Ars Technica reports on a bug in iOS that can cause iPhones to reboot. This bug also seems to affect OS X under certain situations and extends beyond text messages on iOS. The trigger is trying to render the string in question.
A similar rendering bug for Apple has occurred previously that was also covered by Ars Technica
Microsoft has also fallen victim to font rendering bugs in the past:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms13-060.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms10-063.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms14-036.aspx
I'm not a fan of iOS or Apple, in fact I find their interfaces so incredibly frustrating that I refuse to use their products, so I find this particularly amusing:
A newly discovered and potentially worrisome iOS bug has been causing Phones to crash and automatically reboot when a certain string of characters is received via the Messages app. The string in question, which consists of both English and Arabic characters, was first brought to light via a Reddit thread before being corroborated by MacRumors late on Wednesday evening.
"Sending the string of characters to an iPhone results in an immediate respring, causing an iPhone to crash and quickly reboot," the report notes. "From there, if the Messages app was opened at a list view, the Messages app crashes automatically when you try to open it. If it was opened to the conversation where you received the message, the app will open, but attempting to go to another conversation causes Messages to crash."
Read more here.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday May 29 2015, @01:34PM
Funny, I was going to make the same comment about systemd. I recently heard it will also require reboots for updates in some cases. wiping out one of the advantages of Linux kernel 4. If so, it's going to be the new Intel/Microsoft thing: Linux giveth, systemd taketh away.