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.
With the advent of the App Store where you can download AIM for free, there is now a way to send SMS messages for free. This method is brought to you by Jeff Carlson of Tidbits.com and will comprise this week’s Tip! (Important note: the following method is only proven to work in the U.S.)
When I picked up my shiny black iPhone 3G last Friday, I knew I was going to have to pay the inevitable rate increase for data (another $10 smackers a month). I also knew I would (hissing a curse under my breath) lose my built-in 200 text messages per month. AT&T’s SMS packages offer a laughable range of offerings: $5 a month for 200 messages, then an Olympian leap to $15 for 1500 messages and $20 for unlimited. What, no room for $10 a month for, say, 750 or 1000 messages? But I digress.
The basic idea goes thusly: AIM (and thus your AIM app on your iPhone) is able to send free text messages by sending them to +13522225555 (or whatever the phone number is). There’s a bit more to it, of course, so be sure to click on through and read Carlson’s walkthrough.
(Post updated since publication by request)
We already told you that 1.1.3 hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be, but one of the issues with the ROM slipped by us. Namely: some people have been experiencing SMS messages getting listed out of order. Threaded text is the best thing since, well, SMS, but it doesn’t do much good if your texts are all out of order.
The problem arises when you don’t have your iPhone’s clock set to update automatically from the network time and your iPhone thinks it’s one time, the carrier another. So presumably the SMS app lists incoming texts by their carrier-based timestamp and yours by the internal timestamp — a mismatch means out of order texts.
The fix - turn on automatic updating and deal with whatever hassles that might bring you if you travel between time zones a lot.
(via Engadget Mobile)
