2015-05-29
[public] 1.65M views, 49.7K likes, 366 dislikes audio only
http://tomscott.com - http://twitter.com/tomscott - There are all sorts of theories about why a string of weird, mostly-Arabic text can crash your iPhone. I've hunted through them, summarised the ones that seemed plausible, and the first part of this is a run-down of what's going on. The second part: well, I'm going to take a punt at explaining why Arabic, in particular, causes this bug -- and hopefully we'll see if I'm right or wrong soon!
The Snopes article in question: http://m.snopes.com/2015/05/27/iphone-effective-power-imessage-glitch/
The Register has an article about exactly what instruction misfires, but without knowing *why* that bit of code's being called, it's not all that useful: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/text_message_unicode_ios_osx_vulnerability/
And lastly, here's how to fix your phone if you've been hit by it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204897