Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Should have been patched within 8-12 hours. Anything more is unacceptable.

Turn off message previews and banners in notifications and, for the time being, the problem is solved. Without knowing everything involved with regard to the problem, or what a proper fix would entail, we simply cannot assume a proper time frame for a fix to be released. Saying someone "should have done such and such" without knowing all of the information is nothing more than a ill-conceived judgement call.
 
No, no it doesn't. Criminal charges for what, exactly? It's not hacking by any means. It's a prank. A) pranks rarely get prosecuted unless there's physical or financial harm in the matter. B) what statute would it fall under anyway C) more likely it'd be a civil suit if anything was pressed and I doubt any jury would care about a prank.

There is for example the "Computer Misuse Act" from 1990, which criminalises "unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, operation of computer etc.". Now tell me how sending a message that you know will crash an iPhone in a way that is hard to recover from isn't an "unauthorised act with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, the operation of a computer".

"Prank" and "hacking" are orthogonal concepts, so saying "it's not hacking, it's a prank" is nonsense. "Pranks" that involve the Computer Misuse Act are not something you should get yourself involved in.

hahahahah the no-fun police are here to try and tell you about the serious criminal charges this can incur. this is shortly after the "smoking just two marijuanas will turn you gay" seminar.

The difference is that this _is_ a criminal act, whereas smoking marijuana doesn't actually turn you gay, and most people wouldn't care if it does. But the next time you come up with a strawman argument, think of something more clever.
 
Last edited:
I'm amazed Apple hasn't pushed an emergency patch for this. What the hell are they doing?

It's about 5pm here Cupertino time, I thought by now there would be something out to address this issue. I guess they don't think this has the same urgency as the 8.0.1 that killed people's cell service.
 
I changed all the settings shown in this thread and none of them worked. What did finally work was even simpler. Turn off iMessage and then have Siri send you a message. Worked fine after that. I had banners on and preview on and that still worked.

I sent this to my daughter to test it and it also prevented my message app from opening after I sent it to her from my iPhone. So I had two phones to fix. Same fix worked in both.
 
Keep an eye out for an iOS 8.3.1 update to fix this problem probably by Friday at latest. Meanwhile, go into Settings, Notifications and Messages and turn off showing Notifications on the Lock Screen.
 
If you have a mac/iMac and have it set up to send and recieve messages, you can respond from your mac to person who sent the message. You can then go to your iphone and delete the bad text.
 
Short version

Mine will break with just the first (or, the last, I suppose, as it's written right-to-left) six characters of the first line, the character on the second line and a line break at the end, BTW :)

Does unicode show up correctly in the forum? (Should be safe as this won't appear in people's notification center;)

رً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ
 
I sent this message to my friends (now my own messages crashed)

dears, any solution for me as i sent this message to my friends and now i am not able to open my own messages
 
I changed all the settings shown in this thread and none of them worked. What did finally work was even simpler. Turn off iMessage and then have Siri send you a message. Worked fine after that. I had banners on and preview on and that still worked.

I sent this to my daughter to test it and it also prevented my message app from opening after I sent it to her from my iPhone. So I had two phones to fix. Same fix worked in both.

buddy i did the same but isnt working, i turned off my iMessage and sent a message to my own number but still when i am clicking on messages it doesnt work :(:confused::(
 
Solution (not a good one) deletes all the messages

change date of your Iphone to 2 months ahead of the day you received the message, then go to settings and message then select keep messages 30 days, it will remove all your messages

you will be able to open back your message app, but with no data
 
Ah and people say bugs are not always entertaining.
Most fun I had all morning crashing my friends phones. :D
 
Last edited:
couple more serious unicode issues

We've been playing around a bit and found a couple more issues.

Firstly if the string رً ॣ ॣ ॣ is saved as a contact name and the contact card is sent via whatsapp to an iphone user it seems to completely disable whatsapp. I'm sure sending the card in other ways would also cause problems. Sending a repeat whatsapp message doesn't seem to fix this. Sending it over SMS could cause even more issues but not tested yet.

Second was mentioned before. If رً ॣ ॣ ॣ is made to be the name of a wifi hotspot then all iOS devices nearby searching for wifi networks in settings will have the settings app crash back to the home screen. This can be seen working here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUBSK9QoNck
 
I read that Macs can be affected too... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/28/iphone-text-message-bug-crash-apple-watch-ipad-mac

“As the issue also affects OS X applications, a malicious party could set the triggering text as a server message of the day or welcome message, causing a user’s terminal to crash when authenticating to network services,”

Even if Apple releases update for OSX to fix this bizarre bug, I guess only 10.10 will receive the update. Is there a way to prevent the bug on prvious OS' by manually reconfiguring system settings?
 
I read that Macs can be affected too... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/28/iphone-text-message-bug-crash-apple-watch-ipad-mac



Even if Apple releases update for OSX to fix this bizarre bug, I guess only 10.10 will receive the update. Is there a way to prevent the bug on prvious OS' by manually reconfiguring system settings?

Not really preventative method for everything as it appears to be a CoreText bug that affects iOS, OS X and Watch OS in various apps. It'll need an update to all of these OSs to correct the CoreText problem.
 
Not really preventative method for everything as it appears to be a CoreText bug that affects iOS, OS X and Watch OS in various apps. It'll need an update to all of these OSs to correct the CoreText problem.

Well, if that's the case, I really should update my macs to Yosemite...
 
Looks like the morons in my class found out about this here bug. Idiots are trying it out. I hope they learn their lessons LOL
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.