LOL, it works .......hahaha.........the brain power that had to notice this. Ok, it happened because kids at school using iPhones while in class!
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PSA: There's a New Character Bug That Can Cause iPhones to Crash
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For people asking who finds these things...
There was a guy about 5-10 years ago who used to find them regularly. He was a limo driver and he said he just had a lot of spare time while waiting around with passengers, so would try and do crazy/silly things with his phone to see what happened. I think he realised there were certain patterns where glitches tended to be found. Search fields are a good candidate for messing around.
Nowadays people also do these things because of Apple's bug bounties. Some bugs might let people break Apple's security (e.g. bypass the login screen), although the really valuable ones are those that let outsiders run arbitrary code. However, as that kid found out a few years ago when he reported the bug with FaceTime that let people view/listen to the recipient before they answered, Apple don't tend to pay out unless you're an actual progressional working in the field. (I believe Apple did pay him, though, after places like MacRumors reported on it.)
There was a guy about 5-10 years ago who used to find them regularly. He was a limo driver and he said he just had a lot of spare time while waiting around with passengers, so would try and do crazy/silly things with his phone to see what happened. I think he realised there were certain patterns where glitches tended to be found. Search fields are a good candidate for messing around.
Nowadays people also do these things because of Apple's bug bounties. Some bugs might let people break Apple's security (e.g. bypass the login screen), although the really valuable ones are those that let outsiders run arbitrary code. However, as that kid found out a few years ago when he reported the bug with FaceTime that let people view/listen to the recipient before they answered, Apple don't tend to pay out unless you're an actual progressional working in the field. (I believe Apple did pay him, though, after places like MacRumors reported on it.)
No one else can afford to live in the Bay Area and Apple doesn’t want to do remote work… so prob the only ones that can are Stanford students whose parents foot the bill. Gotta love interns.
You're typing it wrong.
Or maybe I am, because I can't duplicate it. No crash for me. iOS 18 22A5346a
And that's SO stupid. Apple has been fully equipped to handle remote software development work since the early '90s. I know a guy who did it back then.
I had plenty of fun in the "early days" of the internet and Microsoft Active Pages, their first foray into web applications using an interpreted scripting languagege. Those websites would have a page called "global.asax" that would contain all manner of code, including code that runs on application startup. Rather embarrassingly, Microsoft overlooked the fact that you could simply append something like "$data" to the web page and it would just show the code contents of that page in a browser instead of running it.
Looks like a backdoor. I can't imagine, how all those character-"bugs" can occur with no intention behind it. BTW, I myself earned my living by developing software for more than 25 years.
I think it's a feature. It's the OS telling the user, "Don't be stupid. Come back when you plan to type something meaningful."
=)
On another note: I was able to get Settings to crash, but not Apps. My iPhone 12 Pro is running 17.6.1 (21G101)
One note: It's not just that one string "":: that does it.
It's any pattern that matches:
But this does crash:
Editing a string that doesn't match to cause it to match it causes instant crash. So if you add a space between " and :, then go back and delete the space, it crashes.
It's any pattern that matches:
- An opening quotation mark at the beginning of the search box.
- A closing quotation mark. Anything can be between the two quotation marks, other than another quotation mark.
- A colon immediate after the second quotation mark (no space in between)
- Any character other than a space, although there can be any number of spaces between the colon and the next character.
But this does crash:
Editing a string that doesn't match to cause it to match it causes instant crash. So if you add a space between " and :, then go back and delete the space, it crashes.
I tried it… and it didn't work! And it didn't work on an older iPad, either. But it did work on my iPhone 13 Mini running iOS 17.6.1, as expected.Let me try it on Sonoma
Because those are “smart quotes”, or curly quotes, as used by typographers and automatically added in place of vertical ones by modern operating systems and word processors. You have to purposefully do a long press on the quotation mark key and pick the vertical ones (U+0222, or ").
If there is an upcoming iOS update to fix that bug, I wonder if Tim Cook, being the clueless bean counter that he is, will allow use of the same version number 17.6.1 for a third time in a row.