Be cautious about giving your WiFi community an uncommon identify — it’d create critical complications for any iPhone customers within the family. BleepingComputer and AppleInsider say that safety researcher Carl Shou has discovered a naming bug that ‘breaks’ WiFi on iOS units. Give your community an SSID like “%p%s%s%s%s%n” and your iPhone will lose WiFi performance. You can get it again by resetting your community settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings), however that is clearly a ache should you simply needed to keep away from utilizing mobile information.

The trigger is not clear at this level, however BleepingComputer speculated that it is perhaps a string formatting flaw. Simply put, iOS would possibly confuse the % entries with programming instructions and variables. Schou famous that he recurrently makes use of names like this to mess with “poorly developed devices.” He examined the bug with iOS 14.4.2, nevertheless it was nonetheless an issue as of iOS 14.6.

We’ve requested Apple for remark.

Character-related bugs aren’t extraordinary. A 2018 bug in iOS and macOS crashed apps utilizing a single image. WiFi points are uncommon, nevertheless, and this glitch would make it comparatively simple for pranksters to (briefly) wreck your cellphone utilizing public hotspots. While it was already a good suggestion to keep away from connecting to unusual hotspots, you will have a very good purpose to withstand that temptation whereas this bug exists.