"Unicode of Death"

[Shervin Afshar]

>
> 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.
>

We should be thankful to those folks "waaay too much time on their hands"
to discover these for us all.

Although most people seem to identify it correctly as a CoreText bug,


Any good technical write up about this?


↪ Shervin

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 7:53 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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