People are trolling iPhone users with the ‘killer symbol’ that crashes their apps

Surprise! Assorted jerks on the internet have weaponized the Unicode-based bug we reported yesterday to insta-crash apps running on an iPhone or a Mac. The result is somewhere between the old Alt + F4 trick and a script kiddie stunt, and it ranges from being annoying to rendering a device unusable, depending on the tenacity of the troll.

The bug causes many iOS and Mac apps to crash when rendering two characters in Telugu, a south Indian language. While anyone can avoid viewing the symbols themselves, problems arise when someone ill-intentioned starts spamming out the symbols or sending them directly to devices where they will be received as a notification.

Droves of Twitter users have taken to tweeting the symbols out over the last day with messages like “read this to log off instantly” and “retweet this to crash anyone using an Apple device,” though luckily most of them don’t have many followers. Still, if the symbol shows up in your @ replies or in the handle of someone who likes one of your tweets, then it’s game over for whatever app you have open (Motherboard writer Joseph Cox learned this the hard way). From what we’ve observed, the only way to get an app working again is to reinstall it from scratch — a time-consuming process, especially if a troll just crashes it all over again.

As captured on Twitter, one security researcher added one of the symbols to his Uber handle as an experiment. “I suspect a crashed phone means you get routed to the next driver… who gets crashed too. Like an Uber routing worm,” he wrote. We reached out to Uber to see if they’re aware of the issue and will update when we hear back.

For now, most of the trolling seems to be on Twitter. A search on both Facebook and Reddit yielded conspicuously few signs of Telugu trolling, so it appears that those platforms may have taken steps to limit the fallout from the iPhone-killing Unicode symbols.

Meanwhile, a thorough blog post by Mozilla engineer Manish Goregaokar suggests that the scope of the Unicode bug could be broader than the two symbols we know. “… From some experimentation, this bug seemed to occur for any pair of Telugu consonants with a vowel, as long as the vowel is not ై (ai),” he wrote. His findings so far:

So, ultimately, the full set of cases that cause the crash are:

Any sequence <consonant1, virama, consonant2, ZWNJ, vowel> in Devanagari, Bengali, and Telugu, where:

consonant2 is suffix-joining – i.e. र, র, য, and all Telugu consonants
If consonant2 is र or র, consonant1 is not the same letter (or a variant, like ৰ)
vowel is not ై or ৌ

TechCrunch has reached out to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to see how those platforms are handling the bug, which is particularly destructive when blasted out on an open social network. We’ve also been in touch with Apple and they’ve confirmed that there is a “dot update” fix coming soon, though declined to confirm if it would be iOS 11.2.6. Apple noted that the bug is fixed in current betas of iOS, tvOS, macOS and watchOS.

Comments

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

job

http://TheWeeklyJob.com/?id=147500

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Facebook ‘Class Action’ Privacy Lawsuit Moves To Austrian Supreme Court

A privacy lawsuit filed against Facebook last year by Viennese lawyer and data privacy activist Max Schrems has moved up to Austria’s Supreme Court which will rule on whether the suit can be treated as a class action. When Schrems kicked off the suit, back in July 2014, he invited adult non-commercial Facebook users located anywhere outside the U.S. and Canada to join the suit for free — and tens of thousands of people quickly took up the invitation. The legal action focuses on multiple areas where the plaintiffs argue Facebook has been violating EU data protection laws, such as the absence of effective consent to many types of data use; the tracking of Internet users through external websites; and the monitoring and analysis of users via big data systems. Facebook’s participation in the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program is also part of the complaint. In July the case suffered a setback when an Austrian regional co...

Best Web Design Company in Pondicherry

#Technology has two faces. We all feel it, but sometimes can’t find words to describe it. #Ebooks are the best example to show the 0-1 nature of emotions the #technology evokes. #itwhere provide a #Best #solutions to #Growyourbusiness feel free to drop a #Mail info@itwheretech.co.in www.itwheretech.co.in

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog