'Text Bomb' Is Latest Apple Bug (bbc.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A new "text bomb" affecting Apple's iPhone and Mac computers has been discovered. Abraham Masri, a software developer, tweeted about the flaw which typically causes an iPhone to crash and in some cases restart. Simply sending a message containing a link which pointed to Mr Masri's code on programming site GitHub would be enough to activate the bug -- even if the recipient did not click the link itself. Mr Masri said he "always reports bugs" before releasing them. Apple has not yet commented on the issue. On a Mac, the bug reportedly makes the Safari browser crash, and causes other slowdowns. Security expert Graham Cluley wrote on his blog that the bug does not present anything to be particularly worried about -- it's merely very annoying. After the link did the rounds on social media, Mr Masri removed the code from GitHub, therefore disabling the "attack" unless someone was to replicate the code elsewhere.
Where's the video? (Score:2)
causes an iPhone to crash and in some cases restart. Simply sending a message containing a link which pointed to Mr Masri's code on programming site GitHub would be enough to activate the bug -- even if the recipient did not click the link itself. Mr Masri said he "always reports bugs" before releasing them.
I usually love seeing such bugs in action. Anyone can point us to the video?
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Bump it up to coffee stirrer the next time your post this.
Replace CEO (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's got a real general malaise problem, lately. The fix is likely to replace the CEO and possibly other high-up executives because they've focused too much on other crap, and not on the core-business. If Tim Cook, (for example,) wants to be the CEO of a watch company, or a headphone company, let him go do that.
Apple is a computer company, even if they removed the word "computer" from their name. Of course this is merely my opinion, but I'll tell you this for sure: unless and until Apple shapes up its act, I am not buying any more Apple products, or products that only work with Apple products. If it comes to pass that I need a new computer and/or cellphone before Apple pulls its corporate head out of its corporate ass, I will switch to something else. (Case in point, I recently obtained an old MacBook that Apple has decided is obsolete, and put GNU/Linux on it, in preparation for doing the same with my iMac, which once I don't need it for my iPhone anymore, that will be it, and I will unApplify my life. I'll probably get a dumb-phone, and go back to the days when I navigated for myself, etc., and not rely on the increasingly unreliable kludgey crap coming from Apple nowadays.
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This seems underrated to me. Maybe ditching the CEO is going a bit too far, but they definitely need to get serious about software QA.
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The free market demands a blood sacrifice in order for Apple to have expiation [youtube.com]
Re: Replace CEO (Score:2)
Not only software. Appleâ(TM)s hardware use to be worth the money but now itâ(TM)s overpriced and not as ergonomic and useful as it used to be. Thanks to it not being upgradable its cost per year and its impact on the environment has exploded too.
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Their apostrophes were better in the olden days too.
Re: Replace CEO (Score:2)
See? Everything was better back then. :P
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once I don't need it for my iPhone anymore, that will be it, and I will unApplify my life. I'll probably get a dumb-phone, and go back to the days when I navigated for myself, etc., and not rely on the increasingly unreliable kludgey crap coming from Apple nowadays.
You don't need to switch to a dumb-phone to be free of Apple junkware. Do yourself a favor, try a Samsung S8 and discover what a great experience it can be to use a truly high-end smartphone, with a gorgeous screen, conveniently expandable storage and a headphone jack. The best part is that you can achieve that without bending over for another Big Brother, you can use excellent open-source software from F-Droid.
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Apple's got a real general malaise problem, lately. The fix is likely to replace the CEO and possibly other high-up executives because they've focused too much on other crap, and not on the core-business. If Tim Cook, (for example,) wants to be the CEO of a watch company, or a headphone company, let him go do that.
Apple is a computer company, even if they removed the word "computer" from their name. Of course this is merely my opinion, but I'll tell you this for sure: unless and until Apple shapes up its act, I am not buying any more Apple products, or products that only work with Apple products. If it comes to pass that I need a new computer and/or cellphone before Apple pulls its corporate head out of its corporate ass, I will switch to something else. (Case in point, I recently obtained an old MacBook that Apple has decided is obsolete, and put GNU/Linux on it, in preparation for doing the same with my iMac, which once I don't need it for my iPhone anymore, that will be it, and I will unApplify my life. I'll probably get a dumb-phone, and go back to the days when I navigated for myself, etc., and not rely on the increasingly unreliable kludgey crap coming from Apple nowadays.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but Apple has been like that since the 2000's. They've just lost their cult of personality.
They've always produced unreliable, klugey crap but previously had good marketing and a legion of rabid fanboys to attack anyone suggesting it wasn't the best thing since Jesus made pancakes out of wine.
An Iphone 8 isn't worse than an Iphone 3, it's just that people are seeing them for the overpriced crap they are. Replacing the CEO wont do anything to change that because
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"Mr Masri removed the code from GitHub, therefore disabling the "attack" unless someone was to replicate the code elsewhere."
It's called Forking, and probably was done by many people before he removed the code. This is rather reckless on his part to make the exploit available before Apple has a chance to patch it.
Text? (Score:1)
Link?
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There's nothing wrong with being new and nothing wrong with bitching about old news. There is however something wrong with telling people to go away.
Also 4chan is not a "shitsite". The internet is a beautiful mosaic and 4chan is a colorful part of it.
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The Messages app's default behavior has it load a preview of the linked-to content, hence why the linked-to content can—and in this case did—cause problems.
Anyway, previews can be toggled on or off in settings, it's possible to delete the offending messages via settings if Messages becomes inaccessible, and messages from unknown senders are by default shunted into a separate section in Messages from those sent by contacts, so the issue was always going to be minimal in scope and impact. Even so,
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Even so, it's nice to see that they were able to accomplish some initial mitigation prior to the full fix coming next week.
It's not "nice", it's a bare minimum.
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The bug itself is understandable -- the space of all possible Unicode text strings is infinite, and the behavior of a universal text renderer is more subtle than most programmers would imagine. I think most programmers would be susceptible to not handling every use case in every language correctly.
What's disconcerting is that the fault appears to crash the entire OS, not just the one buggy application. Shouldn't memory protection and process segmentation prevent that?
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Its all part of building on search features https://www.wired.com/2014/10/... [wired.com] (10.20.14)
Is it really a bug though?? (Score:1)
I don't know about all of you, but I'm getting really excited just waiting to see how SuperKendall will enlighten us all as to how this is a feature that benefits each and every disciple of the Apple world. This is gonna be good.
+1 troll
Slowdowns? (Score:2)
Ban unicode (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Is all of ASCII really needed? My ASR-33 teletype does a fine job with just the seven bit character set. It doesn't even have lower case.
Re:Ban unicode (Score:5, Insightful)
If it can't be expressed in ASCII, it's not worth writing.
No other languages exist in the world.
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Other languages exist, but Unicode sucks for encoding them. Most Japanese, Chinese and Korean software doesn't use Unicode, for example. And most software that claims to support Unicode is broken.
We need to replace Unicode with something better. My suggestion would be:
- 32 bit unsigned is the primary character encoding, with an 8 bit format for legacy systems like email. Compatibility modules for loading UTF8 and UTF16 will be provided. Most text is compressed when transmitted anyway (e.g. HTTP) so 32 bit c
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Oh so you mean like the stagefright bug for android?
Had this on an old Nokia phone (Score:5, Interesting)
Some text messages would reliably cause the phone to reboot on delivery of the message.
This would cause an almost endless reboot cycle, until the server gave up attempting to deliver the text message (around 10-20 reboots).
Unicode! (Score:3)
This is exactly why Unicode support is unsafe and dangerous! Thankfully Slashdot will always be a safe haven from such shenanigans.
It's still easy to find... (Score:1)