Two Unicode Symbols Found to Crash Mac and iOS Apps

DooKey

DooKey

[H]F Junkie
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Two unicodes have been found that will crash almost any app running on a Mac or iOS device. The symbol just has to be displayed and then the software crashes. In some cases the app can't reopen and must be reinstalled. This is pretty nasty and Apple needs to get this one patched quickly.

The bug crashes apps including Mail, Twitter, Messages, Slack, Instagram and Facebook. From our testing, it also crashed Jumpcut, a copy and paste plugin for Mac. While it initially appeared that the Chrome browser for Mac was unaffected and could safely display the symbol, it later crashed Chrome and the software would not reopen without crashing until uninstalled and reinstalled.
 
Hello Apple QA. Here is a simple test: create a test script that sends every Unicode character to the iMessage app. If it causes a crash, make note of the unicode character and create an issue for development to fix.
This isn't the first time they've had a bug like this. This is bad!
 
steakman1971 said:
Hello Apple QA. Here is a simple test: create a test script that sends every Unicode character to the iMessage app. If it causes a crash, make note of the unicode character and create an issue for development to fix.
This isn't the first time they've had a bug like this. This is bad!
Click to expand...

you misspelled courageous.

i think you meant "this is courageous"
 
That's just stupid silly. Wow. How could that affect multiple apps? It's not like chrome is developed using apples software. Must be a key problem with the os. Only thing that makes sense to me. :(
 
That is really a dick move to post something that you know very well will cause issues with the intent of break people's systems.
 
Will it crash their systems if you text it to them???
 
This doesn’t crash iOS Safari, all you people posting the symbol might now be crashing anyone :(
 
No crashing on a Macbook here in Safari. However I unthoughtfully did it in Reminders and had it stuck in a crash loop in iOS and macOS. Cleared the reminder out through icloud.com on my windows machine, though it might have worked in Safari maybe.
 
steakman1971 said:
Hello Apple QA. Here is a simple test: create a test script that sends every Unicode character to the iMessage app. If it causes a crash, make note of the unicode character and create an issue for development to fix.
This isn't the first time they've had a bug like this. This is bad!
Click to expand...

This is a great idea, but the problem is that these bugs are formed by combinations of unicode code points with some other weird unicode crap (zero-width non-joiner); the combinatorics of trying to find all the crashing sequences of 5 code points are pretty bleak; it might be a bit better if you only do 5 code points that are within one script combined with all the weird crap; but still it's pretty meh. Need to sandbox the text rendering (although that's got perf problems all over it)
 
Exavior said:
That is really a dick move to post something that you know very well will cause issues with the intent of break people's systems.
Click to expand...
Not sanitizing the inputs is a dick move. Not performing decent QA is a dick move. Charging the price that is charged WITHOUT these things is a dick move.
Not actually improving FROM THE LAST TIME THIS OCCURED is a dick move
 
After years of mocking Microsoft's cumbersome UI, Apple has finally developed a good alternative to ctrl-alt-del!
 
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