Be careful with text messages: Technicians are warning iPhone users that typing certain characters into their devices can inevitably cause them to crash.
“Proceed at your own risk,” warned Constantine, the Mastodon researcher who discovered the bug. An ominous public service announcement.
A self-proclaimed “hacker” and “web security” researcher has discovered that typing two quotation marks and two colons (“::”) into the search bar of the Settings app causes Springboard, Apple’s mobile user interface, to function perfectly. TechCrunch reported.
The digital wizards PCMag tried it outThe screen went black and the iPhone’s loading screen appeared for a few seconds before rebooting to the locked home screen.
According to experts’ investigations, the crash also occurs when a user swipes all the way to the right on the home screen and types these letters into the search bar in the App Library.
You can think of it as something like a contingent version of the digital safewords used to deprogram murderous AI in dystopian horror movies.
In fact, experts have discovered that simply typing the sequence followed by any other letter is enough to trigger the Apliocalypse.
The good news is that this literal code blackhole doesn’t appear to be a “security bug,” says Ryan Stoltz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the flaw.
This killer hack is just the latest in a long line of digital dialogue fiction that has continued over the years.
Other examples include strings of symbols and Arabic letters that caused crashes in 2015, and Indian Telugu syllables that caused apps to freeze and shut down in 2018.
The latter bug affected most messaging apps, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Gmail, Outlook for iOS, and Facebook Messenger.
As recently as 2020, a crash could occur when a user typed a series of characters written in Sindhi combined with an emoji of the Italian flag.
