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A blog post on Tuesday illustrates the harmful, sometimes unintentional, effects of altering or altering the environment. adding code to a major operating system for no other purpose than to appease the government of a certain market. Apple did it when he removed the Taiwan flag emoji from the traffic in China.
Source: Patrick Wardle
Patrick Wardle, director of research at Digita Security, discussed the problem that caused some In his personal blog, Objective-See
As the Wardle explained, iOS 11.3 and later versions contained a bug that, for some iPhone and iPad users, caused constant crashes The word "Taiwan" was entered in the text fields of the first and third applications.
The remote flaw would also trigger a crash event when trying to display Taiwan flag emoji on some devices. The process was repeatable in iMessage, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Apple fixed the bug in iOS 11.4.1, citing a bug report filed by Wardle earlier this year.
Some aspects of the bug are unclear, but Wardle has reduced the negative effect to a "null" pointer dereference. In particular, the problem is presented when an operation removeEmoji resulted in a system statement that checked the region settings of a device. A resulting function is broken under certain conditions related to the parameters of the Chinese region.
As noted by Emojipedia iOS hides the Taiwanese flag on devices set in China. This process involves removing emoji from both the keyboard and rendered data, such as incoming text messages.
While the code worked for Chinese iPhones, it caused problems for some iOS devices set up in other regions, or more specifically a "state without an unsupported region".
The test highlights the limitations that Apple and other companies go to appease the government of China. China and Taiwan have a long and controversial relationship that goes back well before the Chinese civil war. Taiwan regards itself as a sovereign state called the Republic of China, while the People's Republic of China (Mainland China) regards Taiwan as part of its territory and sensitive to issues concerning the identity of the island.
China (People's Republic of China) is a vital market for Apple. Although the company publicly boasts a firm stand against censorship and government spying, it has played well with the often deplored laws of the Chinese government.
Last year, for example, Apple took the flak for removing the application NYT from the Chinese App Store, which was followed by the deletion some VPN applications in accordance with Chinese regulations.
More recently, the company has transferred Chinese iCloud data and cryptographic keys to local servers managed by Big Data Industry Co., Ltd. of Guizhou-Cloud, a decision decried by privacy advocates. For its part, Apple has argued against the fact that iCloud is subject to China's cyber laws, but has pointed to compliance as a cost of doing business in the country.
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