Imagine, for a moment, that you couldn’t text. Granted, freedom from autocorrect would be glorious for a few brief moments, but you’d probably lose all your friends in short order. So it’s not great news that a hacker, thankfully a good guy, has figured out how to shut down iMessages for good. And worse, any idiot can do it.
The hack exploits virtual business cards, vCards in tech parlance. Most vCards are pretty simple; you text them to somebody, they click on them, and it adds contact information and other data to your phone. They’re usually about 200 to 300 lines of code. What vincedes3 did as an experiment was create one with over 14,000 lines of code. Once you open it, iMessages is overwhelmed and crashes. So reboot, right? Nope: iMessages tries to open the last text you received on boot.
The good news is that vincedes3 is a nice person who created a temporary fix if you get pranked: Just click here and it’ll shut down the code. You can also get a friend to help you if that link doesn’t work, and presumably Apple is working on a fix. You probably shouldn’t be opening vCards anyway, as opening anything that executes code on your device is just begging for trouble, but now you have an even better reason to ask your friend to just text you his office phone.
(via Gizmodo)