[userbinator]

The flip side of making things opaque and "just work" per Apple philosophy, is that when they don't work, trying to fix it becomes even more difficult.

This is a very unusual "exploit", however --- according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard it's not even a valid .vcf file but looks to be just an RTF with copious amounts of text (appears to be bytes from PNG images concatenated together, although I haven't actually tried to read them as such.)

I think there's some sort of hidden quadratic (or higher) algorithm that's causing this, along the lines of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/ . As a datapoint, this 7-year-old machine rendered that file as RTF (in WordPad) in less than a second. An iPhone doesn't have quite as powerful a CPU, but still shouldn't be struggling to do it.

[teddyh]

> The flip side of making things opaque and "just work" per Apple philosophy, is that when they don't work, trying to fix it becomes even more difficult.

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”

— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless