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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."
There is no memory corruption involved here, it's a failed assertion, namely that the string begins with 'File://' and the routine it was passed to expected the string to start with 'file://'.
The crash isn't because they were lazy, it's because they went out of their way to include checks for the data they were passing around and one of those checks found something unexpected, and aborted the program, by design. I'm pretty sure this is a good thing.
Since in that year the Apple fanbois haven't managed to grow a sense of iHumour yet, and they keep reacting hysterically to that old joke, why not keep it?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
I know what assert() is.