Last April, while security researcher Patrick Wardle was attending the RSA security conference in San Francisco, a Taiwanese friend who lived in the city asked to meet for coffee, and for his help with what she described as a serious problem: China, she said, was hacking her iPhone.
Wardle, a former NSA staffer and a prominent Apple-focused hacker who founded Digita Security, had heard that request from paranoid friends and acquaintances plenty of times before, making him naturally skeptical. But when he met his friend in person, she showed him something bizarre: Every time the Taiwanese flag emoji[1] appeared on her iPhone for any reason, the app that had displayed it instantly crashed. That meant, essentially, that anyone could crash Wardle's Taiwanese friend's phone at will, simply by sending her any text message that triggered a notification and included the Taiwanese flag. "I could send her a message and this emoji of death would crash her phone," Wardle says.
In the months since, Wardle has worked on and off to deconstruct that emoji mystery. What he found—and helped Apple fix—wasn't the targeted hacking of his friend's iPhone. Instead, it was an unintentional bug in a very intentional censorship feature, one that Apple includes in every iPhone in the world in an apparent attempt to placate the Chinese government. "Basically, Apple added some code to iOS with the goal that phones in China wouldn't display a Taiwanese flag," Wardle says, "and there was a bug in that code."
'I could send her a message and this emoji of death would crash her phone.'
Patrick Wardle, Digita Security
Since at least early 2017[2], iOS has included that Chinese censorship function: Switch your iPhone's location setting to China, and the Taiwanese flag emoji essentially disappears from