First they killed your iPhone with an SMS that reads…
effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗
Then they murdered your Skype with a message just eight characters long…
http://:
What will happen next? Can they make your tablet explode by saying something unkind to it? And whatever you do, never type ‘Google’ into Google, because you can break the internet.
But seriously, I welcome these news stories, and not just because I am a miserable git who rarely uses Skype and owns an Android phone (though that all helps). As communications systems become more complicated, they become more fragile. If people can decapitate phones and VoIP services by deploying a few characters, imagine what would happen if a determined enemy wanted to mess with the communications of another country, or sabotage the products of a rival business.
The deeply-engrained mentality of the IT world is to test up to a point, sell the product, then wait for other bad stuff to happen before that gets sorted out. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but our world is now so dependent on communications that we cannot tolerate major interruptions without suffering a great deal of harm. For the concept of five-nines availability to continue to have meaning, the clients that connect to a network must be as resilient as the network itself. All of that means we need more testing, tighter security, and greater confidence that systems will function correctly when integrated with each other. Sometimes these concepts may be hard to explain to a skeptical public who would prefer to see their money spent on more obvious, tangible benefits. But if you keep sending a string of characters that kills their phone, they will soon get the message…
