Technology, as a complex system that is, is full of errors, but few can boast of being as curious and rare as the one that has recently come to light, with the iPhone as the protagonist. It has to do with audio messages And when we tell you it will seem a joke.
Imagine that you send a voice message to a friend and that, without prior notice, it does not arrive. The audio is not erased or gives error, it simply disappears. And best of all (or the worst) is that this happens when the name of a known restaurant chain. Neither today is the day of the Holy Innocents nor this is a joke. Stay because this story does not leave anyone cold.
Message app failure
The mystery has been uncovered by the journalist and Podcast PJ Vogt, in one of the last episodes of his program Search Engine. Vogt discovered that voice messages sent from an iPhone stopped surrendering if they included a simple mention to “Dave & Buster's” (an American restaurant chain). Yes, just by saying that, your voice note could fell as if it had never been recorded. And the most disconcerting is that No one received any notice that the message had not been sent.
The phenomenon caught the attention of the cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos, who collaborated with Vogt to investigate what was happening. The conclusion sheds light on how even the most sophisticated systems can stumble with a small symbol. When IOS transcribes a voice message, try to convert the audio into text to make it more accessible and useful. However, al Detect the “&” symbol In “Dave & Buster's”, the system erroneously interprets it as part of a computer code, not as current text. Result of this, the transcription process fails and the whole message is corrupted.
These types of errors are usually solved with a process called “characters escaped”, which indicates to the system that this symbol should treat as literal text. But, apparently, Ios is not doing it correctly in this case. The developer Gui Rambo, who usually filters details about Apple's software, decided to deepen on his own and published a technical article with the error records that show how the system enters crisis when processing these messages.
The interesting thing about this ruling is that it is not a generalized problem with voice messagesbut of something extremely specific and, therefore, difficult to detect without a good dose of curiosity and much free time. Rambo shows in his blog how iOS hopes to receive a certain type of code after the symbol “&” and, when not arriving, the messages simply blocks and eliminates the audio completely.
Apple, meanwhile, has already recognized the ruling and has confirmed that it works on a solution that will arrive in a future iOS update. Of course, he has not specified when. So if you want to check this peculiar bug for yourself, you might hurry before they correct it.
Beyond the anecdotal, this error reveals how complex the systems that we depend daily and how a small detail can cause the most curious failures.
