A Certain String Of Arabic Characters Will Crash Your Mac And iPhone Apps

A bug in CoreText, Apple's text rendering engine, causes apps to crash when displaying a certain combination of Arabic characters, reports TechCrunch.

Not too long after it was discovered, the string of characters floated around the Internet and ultimately landed Twitter, and just to read these letters in your timeline was enough to crash your Twitter app. A Russian tech site claims that Apple knew about this defect for six months without doing anything about it.

These magic Arabic letters (we're not going to publish them here for obvious reasons) that make your technology go bye-bye carry out their deed simply by appearing on your screen. Anywhere that CoreText is generating user-generated characters - Twitter timeline, Facebook updates, even a list of available wireless networks - is a potential place to set a trap.

The bug affects both your iOS 6 devices and your OS X 10.8 setup (10.9 is unaffected). Facebook has already blocked these characters from being posted on its site.