Reader Karl writes in to let us know his twelve year old son discovered a glitch in SMS security:
Being security conscious he turned on the passcode lock and disabled SMS Preview. [...] If a message is received during the passcode entry or while the screen is locked, a generic message of “New Text Message” appears, to prevent viewing of messages without unlocking the phone. [...] If however the phone is placed in emergency call mode, any incoming SMS messages are previewed instead of presented as the generic messages.
Next comes two issues concerning the implementation choices Apple made in the iPhone Mobile Mail client. According to Ars Technica, as disclosed by Aviv Raff, the first involves the way Mail truncates URLs for display on the iPhone. If a malicious URL is properly crafted by an attacker, the truncation can cause a fake URL to be non-obvious to the users, and thus more likely to result in phishing.
The second results from the lack of an option to display images in the full HTML Mobile Mail client. Since images are automatically displayed, spammers can gain confirmation that the email account that received it is active and ripe for spam attack.
As always, malicious attacks evolve and propagate at an alarming rate, and while we hope Apple fixes these immediately if not sooner, the onus is ultimately and always on we end users to pay attention and do everything we can to avoid them.
tsopanos emails in and points us to this iPhone Hellas story. Yes, it is literally Greek to us (groan), so here’s a Google Translation.
Here’s the scoop: the Data Meter on the iPhone is very helpful for letting you know how much data you’ve used, as Rene pointed out a few weeks ago. Sadly: it’s not a “Cellular Network Data” meter proper, apparently. Tsopanos has figured out that if you play around with the Access Point Name (that’s APN to the rest of us, and no, AT&T owners won’t see that setting under General -> Network), you can get that meter to return false information on 2.0.2.
More specifically, if you ‘break’ your APN by changing or screwing around with those settings and then go back and browse any data you have cached on your browser, email, or maps, the iPhone believes all that is more data that’s been downloaded over the cellular network. What this means is that the Cellular Data Meter might actually be double-dipping when your APN is right, i.e. counting locally cached data as cellular data. We’re not sure yet as we don’t have an iPhone with editable-APN sitting around — browsing cached data while in Airplane mode doesn’t seem to register.
Yeah, it’s a esoteric bug and yeah, at least that bug errs on the side of caution by showing you potentially more data than you’ve actually downloaded. Still, something we’re hoping will get a fix.
Thanks, Tsopanos!
So Dieter wrote up a review of Google Translate’s shiny new, iPhone optimized WebApp, and it intrigued me enough to check it out. Since I live in Montreal, French was the first language I decided to try out. Since I’m damaged and have issues that would make Lucy jack her price up to 50 cents, the very first thing I tried to translate was: “leave me alone.”
And what did Google Translate’s WebApp say “leave me alone” was in French? “leave me alone”. Oui-mais-wha?
Curious, I went from MobileSafari to desktop Safari, and what did translate.google.com tell me? “leave me alone”. German didn’t work either. Spanish and Dutch, however, did.
Kicker: “me dejen solo” from Spanish to French? You guessed it! “leave me alone”.
Well, if I ever get pounced on by our local language police, I can always try to tell them Google says “leave me alone” is perfectly acceptable French!
(For the record, Yahoo! Babel Fish actually offers a translation, if somewhat formally: “laissez-moi seul”)
Is this a known bug? I silent plea for help from an overworked Googler? A strange Babylonian plot? Or just one of many glitches in the system?
Have you run into any crazy Google mistranslations?
So it’s been a day since 2.0.1 was made available and we at TiPb would like to know how it’s been running on your iPhone. Did this bug-fixer of an update actually fix any bugs? Or are we all getting suckered into believing that the update has made things snappier? Pains in the update process? Backups faster? Apps Crashing? Or are things just less sucky? Maybe you completely avoided the update..anything and everything, we want to know!
Personally, things have “felt” a little bit smoother. Contacts load noticeably quicker but my SMS is still a good couple of seconds too long. No crashes to report yet but I did have one ginormously big hiccup after updating: the mail app crashed on launch. I had to completely restore and set up my iPhone as a new iPhone which was more than mildly annoying, to put it lightly. So other than that, YAY 2.0.1. Woot.
So TiPb faithful, how is 2.0.1 treating you?
Here at TiPb, we’ve all had bugs with the leaked 2.0 update and, like the rest of the interw00ts, we’re also not getting Mobile Me working reliably since it went live yesterday. Thankfully, Apple has fessed up and admitted that the transition from .Mac has “taken longer than expected” (per Engadget).
The Mobile Me desktop login just worked for me for the first time just now, this morning. I’m successfully pushing data out, but I’m not about to start depending on it for real work. Is it working for you?
So we know that jailbreaking 1.1.3 is possible (but a bit of a pain), but now we’re also hearing that the pain doesn’t necessarily stop once you’ve finished the jailbreak. Gizmodo is reporting on various issues including the breakage of Google Location and of various native apps. The latter isn’t too surprising, as there are lots of internal changes in 1.1.3 that seem to be getting the iPhone ready for official apps. How’s that? Well most applications don’t run as root and there’s even a hidden application key that programs will need to run. (That last means that hackers might someday be able to provide native apps without resorting it iTunes)
If all that doesn’t scare you and you haven’t updated to 1.1.3 yet, a couple of 13-year-olds have released an over-the-air solution for you over at http://ijailbreak.com/. 1.1.3 folks will need to downgrade to take advantage of it, though.
Sadly,the issues don’t appear to be limited to just people who are hacking away at their iPhones. Folks are noticing that 1.1.3 seems to be dropping calls and handing Bluetooth poorly (though there are some ugly fixes for that).
You? How’s 1.1.3 been treating ya?
