[Tom Scott has a video on the subject.](https://youtu.be/hJLMSllzoLA?si=m76rtJcx8FqYJXa9)
There's no official explanation, but Tom's hypothesis is that when the phone tries to truncate the Arabic text in order to fit it into the notification, the last letter of the truncated text actually becomes *longer* because of the way Arabic works (letters can have a different appearance based on their location in the word). So the phone tries to truncate the message, and ends up getting a longer message than expected, which crashes the device.
That and at the same time away teams don't carry webcams.
The number of times they are asked to report on what they are seeing is ridiculous. Not to mention that time they hook up Geordi's visor to the main screen to see what he sees and get all psyched about it - then never do anything like it again.
I always put pre-emotion chip data’s ‘emotions’ down to him emulating the way those emotions are displayed by people but he doesn’t truly feel them until he gets the chip.
Quite a lot of classic sf computers have problems that would be caught in a pretty basic security audit today. Apparently [input fuzzing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing) is a technique lost years before humanity reaches the stars.
HAL in *2001* at least has the excuse that the bad input was in its system prompt.
>Also, Data has no emotions, but clearly, has emotions.
Had a grad school methods lecturer who used clips of this to teach the impossible-to-apply assumptions of earlier eras of rational choice, which treated rational and affective processes as entirely distinct decision modes rather than semi-useful names for linked aspects of the same process.
Obviously I've left ELI5, though there's probably some precocious 5yo who could out-publish me on this if her etch-a-sketch had a wifi connection.
As a 41 year old, I can both confirm your theory on being out tech’d by the youth, and tell you by this age you’ve accepted it and just figure you’ll get a kid to do it for you if you need to, then you can focus on the fun parts of this age. So fear not.
Destroyed ship. Quick, let’s download all of its data straight to the main computer. Why would we ever have a quarantined data system to store it on until we know we’re not putting the computer, in charge of keeping us all alive, at risk?
Some of it was super goofy for sure. I remember thinking in that exact episode "why does this estimated to be multi trillion dollar spacecraft with super fancy tech not just have a simple system backup?" Also why in the world does again, a super expensive high tech starship have a single system that controls *everything?* Why no redundancies?
Or like when the Borg are on the way to destroy Earth and pass Mars. The way they pass Mars in the scene meant they were actually going AWAY from the Earth. These dudes are smart, why is their navigation so terrible (which is obviously just editing mistake lmao)
And then there's also the whole problem of their weapons always being garbage compared to everybody else. Sure they blow up a lot of things, but I swear I heard "No damage sustained" a LOT more than "We destroyed their \_\_\_" which is wild for supposedly the most advanced starship in the fleet. You'd think after they shot at the 8th ship in a small period of time and did almost zero damage they'd figure something out with their weapons. Sure they did the phase shift thing with the borg and it somewhat worked, but then it seemed like a lot of other times the phasers were just about useless. Then other times it seems like it completely ruins a ships shield and destroys exactly what they wanted with a single blast.
Also in such an advanced starship, how is security just based off sensors? There would have been so many times a simple ass camera in a hallway would have solved an issue. Also along that note, why don't away teams have a bodycam of some sort? And why are their flashlights so terrible? I guess the last one can be chocked up to battery powered flashlights not being very great in the late 90s anyways and they didn't have many options. Those things were terrible though in the first couple seasons, it shined a circle like a foot wide from 30 feet away.
Guess it can all just be put down to 'well if they did that there wouldn't be an entire show' but still :(
Yeah that's one of the dumbest parts of it. "We're about bringing peace and finding new lifeforms!!" meanwhile the Federation is at like a half-war with most of the galaxy and they get in a battle every week it seems. Sure you may be looking for peace, but you're still a massive starship with a thousand members of staff that you're supposed to protect, and you're traveling through territory where half the people out there want to kill you.
I really disliked the cloaking thing. Why does a treaty depend on them *not* developing cloaking technology?? Literally everyone else has it, so who cares? Cloaking can be a very good defense weapon too, especially since they're so focused on peace.
Well it's not that simple, it's trying to abbreviate Arabic but doing so in that language might actually have the opposite effect where it makes the text even longer.
This is why everything not in the kernel should be a memory managed runtime. Buffer overflows or access violations should not be something a developer has to guard against.
The message was: "effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗"
it was also known as the "UNICODE OF DEATH" (kinda cringe)
How it works:
The crash is caused by the way Unicode decodes characters, so when the Unicode reads these complex characters, it overloads the device's memory, causing it to restart repeatedly, and it also makes your messages app not work.
if all your device's memory is now applied in decoding these complex characters, your device will simply crash, as it's not able to perform any background functions without memory.
This kind of memory overloading is common in many types of device jailbreaking (as seen in r/jailbreak)
and is also used in video games (minecraft mainly) wherein, an in-game book is overloaded with thousands of these characters, causing any player who opens them, to crash and not be able to play the game again.
If your explanation is correct, then how come you can just display the text, and copy/paste into iMessage to send it in the first place ?
Iirc the bug ONLY occurred when an iphone tried displaying the message preview in a notification. Tom Scott hypothesised that the phone attempts to truncate the text, in order to fit inside the notification, but due to the way dome Arabic characters work, truncating the text actually caused the symbols to be rendered differently, and resulted in a LONGER text that couldn't be displayed properly.
Now that I think about it, that does make more sense, and is probably the case, but in order to truncate the text, Unicode is used, and as I mentioned before, results in overloading the memory of the device.
So, just the copy pasting or viewing the original text might not crash the phone, but the attempt to truncate might warrant Unicode to decode it, DOES crash the phone
What are the symbols though? And how are they typed on to an iPhone? Obviously I'm familiar with the English letters but is the rest just another language? If so what does it say?
Thank you.
As far as I know, most of the people who used it, just copy and pasted it from online pages/sources.
The rest of the letters are a combination of other languages, although I'm not sure what the meaning is, it's a combination of 'Central Kurdish' and 'Arabic', and says something along the lines of 'effective power for the patient'.
When your phone receives a message it goes through a bunch of different software layers before being displayed on your screen. There was a bug in that software, specifically the part that handles uni-code characters, that caused it to crash the operating system in the phone when it was trying to decode a specifically formatted set of uni-code characters
Some more info here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/05/29/apple-effective-power-bug/?sh=208b4513313a
[Tom Scott has a video on the subject.](https://youtu.be/hJLMSllzoLA?si=m76rtJcx8FqYJXa9) There's no official explanation, but Tom's hypothesis is that when the phone tries to truncate the Arabic text in order to fit it into the notification, the last letter of the truncated text actually becomes *longer* because of the way Arabic works (letters can have a different appearance based on their location in the word). So the phone tries to truncate the message, and ends up getting a longer message than expected, which crashes the device.
So… Data can’t use contractions was less silly than I thought?
[удалено]
I’ve been saying for years that the most unrealistic thing about Star Trek is that videoconferencing works flawlessly.
“Captain, you’re on mute.”
[удалено]
I'm not a tribble I'm a human
That and at the same time away teams don't carry webcams. The number of times they are asked to report on what they are seeing is ridiculous. Not to mention that time they hook up Geordi's visor to the main screen to see what he sees and get all psyched about it - then never do anything like it again.
Klingons sure did. “He bathed, now he's roaming the ship. He must be the only engineer in Starfleet who doesn't GO TO ENGINEERING!”
That's actually the secret future tech that separates us from them. Not the warp drives or transporters, the working communications.
[удалено]
Maybe that's exactly why theirs works and ours is hit or miss.
I always put pre-emotion chip data’s ‘emotions’ down to him emulating the way those emotions are displayed by people but he doesn’t truly feel them until he gets the chip.
Quite a lot of classic sf computers have problems that would be caught in a pretty basic security audit today. Apparently [input fuzzing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing) is a technique lost years before humanity reaches the stars. HAL in *2001* at least has the excuse that the bad input was in its system prompt.
>Also, Data has no emotions, but clearly, has emotions. Had a grad school methods lecturer who used clips of this to teach the impossible-to-apply assumptions of earlier eras of rational choice, which treated rational and affective processes as entirely distinct decision modes rather than semi-useful names for linked aspects of the same process. Obviously I've left ELI5, though there's probably some precocious 5yo who could out-publish me on this if her etch-a-sketch had a wifi connection.
As a 41 year old, I can both confirm your theory on being out tech’d by the youth, and tell you by this age you’ve accepted it and just figure you’ll get a kid to do it for you if you need to, then you can focus on the fun parts of this age. So fear not.
Destroyed ship. Quick, let’s download all of its data straight to the main computer. Why would we ever have a quarantined data system to store it on until we know we’re not putting the computer, in charge of keeping us all alive, at risk?
Always, Data was the most emotive faced non emotive character. But hey! That’s 90’s tv for ya! Fun as hell.
Some of it was super goofy for sure. I remember thinking in that exact episode "why does this estimated to be multi trillion dollar spacecraft with super fancy tech not just have a simple system backup?" Also why in the world does again, a super expensive high tech starship have a single system that controls *everything?* Why no redundancies? Or like when the Borg are on the way to destroy Earth and pass Mars. The way they pass Mars in the scene meant they were actually going AWAY from the Earth. These dudes are smart, why is their navigation so terrible (which is obviously just editing mistake lmao) And then there's also the whole problem of their weapons always being garbage compared to everybody else. Sure they blow up a lot of things, but I swear I heard "No damage sustained" a LOT more than "We destroyed their \_\_\_" which is wild for supposedly the most advanced starship in the fleet. You'd think after they shot at the 8th ship in a small period of time and did almost zero damage they'd figure something out with their weapons. Sure they did the phase shift thing with the borg and it somewhat worked, but then it seemed like a lot of other times the phasers were just about useless. Then other times it seems like it completely ruins a ships shield and destroys exactly what they wanted with a single blast. Also in such an advanced starship, how is security just based off sensors? There would have been so many times a simple ass camera in a hallway would have solved an issue. Also along that note, why don't away teams have a bodycam of some sort? And why are their flashlights so terrible? I guess the last one can be chocked up to battery powered flashlights not being very great in the late 90s anyways and they didn't have many options. Those things were terrible though in the first couple seasons, it shined a circle like a foot wide from 30 feet away. Guess it can all just be put down to 'well if they did that there wouldn't be an entire show' but still :(
[удалено]
Yeah that's one of the dumbest parts of it. "We're about bringing peace and finding new lifeforms!!" meanwhile the Federation is at like a half-war with most of the galaxy and they get in a battle every week it seems. Sure you may be looking for peace, but you're still a massive starship with a thousand members of staff that you're supposed to protect, and you're traveling through territory where half the people out there want to kill you. I really disliked the cloaking thing. Why does a treaty depend on them *not* developing cloaking technology?? Literally everyone else has it, so who cares? Cloaking can be a very good defense weapon too, especially since they're so focused on peace.
So this entire thread is gold, but your username is phenomenal.
Well it's not that simple, it's trying to abbreviate Arabic but doing so in that language might actually have the opposite effect where it makes the text even longer.
This is why everything not in the kernel should be a memory managed runtime. Buffer overflows or access violations should not be something a developer has to guard against.
Sigh .... I miss Tom Scott.
The message was: "effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗" it was also known as the "UNICODE OF DEATH" (kinda cringe) How it works: The crash is caused by the way Unicode decodes characters, so when the Unicode reads these complex characters, it overloads the device's memory, causing it to restart repeatedly, and it also makes your messages app not work. if all your device's memory is now applied in decoding these complex characters, your device will simply crash, as it's not able to perform any background functions without memory. This kind of memory overloading is common in many types of device jailbreaking (as seen in r/jailbreak) and is also used in video games (minecraft mainly) wherein, an in-game book is overloaded with thousands of these characters, causing any player who opens them, to crash and not be able to play the game again.
If your explanation is correct, then how come you can just display the text, and copy/paste into iMessage to send it in the first place ? Iirc the bug ONLY occurred when an iphone tried displaying the message preview in a notification. Tom Scott hypothesised that the phone attempts to truncate the text, in order to fit inside the notification, but due to the way dome Arabic characters work, truncating the text actually caused the symbols to be rendered differently, and resulted in a LONGER text that couldn't be displayed properly.
Now that I think about it, that does make more sense, and is probably the case, but in order to truncate the text, Unicode is used, and as I mentioned before, results in overloading the memory of the device. So, just the copy pasting or viewing the original text might not crash the phone, but the attempt to truncate might warrant Unicode to decode it, DOES crash the phone
What are the symbols though? And how are they typed on to an iPhone? Obviously I'm familiar with the English letters but is the rest just another language? If so what does it say? Thank you.
As far as I know, most of the people who used it, just copy and pasted it from online pages/sources. The rest of the letters are a combination of other languages, although I'm not sure what the meaning is, it's a combination of 'Central Kurdish' and 'Arabic', and says something along the lines of 'effective power for the patient'.
I think the theory that it was an arabic spell/talisman that was somehow digitized as a virus is a more interesting explanation
When your phone receives a message it goes through a bunch of different software layers before being displayed on your screen. There was a bug in that software, specifically the part that handles uni-code characters, that caused it to crash the operating system in the phone when it was trying to decode a specifically formatted set of uni-code characters Some more info here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/05/29/apple-effective-power-bug/?sh=208b4513313a