Blog: these eight characters will crash almost any app on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

[menotu]

Emil Protalinski - 2 February 2013 - thenextweb

All software has bugs, but this one is a particularly odd one. If you type “File:///” (no quotes, the f must be capitalized) into almost any app on your Mac, it will crash. We’ve tested this hilarious curiosity here at TNW, so feel free to try it out yourself. The discovery was made recently and a bug report was posted to Open Radar on Thursday. It only gained a lot of attention on Friday night though, thanks to a Hacker News submission.

Hilariously, this bug seems to also crash the Mac error reporter, maybe because it has the evil string in it. I did manage to copy and paste a crash dump before the crash reporter crashed: http://pastebin.com/UkhERvaA

....it’s worth noting that the bug only appears to be present in OS X Mountain Lion and is not reproducible in Lion or Snow Leopard

A closer look shows the bug is inside Data Detectors, a feature that lets apps recognize dates, locations, and contact data, making it easy for you to save this information in your address book and calendar. HackerNews user 0×0 explains:

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/02/02/typing-these-eight-characters-will-crash-almost-any-application-on-your-mac/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29

[The Chief]

As soon as you  make it idiot proof, a new and improved idiot will come along and try to do something no one in their right mind would try to do.