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Text Exploit Crashes OS X 10.8 and iOS 6 Apps
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People have been trolling IRC spamming it in Mac/iOS channels all day, work around is to change your encode to Western (ASCII) or the like.
It is the line of Arabic text in this tweet here. The tweet page did not crash my Safari, but when I copied and pasted that line into the browser, as a text entry into MacRumors, Safari crashed on me. It is the entry of this Arabic line into the text field of your Mac web browser that will cause it to crash. You can copy/paste and try it yourself to replicate the bug if you wish. Proceed with caution. It is the arabic line in the tweet here:
https://twitter.com/daken_/status/303784082599456768
Edit: I pasted the line here and it crashed Safari in the MacRumors post. Post was made from FireFox. Line has been taken off. It WILL crash Safari if it is posted on a webpage.
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You can view the line fine, but try copying and pasting that line into a text field in your web browser, or the address pane. Your web browser will crash and quit if you are in Safari on a Mac. That goes for any version of OS X except for the latest build of Mavericks where it is fixed.
https://twitter.com/daken_/status/303784082599456768
Edit: I pasted the line here and it crashed Safari in the MacRumors post. Post was made from FireFox. Line has been taken off. It WILL crash Safari if it is posted on a webpage.
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You can view the line fine, but try copying and pasting that line into a text field in your web browser, or the address pane. Your web browser will crash and quit if you are in Safari on a Mac. That goes for any version of OS X except for the latest build of Mavericks where it is fixed.
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I can see this being on Samsung or Microsoft's website, "Your Mac crashing more Frequently? Buy a windows 8 tablet!"
As far as I'm aware, it only affects 10.8 (my 10.6 machine doesn't crash). Have you seen it happen with an earlier release?
This apparently worked for the dreaded File:/// bug a few months a back, it is worth trying.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20130204131658853
Particularly the sending 50+ messages to push it into the archive, then wipe the history manually.
If you want to reopen the iMessage just let the iMessage crash and quit.
Then if you have iMessage in the dock just do right click and choose "New Message". From there just remove the conversation thread that contains the message. Please don't open the thread, the program will crash if you do so. Just removed (if you hover it a little X appears).
Apparently Apple has fixed the problem...the string is no longer crashing my Safari or Messages app any longer...I have pasted the string into both programs and nothing is crashing.
It appears the webkit fix was done on their end.
It appears the webkit fix was done on their end.
I can't explain that; a client-side rendering issue can't be fixed without a software update (and it still crashes for me on 10.8.4).
Test link - Do not click unless you can risk a crash
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You're right. Sorry...it still crashes. Same arabic text line is making it crash. Running 10.8.4 and Safari, it crashes. On Firefox, it does not crash.
And only folks that type in Arabic, talk to folks that type in Arabic or try to make their stuff by testing this
How many folks is that? In the grand scheme probably not that many. Plus what is the phrase and the likelihood someone would type it
It's gibberish. I'm guessing that it was specially crafted by researching how the text engine works.
So basically no one in real use is likely to type it. Making all this 'oh my gawd, Apple has known about this for twenty years and never fixed it' FUD just that.
The likelihood that someone will accidentally enter this isn't the concern, it's that it could be used as a denial-of-service attack (someone posts this on a site/forum/as a message) and it'll keep crashing users with a certain OS.
Out of curiosity though, does this issue occur if you type those characters? I'd have no idea how to generate them
The text was published on Slashdot in Unicode format. It is a strange mixture of arabic characters, followed by special characters that join other characters together. I suppose 90% of the people on MacRumors wouldn't be able to figure out how to enter this into a text editor. Absolutely nobody would ever in a million years type this text.
I would think access to the source code, analysing the code, finding a bug, and figuring out how to turn that bug into a crash. I _have_ seen code where an experienced developer sees with one look that the code is dodgy - good code has obviously no problems, bad code has no obvious problems. And once you find that, it's easy to find a way to crash the code.
Yes, there have been a few less than mature posters spamming that text in threads, including thread titles. That would affect viewing New Posts, Forum Spy, and the forums where the text has been posted. Mods will take care of it, I'm sure.I think this text was entered into the iOS section of the forums. My phone crashes every time I go there.
I think this text was entered into the iOS section of the forums. My phone crashes every time I go there.
And, of course, Safari in OS X (and probably, any other CoreText app that tries to render the string). Good thing I have Firefox for such emergencies. I'm sure MR will take care of this before it really gets out of hand.
I had this problem earlier this evening when I went to the MacRumors forum home page. Safari 6.0.5 crashed on my Mac running 10.8.4. I assumed somebody had put the "killer text" into a thread title.
It was a pain to get Safari to run again because it wanted to re-open the MacRumors tab each time it started (I may have missed some preference option, but it normally doesn't re-open a closed tab for me). I tried opening a local file instead with Safari, but the MacRumors tab still opened and crashed Safari even though it was not on top.
Finally I opened a local file and did a quick cmd-w cmd-w to close the tabs and then I was OK. I hope the site mgmt is doing something to filter this out. And I hope Apple addresses this with a software update or I'm sure we will see a lot more of this on the net.
It was a pain to get Safari to run again because it wanted to re-open the MacRumors tab each time it started (I may have missed some preference option, but it normally doesn't re-open a closed tab for me). I tried opening a local file instead with Safari, but the MacRumors tab still opened and crashed Safari even though it was not on top.
Finally I opened a local file and did a quick cmd-w cmd-w to close the tabs and then I was OK. I hope the site mgmt is doing something to filter this out. And I hope Apple addresses this with a software update or I'm sure we will see a lot more of this on the net.
We are. Every instance we find, we clear it out of the forum and have taken some measures to attempt to prevent it from being posted, but it's not all inclusive.
If you happen to run across another one, you can use Firefox to report (
