An Apple A Day….Not!

8 Characters to Crash Apple Apps

Apple developers aren’t usually happy to hear they created the most insecure software across the globe, but as it turned out, they have had to come up with a way of crashing the system so simply everyone can do it without leaving their home.

It turned out that the bug only works in the latest versions of Apple’s Mountain Lion OS, so if you want to try it you have to upgrade. Anyway, such feature will make you the envy of all your fanboy friends: the matter is that all you have to do is type “File:///”, which will cause the app to crash. In other words, it’s all about 8 characters in total (and don’t forget to capitalize F) to have any app you want crash without apparent reason.

Only applications that are entirely dedicated to the Apple view of reality will crash this way. In other words, Echofon, QuickTime, Safari, and Notes are proved to crash, while outsiders like Firefox won’t crash on demand. The experts explain that the feature in question happens since the software is created around a built-in assertion. Assertions allow programmers to mandate expected behaviour, validating input to assure its correctness, and in our case, the automated data detectors find what a malformed URL. In response, they send off an app exception to report the internal inconsistency, which crashes the app. The reason for crash is simple: Apple developers forgot to write a built-in handler…