Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 122 posts

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

#101

Post by jmull »

wvenable wrote: post #85
jmull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since this affects a huge number of applications and even desktop applications, it's a low-level library that is causing the problem. I'm not sure it's unreasonable to test every unicode codepoint against shared library if that library is responsible for the rendering of unicode text. But I agree it would be unreasonable to do that for every app that uses the library.

You have a point. It's probably not unreasonable to test every Unicode codepoint against a low-level shared library, at least for APIs that process a single codepoint.

I don't think it's a no-brainer though.

And it is unreasonable to expect a testing technique to be applied in every case where it is reasonable to do so. There are a lot of techniques that are reasonable to use in any give case but it would be no sense at all to apply every one of them. To focus on this one, now, amounts to Monday morning quarterbacking. Once you know the bug it's easy to see how it could have been caught. Of course if you somehow knew of a bug ahead of time you wouldn't need any test at all!

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

#102

Post by wvenable »

jmull wrote: post #101
wvenable wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this affects a huge number of applications and even desktop applications, it's a low-level library that is causing the problem. I'm not sure it's unreasonable to test every unicode codepoint against shared library if that library is responsible for the rendering of unicode text. But I agree it would be unreasonable to do that for every app that uses the library.

You have a point. It's probably not unreasonable to test every Unicode codepoint against a low-level shared library, at least for APIs that process a single codepoint. I don't think it's a no-brainer though. And it is unreasonable to expect a testing technique to be applied in every case where it is reasonable to do so. There are a lot of techniques that are reasonable to use in any give case but it would be no sense…

Yeah, I don't disagree. Arguing this would caught by better testing is close to implying that all software bugs are avoidable; we simply have to test "better" until there are no bugs ever.

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

#103

Post by sigotirandolas »

jcsnv wrote: post #63
ronnier wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For WhatsApp deleting the conversation through WhatsApp Web seemed to fix it.

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

#104

Post by mrlyc »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #79
softawre wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to call that a blue/white rebuttal

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

It's probably a reference to the debate on Reddit about whether a dress (http://i.imgur.com/9VWYggm.jpg) was black and blue or white and gold.

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

#105

Post by skygazer »

kdot wrote: post #24
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…

Some bugs are so bad it begs the question if they even test at all, such as the iMessage Apps store favorites bug a few iOS releases ago.

I run iOS public betas. The staggering improvement in quality between beta 1 and beta 7 seems to be evidence that they doing largely effective QA of major “happy paths.” What I do find interesting is that in early betas, things are broken that imply there are either constant fundamental rewrites going on, or that architecture is sloppy. (Hope it’s the former.) After the final betas, the remaining bugs seem to be untested edge cases. Of course, with complexity, there’s a combinatorial explosion of edge cases to test, so it’s likely their QA is constantly being outpaced.

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

#107

Post by sharmajai »

eridius wrote: post #90
sharmajai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Unicode standard does not have a single definition for "character" because there's multiple interpretations. One reasonable interpretation is "a grapheme cluster". More specifically, here's what the Unicode Consortium glossary defines for "Character": > Character. (1) The smallest component of written language that has semantic value; refers to the abstract meaning and/or shape, rather than a specific shape (see…

I don't see which of those 4 definitions supports the grapheme cluster interpretation.

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

#108

Post by eridius »

sharmajai wrote: post #107
eridius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Unicode standard does not have a single definition for "character" because there's multiple interpretations. One reasonable interpretation is "a grapheme cluster". More specifically, here's what the Unicode Consortium glossary defines for "Character": > Character. (1) The smallest component of written language that has semantic value; refers to the abstract meaning and/or shape, rather than a specific shape (see…

I don't see which of those 4 definitions supports the grapheme cluster interpretation.

The very first one. é has semantic value. ´ by itself doesn't.

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

#109

Post by sharmajai »

eridius wrote: post #108
sharmajai wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see which of those 4 definitions supports the grapheme cluster interpretation.

The very first one. é has semantic value. ´ by itself doesn't.

Of course it does, because it can be combined with other characters. This is the semantic meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent

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

#110

Post by eridius »

sharmajai wrote: post #109
eridius wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very first one. é has semantic value. ´ by itself doesn't.

Of course it does, because it can be combined with other characters. This is the semantic meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent

An accent mark by itself has zero semantic meaning in a written context. It's a modifier. But you need to know what it's modifying in order to assign it any sort of meaning. We're talking about semantic meaning within the context of a written language, not technical details.
Post reply on HN