"Unicode of Death"

[Tim Greenwood]

Must be that same evil Unicode consortium that is destroying civilization
by inventing emoji. The Guardian article has been edited since yesterday,
when it did actually claim that Unicode invented all emoji.
http://gu.com/p/4997q

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 11:04 AM Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Unicode is in the news today as some folks with waaay too much time on
> their hands have discovered a string consisting of Latin, Arabic,
> Devanagari, and CJK characters that crashes Apple devices when it
> appears as a pop-up message.
>
> Although most people seem to identify it correctly as a CoreText bug,
> there are a handful, as you might expect, who attribute it to some shady
> weirdness in Unicode itself. My favorite quote from a Reddit user was
> this:
>
> "Every character you use has a unicode value which tells your phone what
> to display. One of the unicode values is actually never-ending and so
> when the phone tries to read it it goes into an infinite loop which
> crashes it."
>
> I've read TUS Chapter 4 and UTR #23 and I still can't find the
> "never-ending" Unicode property.
>
> Perhaps astonishingly to some, the string displays fine on all my
> Windows devices. Not all apps get the directionality right, but no
> crashes.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO ����
>
>
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