Typing These 8 Characters Will Crash Almost Any App On Your Mountain Lion Mac

An anonymous reader writes "All software has bugs, but this one is a particularly odd one. If you type "File:///" (no quotes) into almost any app on your Mac, it will crash. The discovery was made recently and a bug report was posted to Open Radar. First off, it’s worth noting that the bug only appears to be present in OS X Mountain Lion and is not reproducible in Lion or Snow Leopard. That’s not exactly good news given that this is the latest release of Apple’s operating system, which an increasing number of Mac users are switching to. ... A closer look shows the bug is inside Data Detectors, a feature that lets apps recognize dates, locations, and contact data, making it easy for you to save this information in your address book and calendar."

Re:Little light on specifics....

[Kenja]

Ah, did manage to replicate it. Despite what the long article says, it does seem to be case sensitive. Very odd bug. The truly worrisome thing is that this would seem to indicate that even the most basic of text editors is capable of running scripts from plain text (as opposed to apple script). Not sure what the ramifications of that are, but it seems like a potential vector for malware.