Malcolm Owen
A seeming flaw in iCloud's coding has seemingly prevented an author from being able to access her account, due to its interpretation of her surname "True."
Author Rachel True complained on Twitter about not being able to log into her iCloud account. According to tweets since February 27, the author has been unable to access her account for six months, for what appears to be a coding issue.
One tweet raising the issue shows a diagnostic screen stating "iCloud has stopped responding," offering to send diagnostic data to Apple, reports iMore. The details section of the window mentions "cannot set value true' to property lastName' as part of what would be sent off.
Anyone else getting this error from Apple iCloud ? In past or now?
— Rachel True (@RachelTrue) February 27, 2021
I'm 6 months deep freeze & looking for any help.
I rem dead coding languages like kobalt.. & this seems like an Apple coding issue — not hardware pic.twitter.com/05EJmG3d6Y
It appears that iCloud is interpreting the last name of "true" as a boolean flag rather than as a text string, which the program cannot properly interpret and breaks.
True claims she has been on the phone to Apple's customer care for multiple hours about the problem, but to no avail. Later tweets has the author proposing a bug has been identified and could qualify her for a bug bounty reward.
As of March 6, True still doesn't have any access to the account, but was informed Apple will get in touch on Monday or Tuesday with further assistance.
Stephen Silver
Christine McKee
Charles Martin
Amber Neely
42 Comments
Someone has missed out quotation marks near the use of "lastName". The ease of implicit typecasting in some languages eventually comes back to bite you in the ass. Could probably inject some JS to fix it.
She should commiserate with Bobby Tables:
https://xkcd.com/327/
She could try using the AppleID site to change her last name to _True
Last week I couldn’t see a custom column in MS Project’s object model because I named it “Application”.
Can't phone support get you to the correct person to solve this? If not email Tim Cook, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi with a detailed explanation and someone from the executive team will call you - it won't be one of those three but it will be someone that in fact can get this solved. I had a super super super weird issue once and emailed them and sure enough someone called me who assured me that while she didn't know how to fix it, she verified the super super super weird issue and assured me she has smart people that she can contact and get it solved for me. Sure enough, they did! It may have helped them solve a criminal enterprise situation in China too.