[saagarjha]

iMessage is a normal iOS app, at least mostly. It has access to a couple of entitlements that normal apps don't get, since it needs to do things like access Apple Pay and launch iMessage apps, but it's possible to have the app itself crash without hosing the entire OS. The problems we're seeing here, however, are issues where iMessage's (buggy) frameworks are being loaded into the SpringBoard process (which is essentially the UI shell for iOS) and this is what is crashing, causing the phone to be unusable. So the solution here would be to stop allowing for message parsing to happen in contexts like these. (Also, as far as I am aware, there have not been any jailbreaks in iMessage that rely on the app being special in any particular way because it's really not.)

[JBiserkov]

Internet Explorer is a normal Windows application, at least mostly. It has access to a couple of entitlements that normal applications don't get, since it needs to do things like access MSN Passport and launch ActiveX components, but it's possible to have the app itself crash without hosing the entire OS. The problems we're seeing here, however, are issues where Internet Explorer's (buggy) frameworks are being loaded into the Explorer.exe process (which is essentially the UI shell for Windows) and this is what is crashing, causing the computer to be unusable.

2002 called.

[saagarjha]

The difference being that with iMessage people can trigger the bug remotely and there's little you can do about it except turn it off completely (as someone I know did end up doing). Hey, I didn't say that what they were doing was a good idea :)

[sambe]

Internet Explorer bugs could not be triggered remotely?

[noisem4ker]

You can't send messages to Internet Explorer. You can just hope the user will fall into your trap website.

[tialaramex]

Right. For example, no huge global companies run services where you pay them money and they paste your arbitrary content into other web sites...

No wait, I was describing a sane world, but this is a world where we decided to fund everything with advertising ("This drug rehabilitation clinic sponsored by OxyContin") and so actually you can do exactly that.

[rasz]

Sure you could, guess what Outlook 2000-2003 used for email internally.

[airstrike]

Damn.... between this reply and csande17's[1], this thread is pure gold. I hope iOS folks are reading this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20773002

[tinus_hn]

What entitlements does Internet Explorer have? On Windows any app can do anything.