Fonts have long been the culprits in system and app crashes in all computer systems. I've seen bad fonts crash a Mac or Final Cut or Avid or Photoshop. Can't even remember how many times I went looking for and found bad fonts. I used to have an app for that, but don't remember it's name. A font is a messy thing with all sorts little details about each character. If one tiny detail is off, or wrong - poof! Yer down.
What one of my friends thinks the problem is, is that each character in the English alphabet takes one byte to save. Where as some Arabic characters take two bytes. When the message is too large in the notification, apple sends the text down a line and adds an ellipse. But Your iPhone, when set to English, thinks that each character is only a byte long, so it doesn't realize that the Arabic character is more than one byte and tries to add the ellipse between the two bytes needed to display the single Arabic character, thus causing your phone to try to display a byte that doesn't represent any character and leading to a crash.
There are a number of ways for a software bug to crash the operating system. Most of them have to do with the app overwriting memory that doesn't belong to the app, either overwriting system code or data needed for system code. A long time ago, it was very easy to crash Windows just with a simple stack overflow (a function creates a big array on the stack, then calls itself recursively). Operating systems protect their memory much more effectively these days, but there are still holes...
And just to show how dumb today's society is, there are people intentionally trying to crash their phone with this. WTF? Unless you work at Apple and are responsible for fixing software bugs why on earth would you try to replicate this?
What's the harm? It doesn't hurt anything as long as they've read the article. It's nothing like a layman deliberately installing malware where long-lasting harm may be done to the system; where the harm may require a more experienced hand to be resolved.
They wouldn't have to test every character that's supported, just every character that is in active use and they can flag characters outside their tested set for added checking. The combinations would still reach trillions of trillions but supercomputers can crunch through quadrillions of computations per second now so they could test a significant range. The easiest way would probably be to have a buffered rendering step so they'd take the string, run a new process and render it there first. If that process renders ok, either use the result or run it again in the main app. If that separate process crashes or fails in some way, just put up a message saying that the string failed to render.
Testing every character that's supported wouldn't be hard. It's in the combinations of characters that the circumstance becomes effectively impossible to test. Rather, the approach would be to write code which should be able to handle a bizarre range of combinations by looking at what is required to handle and render them together generally (an approach based on general understanding of what is involved rather than an exhaustive test of character combinations), and efforts to limit consequences should something go wrong. Similarly, this is likely one of many possible character combinations which could trigger the same bug.
What one of my friends thinks the problem is, is that each character in the English alphabet takes one byte to save. Where as some Arabic characters take two bytes. When the message is too large in the notification, apple sends the text down a line and adds an ellipse. But Your iPhone, when set to English, thinks that each character is only a byte long, so it doesn't realize that the Arabic character is more than one byte and tries to add the ellipse between the two bytes needed to display the single Arabic character, thus causing your phone to try to display a byte that doesn't represent any character and leading to a crash.
It should be much more complicated than this. Apple devices have been rendering all manner of special glyphs (whether foreign or otherwise) for quite some time now—and messages which contain a combination of basic Latin characters and multi-byte Unicode characters. It is also not very difficult to recognize the boundaries between these characters and break (e.g. add an ellipsis) at those points. Now, if they're trying to do something fancy which scans for appropriate points in the area or around 'words' we might run into something more probable.
Comments
So what genius decided to print the actual text in an article? Seems pretty irresponsible.
At least they didn't post a text string that can be copied :P
Didn’t work on my girlfriends iPhone. Boo
Didn’t work on my girlfriends iPhone. Boo
Bummer. We'll have to give this a try when I get home. Sounds like it crashes Apple Watch too.
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Apparently...this is super popular and fun pastime.
I must admit... if I was 16... I would be thanking Apple for such a cool feature. LOL
- RC
Why exactly is this even possible?
There are a number of ways for a software bug to crash the operating system. Most of them have to do with the app overwriting memory that doesn't belong to the app, either overwriting system code or data needed for system code. A long time ago, it was very easy to crash Windows just with a simple stack overflow (a function creates a big array on the stack, then calls itself recursively). Operating systems protect their memory much more effectively these days, but there are still holes...
Thanks a lot for share.
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it will cause messages to crash and no longer open much much worse imo - MEe Hack
Testing every character that's supported wouldn't be hard. It's in the combinations of characters that the circumstance becomes effectively impossible to test. Rather, the approach would be to write code which should be able to handle a bizarre range of combinations by looking at what is required to handle and render them together generally (an approach based on general understanding of what is involved rather than an exhaustive test of character combinations), and efforts to limit consequences should something go wrong. Similarly, this is likely one of many possible character combinations which could trigger the same bug.
many developpers made that IOS and a bit of Arabic characters can crash it, wow