by Jason Snell
Cracking ‘The Dave & Buster’s Anomaly’
Gui Rambo provides some nerdy tech detail on an iOS bug featured on the Search Engine podcast, in which it’s revealed that Messages will not deliver any audio messages containing the phrase “Dave & Buster’s”:
At the time I’m writing this post, this bug is still happening, so you should be able to reproduce it. I reproduced it using two iPhones running iOS 18.5 RC. As long as your audio message contains the phrase “Dave and Buster’s”, the recipient will only see the “dot dot dot” animation for several seconds, and it will then eventually disappear. They will never get the audio message.
Years of dealing with HTML and XML mean that I correctly guessed why this was happening before reading—it’s my favorite punctuation symbol for a reason!—but it’s still a fun dive into how one of Apple’s iOS security systems works.