It seems like the lesson is that you shouldn't be processing data sent to the device by random strangers without the user explicitly choosing to open the file or follow the link.
Why can't they just make it like most email clients? No preview by default, give a banner with an option to explicitly allow a preview for that specific message or conversation?
It is! The phishers try to socially engineer their way into getting link previews or in fact clickable links period.
Screenshot here of the automatic link/preview disable-
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/phishing-text...
But how does that prevent one from receiving and opening a malicious message?
Image decoders are pure functions and all should have been rewritten as 100% safe Rust years ago.
Users need functionality.
It’s up to us to figure out how to provide that safely.
Saying to users they shouldn’t have those features isn’t sage advice, it’s admitting failure.
https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-t...
Even to the baseband firmware:
https://blog.google/security/bringing-rust-to-the-pixel-base...
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...
(Of course, new code is preferred in Rust over C, for sure.)
Before you know it, people want to preview SVGs, PDFs, video, HTML and so on.
And to do that properly means you've got to support obscure formats like JBIG2 and CCITT Fax. Malicious vector images with a billion elements to render. XML that lets one file embed another.
And good luck getting the budget to re-implement them all from scratch in a better language, when the only business value the feature delivers is a postage-stamp-sized preview image.
And let's be honest, you'll have what, 0.0001% of users who want to preview CCITT in 2026? Less? Probably less.
> JBIG2 and CCITT Fax
Since performance isn't such a critical concern with obscure legacy formats, it really wouldn't be much more than a day or two of work for a competent developer with AI agent tooling to convert an existing decoder to safe Rust.
Meta set nearly a hundred billion dollars on fire for a total failure that everybody saw coming, a trillion dollars is what the current AI investment crazy is pouring into concrete and TSMC chips, but... a couple of days for a developer is asking too much!?
