'Black dot of death' is crashing iMessage, and there's only one way to fix it

Apparently we live in a universe where crashing your friend's phone is considered a fun prank.

There's a new bug going around that can paralyze the iPhone's Messages app if it receives a message with a particular character, and not even a reboot will fix it. As reported by Cult of Mac, the bug is called the "black dot of death," but it's not actually the black dot emoji (⚫) that does the damage. 

Instead, a thousands-character-long string of invisible Unicode text, which accompanies the dot, does the damage. The text is too much for the Messages app to handle, rendering it unusable, crashing every time the user tries to launch it. The bug affects iOS 11.3 and the iOS 11.4 betas. Read more...