Apple has past mastered using animation to aid both usability and fill transitions. An example of the latter is the “shrink” effect used when you hit the home button: whatever’s currently on diminishes to nothingness and the home screen icons fly back into place. To do this effect, however, the iPhone takes a quick screen shot, and then uses the built in CoreGraphics/Animation layers to rapidly scale it down.
See the problem? No? Wired does: once a screenshot is taken, even if the iPhone immediately deletes it, those bits hang around inside your device. Current recommendations to properly destroy data involve multiple, pseudo-random overwrites. Absent that, forensics experts can often retrieve so-called “deleted” files. Including the screen shots the iPhone uses for animation. Including, potentially, any confidential or classified documents you were viewing — or embarrassing Hello Kitty sites you were browsing –when you hit the home button.
Sure, this will likely never be a problem to most users. Passwords are obscured and not many of us have docs — or look at sites — that would be worth the significant forensic resources it would take to recover iPhone screenshot files.
But, a security/privacy concern is a security/privacy concern, and while this one doesn’t trouble me personally, not knowing about it — and making an informed decision based on knowing about it — would.
And hey, at least it’s not as tattly as Google Chrome…
The iPhone OS, like its big Mac brother, has a lot of little tools, preferences, and settings, some explicitly surfaced, others hidden away. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) brings us one of each this week!
First up, by way of RipDev’s molecular decomposition of the code (either that or a well-placed source…) is a way to enable screen capture on your jailbroken iPhone:
After setting the preference in /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist, just restart Springboard and use the following super-secret key combination: Hold down the Home key and toggle the mute switch. Your screen flashes white, a screen shot appears on your camera roll. [...] If you’d rather not edit your property lists directly, add http://repository.ripdev.com as an Installer repository and install Apple Screenshot Enabler. Warning: trying to remove the mod via Installer.app caused my phone to reboot. It just would not uninstall properly.
Next, for our international readers who may want to use their own TLD (top level domain such as .ca, .uk, .de, etc.) rather than the standard .com, here’s a way to internationalize your Safari Touch keyboard:
In settings, choose General > Keyboards and enable some of those international keyboards. Next go to Safari and start to enter a new URL. Tap the globe to switch the active keyboard from US English to some other nationality. [...] Finally, tap and hold the .com button. After a second, a regionalized version of .com appears just to the left of the default.
Hit the links for more and If anyone gives them a try, let us know how they work (or don’t) for you!
