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          Guilherme Rambo Explains the Dave & Buster's Message Anomaly

   Adam Engst

   At his [1]rambo.codes blog, [2]Guilherme Rambo writes:

     The bug is that, if you try to send an audio message using the
     Messages app to someone who's also using the Messages app, and that
     message happens to include the name 'Dave and Buster's', the message
     will never be received.

     In case you're wondering, 'Dave and Buster's' is the name of a
     sports bar and restaurant in the United States.

   It's always an HTML entity! Read all of Rambo's piece for the full
   explanation, but essentially, Apple's BlastDoor security system
   correctly refuses to pass messages containing malformed XHTML, which
   can be caused by an unescaped HTML entity within an attribute: the
   ampersand in 'Dave & Buster's.' Anyone who has coded HTML has stumbled
   over entities at some point'forgetting to escape an ampersand is a
   classic mistake. It's almost reassuring to see that even Apple
   engineers can miss such edge cases, though it's ironic that their
   efforts to transcribe the official brand name correctly are what
   triggered this failure.

References

   1. https://rambo.codes/
   2. https://rambo.codes/posts/2025-05-12-cracking-the-dave-and-busters-anomaly

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