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Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Very Dangerous 8 Characters Crash your Mac Programs .....



VERY DANGEROUS BE CAREFUL.

These 8 Characters Will Crash Most Mac Programs











Mac computers are normally very stable machines, but they’re not perfect, and a new flaw proves it. It turns out if you type "File:///" (no quotes) into most programs on a system running Mac OS X, that program will crash.

When testing this bug out in a number of programs, almost all of them quit immediately. This reportedly only works in the current Mountain Lion version of OS X, so maybe it’s a cool new feature? Will “File:///” replace Command-Q?


The tests we ran let “File:///” crash nearly any app that had a search feature of some kind. Typing it into the search or address bar of any of my browsers crashed them immediately except for Safari, which in this case had not been updated in quite some time. That browser froze halfway through typing the test characters.

Typing the characters into a text field of a website didn’t seem to affect anything. When typing it in as my username and password to access my email account, and the browser window held up just fine. Typing it into the text field of WordPress did not have any adverse effects either. When sending an email to “File:///” and the window still didn’t crash.

The bug is being blamed on the Data Detectors feature of OS X, which gives programs the ability to recognize dates, locations and other data to help users easily integrate things like Calendar and Address Book. Data Detectors is triggered when “File:///” is typed, and tries to extract a file from a path that isn’t there. Then madness ensues, and the whole application crashes. That’s a bit of an overreaction considering the flaw is in something as small as Data Detectors.

Apple is probably flooded with error reports about this, so it will likely get patched at some point in the future, but considering how rarely most people would ever need to type “File:///” it’s probably not a huge priority.


In the meantime, disabling “Correct spelling automatically” and “Use symbol and text substitutions” in the Language & Text section of System Preferences should prevent the bug from crashing programs, and you can go back to typing “File:///” with impunity.


source :
http://sifefsk.org/14063.html

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