Tag Archives: Unicode of Death

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What Can Siri Help You With Today?

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This post is about cool things you can do with Siri, and some you might wish it didn’t do. Stick with me to the end of this post, and I’ll even share with you a funny video of what Siri “really” looks like…

“Siri, please save my iPhone from the messages of death”

This somewhat melodramatic title was posted on TheRegister and reports incoming messages that trigger a bug in the iOS, inducing applications to crash…

The solution?

Apple suggests Siri as a temporary fix (full instructions here). One of the options includes asking Siri to “reply to the malicious message”. That’s right – if you’re being picked on by a big bad hacker who is sending you “messages of death”, get big sister Siri to reply with a digital tongue-lashing – sweet!

“Siri, please turn on the light, switch on the stero and start my car”

Back in 2014, there was excitement surrounding the application called GoogolPLex, which hooked up a hacked version of Siri to the Internet of things. Suddenly you could use Siri for all sorts of applications, as seen in this video:

What’s particularly clever, is the name: “GoogolPlex, turn on the lights” is actually understood by Siri as “Google, please turn on the lights”. Then, instead of running a Google search, GoogolPlex redirects the requests to its servers and uses API’s that interact with your hardware to process your requests.

GoogolPlex, beam me up!

Siri, stop recording our conversations…

You love using Siri? She is a great listener (granted, with dubious hearing). However, if you’re also a staunch believe in privacy, you might want to reconsider what it is exactly you tell your beloved assistant. As reported in this post, all voice recordings are stored for 6 months, after which time they keep the recording for another 18 months but delete the number associated with it… In case you’re now thinking of switching to Microsoft’s equally friendly Cortana, the policy is very similar…

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And now, for a look at what Siri looks like, as seen in Raj’s vivid imagination (from the Big Bang Theory):

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Avira

“Unicode of Death” Crashes Your iPhone

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The newly discovered security flaw on iOS crashes different messaging apps (like iMessage and your SMS app – basically all apps that use Apple’s CoreText library) on your iPhone and possibly your Apple watch when being sent a specific string of text. In addition to that it causes your mobile to reboot immediately. The bug was first reported on Reddit.com where some people were complaining about it.

According to TheRegister, this is what happens once your mobile receives the message containing the “Unicode of Death”, a string of text including Arabic characters and different symbols: “The bug causes CoreText to access memory that is invalid, which forces the operating system to kill off the currently running program: which could be your text message app, your terminal, or in the case of the notification screen, a core part of the OS.”

And sickestdancer98 from Reddit explains: “I can tell you it is due to how the banner notifications process the Unicode text. The banner briefly attempts to present the incoming text and then “gives up” thus the crash. On a jailbroken device, this ultimately leads to safe mode. However, on a stock iOS device, there is no safe mode hence the respring after the crash. That is why this only happens when you are not in the message because the banner is what truly crashes the entire system. Is this a possible vulnerability? Maybe. Has this been around already? Roughly since iOS 6. Can it be fixed/patched? That, my friends, is up to Apple. I hope I cleared things up a little bit if it did help in anyway, shape, or form.“

Apple is already working on fix which they’ll make available in an upcoming software update. Until then there are a couple of workarounds floating around online, one if them being to just turn off the lock screen notifications for now.

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