Why does imessage delete obama

CNN -- This week, former President Barack Obama shared something quite personal with millions of his social media followers. It was a number-- a phone number to be exact -- with a simple message from the former President: text me. Election day is creeping up and early voting is already underway in various states across the nation.

With a record number of voters expected to vote by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, Obama wants to know how you are doing and how you plan to vote this year. Obama's post was accompanied with a picture of him and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama looking at a phone. But the former president is not the only one in the Obama household trying to get in touch with voters.

An apparent glitch in Apple iPhones seems to be preventing people from sending text messages with the phrase "I could be the next Obama. If you want to try it for yourself, write the phrase with no quotation marks, no period at the end of the sentence and a space after the last "a" in "Obama" the space is very important , like this:.

Social media and tech forums indicate the phrase, "The best prize is a surprise" produces a similar result, with the word "surprise" disappearing. One YouTube user actually uploaded a video of the process from start to finish, from typing in the phrases to seeing them send and disappear:. Strangely, users can copy the sent phrase, paste it back into the text field, and the missing word will show up once more.

Additionally, the vanishing word will still appear in the preview of your most recent messages, so it hasn't completely disappeared:. The Verge seems to have been one of the first to break the story back in April, after rumors of the glitch began circulating on social media.

The issue is now going viral once more, particularly on Twitter. Naked Security notes that "I could be the next Bush" and "I could be the next Clinton" both work, and others have pointed out that words changing just one letter of Obama's name also works. But the code that actually formats the message reckons that it won't quite fit on one line, and thus renders it with the last word on a second line.

Therefore, the glitch seems to be based on pixel length versus number of characters. The phrase "I could be the next Odama" will encounter the same issue, since it's the same length. Curious, though, that the issue hasn't been resolved roughly four months after being raised on social media and tech forums.

Those are two characteristics that modern software can do without now that vulnerabilities and exploits have commercial value and are actively sought by Good Guys and Bad Guys alike. Keen observers have noticed that if you cut-and-paste from the offending message bubble, you get your Obama back. In our synthetic example, only a message that is exactly the same pixel length as a line will be treated differently by the two code fragments and trigger the bug; all other messages will be handled correctly.

It may not seem important here, but in code that manages memory, off-by-one errors often lead to buffer overflows, and those sometimes lead to exploits. Follow NakedSecurity on Twitter for the latest computer security news. Dang…I was hoping someone had finally come up with a solution to people blaming Obama for everything, up to and including the assassination of JFK. Wouldn't it be easy to test the hypothesis by writing permutations of the word Obama, such as bOama and amabO, which would be the same pixel length but not the same word?

I don't have an iPhone to test this on, so I'm curious to see if the bug still occurs then. Depending on how the font is kerned, just rearranging the letters might be enough to change the pixel length.

At age 73, I'm unlikely to keep doing it much longer. Software testing may be hard, but formal methods i. I tried that on my iPhone and I was able to say the whole thing… with a space after or no space after. Skip to content.