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Apple Updates All of Its Operating Systems To Fix App-crashing Bug (engadget.com)
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.
It used to be just Little-Endian and Big-Endian, now it's also Single-Indian. Thanks Apple!
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
PS. I'm thinking of starting work on this, but can't think of a good name. Any suggestions?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
My first Apple purchase was a Mac Mini with an Intel Core Duo CPU, 160Gb laptop HDD and (I think) 4Gb RAM. Since then I've purchased various other Apple devices (including iPods, iPads and an iPhone 7). According to my records, "Apple spend" has made up about 31% of my total hardware budget since the Mini.
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.
Unicode has nothing to do with the encoding used. Just use UCS-4/UTF-32 if you don't like encoding.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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...
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 with auto-language detection enabled, if you start a sentence with that dygraph the first thing it will do is lower case the J for you (not recognising the dygraph) quite helpfully thinking you're writing English, and then after the end the sentence proceed to tell you you misspelled the first word since both I and J should be capital.
Then there's classical linguistic confusion around characters that have alternative forms. Ö in German being written as Oe, the strong ß in German being ss. Even the western languages are hard.
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.