Super-Weird Bugs in messages are nothing new, but the latter is a real head scratch: if you try to send an audio message with the “Dave and Bust” sentence, it will not work. Why would this specific phrasing cause a problem? A coding expert fell for the case. I will not say “and reason will shock you”, but if you are like me, you will find it interesting.
First of all, allow me to explain what is happening when the bug is triggered. At first, the audio message (“I'm going to have lunch at Dave and Bust”, for example) seems to be sending normally. It appears in the post -recipient messages, as well as a transcription of the content. No problem is reported.
It is at the end of the recipient that we locate the problem. Initially, the recipient sees the icon of ellipsia, indicating that something is typed or sent … but it continues, and continues and ends up disappearing. And at this stage, there is no indication that anything was sent at all: no message, no message transcript, no notification of failure of the message. In fact, if the recipient did not have the opening of the application or had opened it but was in a different conversation thread, he would never have known that something was supposed to be on the way.
This bug is new to me, and the first time I heard about it was when it was discussed on Monday in the blog managed by Guilherme Rambo, an expert in coding and engineering. Rambo, in turn, heard of the bug on the podcast of the search engine, which devoted its episode of May 9 to the subject.
Rambo reproduced the bug, guessed that the problem must be at the end of the recipient, then connected this device to its Mac and started watching newspapers. And from this moment, he does not seem to have taken time to determine what was going on: the iOS transcription engine recognized the name of the American restaurant chain, the transforming for the good business brand (“Dave & Buster's”, with a very important ampersand), then passing that In the XHTML code used to send a transcription with the audio message. The problem is not caused by Dave and Buster words, but by the ampères and between them, which has a special objective in the coding and prevents the code from being properly analyzed.
David Price / Foundry
As you can see in the image at the top of this story, an audio iMessage sent successfully, ending with the expression “Dave & Buster” appears as sent but never appears on the recipient's phone. After a while, the audio message disappeared from the sender's phone, and the recipient completely ignored that the message had never been sent.
In this spirit, it is a brief jump to recognize that other brands could cause the same problem – they have simply not been spotted to do so so far. Rambo notes that “M & MS” will do the same. For owners of British iPhone, in fact, “Dave and Buster” doesn't Trigger the bug because this chain is obviously not well known here and does not obtain its amps and added by Autocorrect.
To reproduce the problem, I had to ask a friend to send me a message on the M&S supermarket chain. Indeed, this caused suspended ellipsy followed by an insensitive message. At the time of writing the editorial's moment, it seems almost certain that any iOS sentence would recognize as containing an ampon and would cause an audio message, and when I would put it like that, it is surprising that the bug was not more widely reported.
Karen Haslam / Foundry
On the positive side, one could imagine that it is a bug that should be easy to correct in an iOS update. The transcription functionality in messages must simply be informed of “escaping” special characters so that they do not spoil the analysis process. And as Rambo notes, it is not a bug with security vulnerabilities; Indeed, this shows that Apple's blastdoor mechanism is working properly.
“Many bad analyzers would probably accept the incorrectly formatted XHTML,” he writes, “but this type of leniency when the analysis of data formats is often what ends up causing security problems. By being a pedantic on formatting, Blastdoor protects the recipient from an exploitation which would abuse this type of problem. ”
