Kirsle.net
It seems there's a new iOS vulnerability where receiving a certain text message can crash your phone (forcing a reboot), and then lock you out of the Messages app--presumably because attempting to display the offending message will crash the phone again. Also, apparently, you don't even have to read the text message; the notification for the message alone will crash the phone too.
I heard of it from this article on Cult of Mac, and I have various thoughts on the matter (and about iOS vulnerabilities in general and how people handle them once discovered--the long story short is they're handled very poorly).
The article mentions that if you found yourself a victim to this exploit, you can "fix" it by visiting a web page in Mobile Safari which then offers to "Open this page in Messages" and then finds some way to allow safely deleting the text without crashing the phone.
I tried inspecting the source code of the "fix" page with the curl command line HTTP client (because you should never check out a possibly shady web page in your normal browser, as they might try and exploit some zero-day vulnerability in your browser and compromise your computer). But, it seems that the domain the fix was hosted on no longer exists: it gave me some DoubleClick "inquire about this domain" nonsense and tons of advertisements.
Either this is an extraordinary coincidence that the site is down now (given that the article was written today, and presumably the site worked when the author wrote the article), or the site was up to something shady and got reported and terminated by its host/registrar. My guess is that it was basically a jailbreak exploit, as iOS tends to be very locked down compared to Android (for example, no "Intents" system for apps to communicate with each other, and iOS doesn't allow replacing the default Messages app for managing your text messages).
Which brings me to how iOS vulnerabilities are handled in general by the users: very badly. Somebody discovered that they can crash iOS by sending a certain text message to an iPhone user, and instead of doing the responsible thing of privately informing Apple about it and not disclosing it publicly, they make YouTube videos being like "Text your friend these 3 characters and crash their phone! It's hilarious! Fun prank!"
It's not a fun prank. Short of using a shady as fuck web page that probably gains root privileges on the phone in order to fix your Messages app, the other way to fix it would probably be to factory reset the entire phone.
To compare with Android, vulnerabilities get disclosed in vague terms, like "somebody can craft a special audio file and text you it", but with no specific details, and the users are more concerned with updating their OS to patch the problem as soon as possible; rather than being, "I can crash all my friends' phones! I know exactly how to do it because blogs and YouTube videos are telling me how; and I'll use it to 'prank' as many of my friends as I can before Apple can fix it!"
One reason I'm glad not to be an iPhone user. I'd have to unfriend people IRL if they intentionally abused such a dangerous exploit against me.
In user interface and software design, the principle of least astonishment states that "if a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature." It means that your user interface should behave in a way that the user expects, based on their prior knowledge of how similar interfaces behave.
This is a rant about Mac OS X.
Today I picked up a Macbook Air (13", early 2015 model) because I wanted a new laptop, as my old laptop (the Samsung Series 5) has a horrible battery life, where it barely lasts over an hour and gives up early (powering down at 40% and not coming back up until I plug it in). This is also my first Apple computer. I'm the furthest thing from an Apple fanboy, but the choices I was throwing around in my head were between an Apple computer and a Lenovo Thinkpad.
I was given a Thinkpad as my work laptop, and it's by far the most impressive PC laptop I've ever used; it can drive three displays and run lots of concurrent tasks and has an insane battery life. Every PC laptop I've owned in the past have sucked in comparison. I hear people compare Apple computers to Thinkpads, so that's why the choice came down to one of these, and I didn't want another Thinkpad sitting around the house. ;)
Months before getting a Macbook I was looking into what kind of effort it takes to install Linux on a Macbook. There's a lot of information out there, and most of it suggests that the best way to go is to install a boot manager like rEFIt (or rEFInd, since rEFIt isn't maintained anymore). I saw some pages about not using rEFIt and installing Grub directly, which were from a Debian and Arch Linux perspective, and it sounded really complicated.
It seems that nowadays, with a user friendly Linux distribution like Fedora, a lot of this works much more flawlessly than the dozens of tutorials online would suggest. I just made a Fedora LiveUSB in the usual way (as if installing on a normal PC), rebooted the Macbook while holding the Option key, so that I was able to select the USB to boot from.
When installing Fedora to disk, the process was very much the same as doing it on a normal PC. I let Fedora automatically create the partition layout, and it created partitions and mount points for /, /boot and /home like usual, but it also created a partition and mount point for /boot/efi (for installing itself as the default bootloader in the EFI firmware on the Macbook). After installation was completed, I rebooted and the grub boot screen comes up immediately, with options to boot into Fedora.
One weird thing is, the grub screen apparently sees something related to Mac OS X (there were two entries, like "Mac OS X 32-bit" and "Mac OS X 64-bit", but both options would give error messages when picked).
If I want to boot into OS X, I hold down the Option key on boot and pick the Macintosh HD from the EFI boot menu. Otherwise, if the Macbook boots normally it goes into the grub menu and then Fedora. So, the whole thing is very similar to a typical PC dual-boot setup (with Windows and Linux), just with one extra step to get into OS X.
Update: I'm keeping a wiki page with miscellaneous setup notes and tips here: Fedora on Macbook
What it really means from what I've read is that Google is just not selling the phone themselves directly but it can still be obtained via other means (developers can still buy them and they're still being sold in other countries), but that Google still intends to support the phone for the foreseeable future -- it will still be the first in line to get Android updates, for example.
I have a Nexus One and I like it and this news is a bit worrisome to me, but not in the way you might expect. Rather, because the Nexus One is one of the few Android phones that is truly open.
Apparently, the very first Android phone (the G1), the first Droid, and the Nexus One are pretty much the only Android phones that ship with the stock, vanilla, Android firmware. All the other HTC phones out there for example run the "HTC Sense" UI on top of Android, and the Motorola phones run the "Motoblur" UI; some people don't like these add-ons on top of Android and would rather run Android the way Google intended, using the stock vanilla release of the ROM. Or, some people just like to hack their phones and have root access on them.
The Nexus One phone made it really easy to unlock your bootloader and install custom/unsigned Android ROMs onto the phone if you wanted to (it would even provide a nice screen warning you that you're about to void your warranty). The Nexus One allows you to install whatever you want on it, and both Google and the phone itself fully supports this. But, other phones, notably the Motorola phones that come with an eFuse that will practically "brick" your phone if you try to modify its firmware, aren't so open.
There seems to be a trend in Android phones in which companies are trying to play Apple; Apple's iPhone devices are super locked down, and Apple tries to patch all the security holes to stop people from jailbreaking their devices - with each firmware release Apple tries to make it harder and harder to hack the iPhones. In Apple's ideal world, their hardware would be completely 100% impenetrable from hackers and nobody could modify their devices. It seems Android vendors want to copy this business model, which I for one do not like.
It seems Android vendors are "standing on the shoulders of giants," they look at Android and all they see is a free open source Linux-based mobile operating system, and they wanna just take all that hard work, add a few things to make their devices a major pain in the ass to hack (in their ideal world, absolutely impossible to hack) and then jerk their customers around in exactly the same way that Apple does. Is this really what Android was supposed to be all about? Just giving greedy megacorporations the cheap tools they need to strongarm part of the cell phone monopoly in their favor?
Hopefully the Nexus One won't be the last developer phone that can be bought by non-developers. I got mine specifically because it ran the stock unmodified Android firmware and because it was completely open to customization. As I ranted about before, I don't like how Apple is able to just slow down your old phones and force you to upgrade; at least I have the comfort of knowing I can easily flash any Android ROM onto my Nexus One and nobody can force me to upgrade by slowing my phone down or doing anything else malicious to it.
God help us if this is the future and we're stuck with many Apple-like companies all forcing us to use their locked-down devices that we're not allowed to touch at all for fear of permanently bricking our devices.
I didn't care one way or another about Apple until I got an iPhone 3G about a year ago. I got it about a month before the iPhone 3GS model came out; I heard the 3GS was on its way but nobody knew when, but I figured, "a smartphone is a smartphone, who really cares if mine doesn't have a compass built in?" How wrong I was.
I didn't know then what Apple was planning to do in the following month. Basically, they release the 3.0 firmware upgrade for iPhone 3G users. The new firmware gives the 3G customers a taste of some of the new features and would encourage them to buy the upcoming 3GS phone to get the rest. But, one more thing, the 3.0 firmware slows your shit down! So, the customers who were fine with the 3G and didn't plan to upgrade to the 3GS, now, would probably want to buy the 3GS just because they get sick of the 3G being so slow.
If you take an iPhone 3G running the 2.x firmware and compare it side-by-side with the 3GS phone running the 3.0 firmware... the differences in speed and "snappiness" is negligible.
So basically, the 3G was slowed down, on purpose, and then when the Apple fanboys stopped complaining and got used to this new slowness... Apple releases the iPhone 3GS and "ohh my godd, it's SO fast and snappy!"
I've been telling everyone my prediction for the last year but now I'm writing it for my blog: my prediction is that this upcoming summer 2010, Apple will release the 4.0 iPhone OS firmware upgrade, which will slow down all the 3GS phones (Apple's currently latest model of iPhone), and then this will be followed a week or two later by Apple unveiling the iPhone 4, which will be OH-SO-FAST now compared to the crippled, slowed-down 3GS phones.
Let's just wait and see if I'm right.
For this reason, my iPhone 3G is the first, and last, Apple product I ever intend to own. Well, the only closed device, anyway; I do like the Mac OS X operating system, and with a Macbook you can always reinstall the operating system from the CD that came with your computer. But with locked-down devices, once you make the mistake of upgrading, you can't go back; modern iTunes versions make sure of this: when you try to restore your devices in iTunes now, iTunes insists on getting the very latest firmware from Apple and doesn't let you browse and choose an older firmware image.
Because of the way Apple abuses their iPhone and iPod Touch customers, you'd better believe they'll pull the same shit with iPad customers too. I hope all you iPad early adopters love your iPad now, but just wait and, approximately a year from now there will inevitably be a new model, and Apple will really want to slow your shit down to force you to either deal with the artificial slowness, or pay another $500+ to upgrade to the latest model.
So I'm not a fan of Apple's closed devices. But I'm also not a fan of Apple's policies in terms of their app store approvals and rejections.
It was all over the blogosphere when Apple banned the Google Voice application from the app store, and even started an FCC investigation about whether Apple had any legal right to do so. Why did Apple ban Google Voice? Because it competed with Apple's very own phone application.
Similarly, there have been other apps Apple has killed because Apple is anti-competitive, including an e-mail app that was better than Apple's built-in e-mail app. Apple likes to maintain a complete monopoly--nay, a dictatorship--over its app store, and it would rather completely exterminate any hint of competition than to actually, you know, compete back. If somebody made an e-mail app that kicks the ass of Apple's e-mail app, Apple should make their e-mail app better than the competition; it shouldn't just throw a bitchfit and say "BAWWWWW this app isn't approved for the app store!"
Apple, in this regard, comes off to me as being like an immature little child, who would rather throw the chess board on the floor and scatter all the pieces than to even think about dealing with any form of competition whatsoever.
In the "App Store Competition" boat also sits Adobe Flash. It's highly speculated that the real reason Apple has a vendetta against Flash is because Flash applications can be just as feature-rich, interactive and animated as native iPhone applications. If Mobile Safari had a Flash player, nothing would stop people from creating web applications, that consist of a Flash object, that users could bookmark as Home Screen icons, that would be just as full-featured as native iPhone applications.
Similarly, Apple's latest developer agreement says you must originally write your app in C, C++ or Objective-C. Why did Apple decide to add this clause just now? Because Adobe's latest Flash beta includes the capability to export your Flash application into Objective-C code, which would enable one to basically use Adobe Flash to create iPhone applications.
Apple hates Flash for one reason: it directly competes with the app store and the native iPhone applications. If you could use Flash to create Objective-C code to author iPhone applications, Apple may lose some market share since Mac OS X is no longer required to create iPhone apps, among other things.
Anyway, this is where I stand on my views about Apple. Frankly, Apple is evil, in the sense of the term as it is used in Google's company slogan, "Don't be evil." Apple is this kind of evil.
So, I have no plans to ever own another closed Apple device, and would never consider developing an iPhone application. Nothing could be worse than spending weeks or months developing an application, only to have Apple dictate at the last minute that your app won't be allowed on the app store.
When I get an Android, I'll do Android app development. It has a plus of being Java-based. This means if I decided to make, say, a game, I could program the game once and then very trivially make many different ports of it: a desktop application, "full version" of the game; a Java applet, "try online before you download" light version of the game; and an Android application, "mobile version" of the game.
I know Apple fanboys like to google for anyone talking shit about Apple and I welcome the comments. I just know however from speaking with Apple fanboys I know in real life that they all were fully aware that Apple slows down their old devices (a co-worker fanboy has an iPhone 3G and agreed that it was slowed down with the 3.0 firmware). But, as expected of Apple fanboys, they try to justify it and defend Apple even though Apple is blatantly screwing them over and extorting them for as much money as possible. But by all means, post your comments anyway; entertain me with your blind dedication to Apple and how you believe they could do no wrong.
Because from where I stand, holding my iPhone 3G that takes 40 seconds to load the SMS app from a sleep state (and you 3G users know exactly what I'm talking about), Apple is doing nothing good here.
0.0024s.
