Text Message Killing Iphones And Ipads.

[ProDave]

There's an article in the Telegraph telling us of a text message "doing the rounds" that will crash an iphone or ipad.

I won't link to the telegraph article as rather irresponsibly it seems to be reproducing the particular character sequence almost inviting you to "give it a try"

The only solution is to turn off message notifications.

Here's my thoughts on this:

A text message is just that, a bit of text that has to be displayed on the screen so you can read it.

So the software to read a text message and display it on the screen is really simple basic stuff. It just has to display the characters. No complicated code to interpret or execute, just display some characters.

We are told i thingies are so much better than windoze thingies and so much less vunerable to attacks.

But some "genius" of a programmer has managed to implement a bit of code that is supposed to just display some text on a screen, and make it so it interprets the message in some way that it crashed the device. It really must be a "genius" of a programmer to mess that up so badly. Heaven help him if he actually tries to code something that's actually complicated.

And so this rogue message has been "discovered" and what do we have? A national newspaper telling everybody that cares to read it, exactly what the rogue sequence of characters is. So now anyone that wants a bit of "fun" can mess up all their friends i thingy devices.

Pure and utter genius on all levels. NOT.

 

[Andy™]

good thing im not an iSheep

 

[Blue Duck]

What's canoeboy's number? I need to send him a text!

:slap

 

[Andy™]

what phone does prof have?!

 

[pewter]

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/27/iphone-crash-bug-text-imessage-ios

The bug – discovered by several Reddit users – means that when the message is received it instantly crashes the iPhone and causes it to reboot, as long as the recipient is not viewing their message history at the time.

The attack appears to be caused by a glitch in the way Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, which runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, renders Arabic text.

When the text message is displayed by a banner alert or notification on the lockscreen, the system attempts to abbreviate the text with an ellipsis. If the ellipsis is placed in the middle of a set of non-Latin script characters, including Arabic, Marathi and Chinese, it causes the system to crash and the phone to reboot.

The bug requires a very specific string of text to be sent within an iMessage or SMS. In attempting to confirm the bug the Guardian went through 50 variations of the text string before replicating the crash.