Apple Updates All of Its Operating Systems To Fix App-crashing Bug (engadget.com) 70
It took a few days, but Apple already has a fix out for a bug that caused crashes on each of its platforms. From a report: The company pushed new versions of iOS, macOS and watchOS to fix the issue, which was caused when someone pasted in or received a single Indian-language character in select communications apps -- most notably in iMessages, Safari and the app store. Using a specific character in the Telugu language native to India was enough to crash a variety of chat apps, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Gmail and Outlook, though Telegram and Skype were seemingly immune.
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It really is time to replace Unicode with something more robust. These errors due to things like combinational characters and tricks like using the text flow control characters to mask file extensions keep coming up.
Programmers aren't language experts, there are no good libraries for handling Unicode, can't even agree on one sane encoding for it... And it's so bad that it's avoided in east Asia for the most part, or just some incompatible subset is used.
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PS. I'm thinking of starting work on this, but can't think of a good name. Any suggestions?
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I'm thinking of starting work on this, but can't think of a good name.
How about NIHcode.
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Bravo. I googled and no-one else is using that.
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Unicode has nothing to do with the encoding used. Just use UCS-4/UTF-32 if you don't like encoding.
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Well, maybe hand in your English comprehension/troll/geek card instead, I am not sure which one you may have.
What Does / Mean Between Words?
To Indicate Or
Often, when a slash is used in a formal or informal text, it is meant to indicate the word or. The examples below illustrate this meaning of the forward slash:
When leaving the classroom, the teacher noticed that a student had left his/her backpack.
College freshmen should bring a mattress and/or cot to sleep on during orientation.
If/when Mary ever shows up, we can all head out to the party together.
Burgers or pizza for dinner? Yeah, either/or is fine with me.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog... [grammarly.com]
Now guess what & between words mean to redeem yourself.
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"UTF" stands for "Unicode Transformation Format".
Unfortunately just using UTF-32 won't really help fix Unicode because a lot of the problems are unrelated to it. The Unicode Consortium's dislike of UTF-32 is actually quite telling.
For example, they say that there isn't much advantage to fixed size code point encodings because with UTF16 and UTF8 you can still work backwards by simply examining 2-3 previous bytes... But what does 95% of software do? Convert UTF8 to UTF16 internally and then assume 2 bytes =
Re:The Source Code (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is, text is hard. The rules for text make no sense. Western text is easy - we're used to it, and have a generally controllable amount of characters. We can choose to encode it as individual letters (so accented characters are stored as individual characters) because there are a limited number of them.
But other cultures, not so much. Arabic can be hard and most are decorations that affect a base character. Plus, character pairings don't make sense - adding a character can make the entire word being displayed shorter and more compact than without that character (instead of longer).
It's bad enough that people keep wondering when /. will support Unicode. Internally, it already does, and has for over a decade (and probably since the turn of the millennium). Problem was, people realized the potential for chaos and trolls spent absurd amounts of time crafting Unicode text bombs that would cause the comment section to be displayed incorrectly or overwritten by characters that were thousands of pixels tall and unreadable. In the end it got so bad the only solution was a approved character whitelist - the only accepted characters for comments were on a whitelist, and basically was what you could represent n ASCII. Eventually they added a display filter that killed the crap comments in affected articles as well so the archives were usable.
Unicode is composed of codepoints. A character may be composed of one or more codepoints. Trolls have managed to generate characters that are composed of thousands of codepoints (imagine using 10kB of data which represents one character - how will you program that?).
Of course, I suppose it disappoints lots of people who were hoping to embed the character everywhere to crash iOS devices...
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All of these problems are because Unicode to highly inconsistent and seemingly designed to cause these kinds of bugs and denial-of-service attacks.
Unicode should have focused just on encoding characters. No modifier characters - Unicode uses them inconsistently in some scripts but not others - which would fix the need for an impossibly complex set of crash-proofing, anti-trolling and grammar rules.
On screen layout, font selection, text flow direction and the like should have been provided by supplemental li
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On screen layout, font selection, text flow direction and the like should have been provided by supplemental libraries that understand languages.
Then it's still part of unicode, you just make some parts undisplayable despite the software "supporting unicode".
I'm thinking about something like this.
Say you have a range dedicated to Japanese, 0x00010000 to 0x000FFFF. In your font description metadata you can have all the glyph mapping information. Your word processor software will know about bidirectional text and Japanese grammar.
You might have an official table that states that characters in that range are all Japanese language. They are typically rendered left to right, or alternatively top to bottom. It's up to the software to do what it will with that informa
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The problem is, as usual, other cultures. What is inconsistent to us may be completely consistent to them - "Th
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No, US English western is simple and we're used to it. Software has its fair share of problems with non English but western Latin based text as well.
Consider just one example: the IJ digraph in Dutch, It has 2 unicode forms, one for upper case and one for lower case. Yet spellcheckers will often be confused by this and not understand if you use them in a word. Office also has classic issues with this in that it converts them to the separate characters I and J. If you then proceed to write something in Word
Re: The Source Code (Score:2)
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Could you be more specific? Except for the reverse file name problem, which is unique to windows, you made no point. ... and an asian automatically uses unicode on his android or iOS device, what else would he? Same for Window, Linux, Macs, switch the language to Thai or Japanese and you have everything in Unicode, heck plain english is unicode, too.
All modern languages and OSes have unicode built in. All is working fine
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It has to be posted
https://xkcd.com/927/
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HTML entities on /. (Score:2)
Some AC offered:
Wish granted. [mothereff.in]
The problem is that /. forbids the display of both certain Unicode characters and their HTML-entity counterparts. So, although that's a handy tool for other purposes, it doesn't solve the Slashdot-character-display-is-purposefully-borked problem.
Next ... ?
Thanks Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
I applaud your swift response patching this issue. Downloading the update now, since I don't have an Android and actually get updates for my 3+ year old phone.
More Endians (Score:5, Funny)
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Designated crashing streets!
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Designated crashing streets!
Actually, this should be a very sobering incident for all of us. We pride ourselves in thinking that we can create robust uncrashable programs . . . and then . . . one wacky Indian character . . . oops!
It's a good thing that the application that crashed wasn't driving an autonomous car!
This should be a wake-up call for Google, Über, Tesla and the rest of the autonomous car folks . . . their software is probably going to be massively complex. And impossible to thoroughly test. They had better assum
There already were Three Little Endians (Score:2)
Even back in the day of the mini- and first micro-computers there already were "Three Little Endians".
The third was DEC Endian, on the PDP-11 (at least initially - I don't recall if it propagated to other things like the VAX).
Due to the 16-bit word size and a byetwise addressing mode that treated the lower byte as zero LSB address (for byte-wise iteration of bignum arithmetic), peripheral I/O operations loaded the record with the even and odd bytes swapped. (ABCDEFGH -> BADCFEHG)
Form Over Function? (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I've noticed change at Apple over that period of time is that, since the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a slow but steady decline in quality and reliability from Apple products. That's not to say that they were immune before he left us, just that there appears, subjectively, to be deterioration in QA over at Apple.
I write this not as an Apple Fanboi nor an Apple Basher: my current iPad (Pro, 10") is probably the most-used piece of technology I've ever owned, but on the other hand last weekend saw me swearing in disbelief at my Mac Mini : having gone to it to update my iPhone and iPad software, I discovered that, somehow, iTunes had decided to unilaterally "lose" the artwork for about 20-25% of my music collection. Of 900 albums. I've already spent a good 90 minutes trying to repair that damage and have a *long* way to go yet...
My experience to date has been that when I made my first Apple purchase, the company had a reputation for high prices but excellent quality. Today, the high prices remain but the quality appears to be disappearing rapidly. Issues with iTunes Artwork, iCloud replication, corruption of the iOS Address Book, a Mac Mini update that bricked the machine, iTunes that can't cope with it's media database on a network-connected drive; the list goes on - and that's just since Christmas 2017...
Apple really needs to get back to basics. If it can't sell reliable product, then no matter how shiny it is, people won't buy.
Re:Form Over Function? (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I've noticed change at Apple over that period of time is that, since the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a slow but steady decline in quality and reliability from Apple products. That's not to say that they were immune before he left us, just that there appears, subjectively, to be deterioration in QA over at Apple.
That's what the next OS release is supposed to be about, stability rather than new features. That said, you are not the only one who'd prefer them to decrease the interval between 'stability releases'. As for iTunes, it sucks, it has always sucked and god knows if they'll ever fix it but it does not suck even half as much as iBooks. You spend a large amount of time organising the PDFs you added, every other update seems to mess them up and there is no easy way to export the library.
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Add to the list the slow rendering of PDFs in Preview.app in the last Mac OS. It is truly puzzling: Preview.app worked just fine for the last ten years, there was nothing to change, it was a great program. Yet somehow they made it render PDFs slower so it is now unusable for displaying presentations. I have to find something else for my teaching. It's like Apple wants to lose me as a customer.
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But here's the odd thing, right...
I keep my music library on a QNAP NAS box - which is also available to my Windows PC[s] and my Linux Mint workstation. I always buy my audio on CD and import to iTunes using Apple Lossless, which means that I can play the music back using Rhythmbox.
Apart from the fact that iTunes can make a pretty awful mess of the way that it lays out files from "compilation" CDs [ARGH!], I have ZERO problem playing any of the content using Rhythmbox. I've never
Thanks but (Score:1)
Thanks, but (Score:2, Insightful)
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Holy shit, they introduced another 72 bugs in the time it took you to double-post the same comment?
Big List of Naughty Strings (Score:2)
Sounds like it's time for Apple to start using the Big List of Naughty Strings (https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings).
It's pretty new, what with it's first commit only being in 2015 (although the idea of it's been around a lot longer).
Cut & Paste (Score:2)
Cut & Paste, All your base are belong to us.
Apple did not update all their supported OSes (Score:2)
There was no patch released for El Capitan, nor one for Sierra to the best of my knowledge. Both are still maintained by Apple.
I expect those patches will come later, as did the Meltdown and Spectre fixes.
It’s too bad Apple is such a small shop... they should consider hiring a couple extra folks so they can keep on top of all their supported products. I certainly wouldn’t want something trivial, like development a security patch, to adversely impact the release schedule of the Animoji team.
UTF-8 motherf**kers! (Score:1)
Not good enough - need for older OSs too. (Score:3)
This is not good enough. Apple needs to issue updates for all the older affected OSs too. Not all hardware can run the new OSs. Not everyone wants the new OSs. Not all legacy software works with the old OSs. The result is there are a lot of older devices out there that need continued legacy support. The cost of fixing the older OSs is trivial. Apple should do it.
What about older mac OSes? (Score:2)
Like Sierra v10.12.6 and El Capitan v10.11.6?