Apple OS X and iOS crashed by 5 Characters

[Gary]

here has been much sniggering into sleeves after wags found they could upset iOS 6 iPhones and iPads, and Macs running OS X 10.8, by sending a simple rogue text message or email.

A bug is triggered when the CoreText component in the vulnerable Apple operating systems tries to render on screen a particular sequence of Unicode characters: the kernel reacts by killing the running program, be it your web browser, message client, Twitter app or whatever tried to use CoreText to display the naughty string.

Much hilarity ensued as people tweeted the special characters, posted them in web article comments or texted them, and rejoiced in the howls of fanbois' frustration. (Facebook had to block the string from being submitted as a status update.)

I think this may be fixed in 10.8.5, definitely in 10.9 and also fixed in iOS 7 guess there may be  a patch for iOS6 but since 7 is so close who knows.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/04/unicode_of_death_crash/

[Simon]

Funnily (or not) enough, I wondered why Safari crashed on me the other day.  Perhaps that was it? 

[Technical Ben]

Always sanitize your inputs...



... oh, wait, it's not a passing of text to a different part of the system/OS/program? It's an actual rendering error? Wow, what does it do, try to kernel too many letters/numbers over each other and hit a divide by zero? 

Ah, the crash is a sanity check error apparently, while the bug which sends the bad input is just your ordinary oversight/error in programing I guess.