awkwardaardvark »

Shoothe wrote: post #66

I wonder how many more of this flops will it take for some security experts to stop recommending iPhone over Android...

For me it will take Google fixing the update situation for Android. Things would have to get quite a bit worse until I feel that a non-technical person, who does not buy a new phone at least once a year, would be safer on balance.

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

#75

Post by lostmsu »

reaperducer wrote: post #72
nebula wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked the character, it is anything but weird. It is a valid character in a language used by millions of people. For those curious: It is a Telugu character; Telugu is one of several widely spoken languages in India.

I guess it depends on your definition of "widely spoken." According to Wikipedia, the number of people speaking Telugu is 0.97% of the world. It's not even a statistical margin of error. Still, how hard can it be to have a machine step through all of the possible combinations of every iOS-supported character set and jam them into iMessage to see if they're failsafe? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language

1%? Are you kidding? That's over 70 million. It's on the order of population of Germany, and 10 times more, than Swedes.

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

#76

Post by sharmajai »

kens wrote: post #35

What's the Unicode codepoint of the character? Is it a single Unicode codepoint or multiple? (I tried to search for info on the web, but Chrome kept crashing.) Supposedly it's a normal Telugu character, but how could that have gotten past even minimal testing in Hyderabad? Or is it some strange combining corner case? Telugu script is kind of unusual in Unicode, since it is syllabic but has separate codepoints for vow…

All Unicode characters map, one-to-one, to their code points. A code point being a numeric identifier. It's a grapheme that combines multiple characters to form a unit of writing.

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

#77

Post by torstenvl »

SalimoS wrote: post #45
torstenvl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't crash iOS 10.3 (although it doesn't seem to render correctly either) https://imgur.com/cglhVS5 Would be really nice if Apple would stop treating its beta software as a final release.

Do you mind trying to open the link again ?

Just did. Still no crash.

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

#78

Post by MarkyC4 »

arenaninja wrote: post #42
adpirz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try copy and pasting the character in your address bar.

Ohhh nice. Yep, definitely crashed Safari on OSX 10.13.3 when the character is in the address bar. Firefox seems fine and is my daily driver, fortunately

Firefox Developer Edition 59.0b9 here on latest High Sierra. Opening the link doesn't crash anything, but highlighting the paste did. I would have expected the tab at most to crash, but it took out the whole browser

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

#79

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

softawre wrote: post #71
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within the context of the previous comment, this is a great comment. I read it six times in rapid succession and it keeps flipping between being a supporting arguement for and against the parent comment.

I like to call that a blue/white rebuttal

Is this a reference to something I'm not familiar with?

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

#80

Post by hoki1 »

ronnier wrote: post #60
jcsnv wrote: 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.

tried option 1, did not work. app crashes when navigating back :(
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