Apple to Fix Telugu Character Bug Causing Devices to Crash in Minor iOS Update

[zokstar]

why did you input the characters in to your device knowing it would damage it?

I didn't! An android person thought it would be fun to send it to me.

 

[a0me]

And testing for 3 characters wouldn't have found that specific problem. The crashing character consists of 5 codepoints.

U+0C1C [Lo] TELUGU LETTER JA
U+0C4D [Mn] TELUGU SIGN VIRAMA
U+0C1E [Lo] TELUGU LETTER NYA
U+200C [Cf] ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
U+0C3E [Mn] TELUGU VOWEL SIGN AA

If you could test 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations per second testing all possible characters that consist of 5 codepoints would still take 1.5 years.

And testing for characters consisting of 5 codepoint still won't be enough. The family emoji ‍‍‍ for example is actually a sequence of 7 codepoints. Woman + Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) + Woman + ZWJ + Girl + ZWJ + Boy.

Unicode isn't like in the old times (like ASCII for example), where we had a direct 1:1 mapping between a codepoint and a character to render. Testing all Unicode combinations just won't work.

Thank you for providing this explanation. Your post should be sticked up at the top of the article.

 

[GoldMan]

Anyone has a fix for this?

 

[lkrupp]

What is happening to the quality of Apple's software development and in particular testing methodology? It seems like one flaw, issue or vulnerability after another. Under Tim Cook the quality of Apple's software has taken a significant nose dive. Software appears to be very much an afterthought. Apple are the new early two thousand's M$.

And you have nowhere to go. Think about that. There are no better options for you. What are going to do? Go to Windows, Android? You’d go from what you perceive as bad to worse? There’s only one thing you got right in your post and that’s “it seems”. The reality is that Apple hardware and software have never been better.

 

[Michael Goff]

And you have nowhere to go. Think about that. There are no better options for you. What are going to do? Go to Windows, Android? You’d go from what you perceive as bad to worse? There’s only one thing you got right in your post and that’s “it seems”. The reality is that Apple hardware and software have never been better.

Apple software is better than ever in what metric?

 

[Sunshoopa]

Fixed for me! Jailbreaking sometimes shines with having major fixes like this even before Apple does.

 

[Phonephreak]

Actually it was discovered by an Italian developer. There have to be at least a couple of million Indians using iOS by now. Why didn’t they scream bloody murder immediately?
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Maybe time for you to switch platforms and be happy. But then there’s the serious Skype bug that Microsoft says is too much trouble to fix right now, and all the Android flaws that will never be patched because the carriers don’t care.

Maybe he like iMessage and just wants to see it improved. Maybe a redo is neccessy, lots of changes since it first was released. Why bring up MS and Android? No better answer?

 

[Roadstar]

This character/alphabet/word from my mother tongue is very very rarely used in a general conversation. Its is both hard to pronounce and also write . I am very surprised to actually somebody using this particular alphabet and found it to break the code. It must be someone who know the code

Or more likely just someone who was running a fuzzing tool, noticed it caused a crash on particular input and narrowed down the problematic part based on the tool's logs.

 

[MacAddict1978]

It's not just Messages, it's an OS-level problem. Tweetbot also crashes if a tweet containing that "character" appears in the timeline.

All I know is I am glad the days of paying per text are over because I sure sent a lot of Telugu texts the other day from my Android.

Still not sure why my friends aren't writing back yet....

 

[Apple Bite]

anyone interested on buying a trending shirt?