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FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

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Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#31

Post by zozbot123 »

aphextron wrote: post #26
NelsonMinar wrote: post #13

I'm always curious how a bug like this ships. I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure. But even before then. Some engineer wrote code for FaceTime that has it open the microphone before the call is accepted. And transmit the audio over the network before the call is accepted. Who did that? And why? I'm not suggesting malice but I do wonder at the lack of defensive programming.

Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward similarities to.... other dynamic languages I feel has led to a rot in the core of what was once a rock solid culture of embedded C/C++/Objective-C programmers building robust, well architected applications. The average Apple app today is just as buggy and disjoint…

What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift - which was the whole point of making a new language, albeit Swift itself is not quite as well-developed, highly-performing or safe as, e.g. Rust.

I think it's programming practices themselves that have fallen off a cliff, at least in the non-FLOSS world, and nothing specific to Apple. You can even see this in the dumpster-fire that's popularly known as "Windows 10", as well as in the latest versions of Mac OS X which are a lot slower and less user-friendly than their predecessors.

Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#32

Post by ummonk »

preinheimer wrote: post #10

As an apple user I'm concerned. I hope it doesn't turn out that Apple has known about this for weeks/months/whatever. On the upside I have a lot of confidence that they can fix this, and that I can receive that patch in a timely fashion.

They said later this week, which seems surprisingly untimely given the severity of this bug.

Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#33

Post by [deleted] »

aphextron wrote: post #26
NelsonMinar wrote: post #13

I'm always curious how a bug like this ships. I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure. But even before then. Some engineer wrote code for FaceTime that has it open the microphone before the call is accepted. And transmit the audio over the network before the call is accepted. Who did that? And why? I'm not suggesting malice but I do wonder at the lack of defensive programming.

Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward similarities to.... other dynamic languages I feel has led to a rot in the core of what was once a rock solid culture of embedded C/C++/Objective-C programmers building robust, well architected applications. The average Apple app today is just as buggy and disjoint…

[deleted]

Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#34

Post by giancarlostoro »

0x0 wrote: post #7
xfitm3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is assuming there is no possible server side mitigation.

Even if there is a server side mitigation, it's a big black eye to have devices being remotely tappable with no user interaction. The devices are obviously not trustworthy anymore with the current software, and you are at the mercy of apple's servers. So a spying apple could always undo the server side mitigation (if even this is mitigatable server side). It's also a wakeup call to see that it is even possible for de…

I mean, you can disable Facetime:

https://www.imore.com/how-to-turn-on-off-restrict-facetime-i...

So I wouldn't get all the tinfoil over this matter, I would probably disable Facetime if I were most people though. Then it's likely to only be an issue of audio being streamed, much less horrible than inappropriate video streaming. I would hope they roll out a server-sided fix initially. "If calling user, if user ads themselves to group call, hang up group call" or some silly logic. I rather see that first, and then the client-side fix.

Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#36

Post by aphextron »

zozbot123 wrote: post #31
aphextron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward similarities to.... other dynamic languages I feel has led to a rot in the core of what was once a rock solid culture of embedded C/C++/Objective-C programmers building robust, well architected applications. The average Apple app today is just as buggy and disjoint…

What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift - which was the whole point of making a new language, albeit Swift itself is not quite as well-developed, highly-performing or safe as, e.g. Rust. I think it's programming practices themselves that have fallen off a cliff, at least in the non-FLOSS world, and nothing specific to Apple. You can even see this in the dumpster-fire that's popularly known as "Windows 10",…

>What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift

Sure, that could be argued. But with Objective-C, you still had exposure to the "metal". You had to understand what a pointer is, and why you would want to use it. You had to understand memory management, even though ARC does the job (mostly). It was firmly entrenched in the world of memory efficient embedded programming that mobile started out as, but now that developers coming from Javascript/Python land see a familiar syntax they've brought their patterns with them as well.

Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#37

Post by Someone1234 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #13

I'm always curious how a bug like this ships. I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure. But even before then. Some engineer wrote code for FaceTime that has it open the microphone before the call is accepted. And transmit the audio over the network before the call is accepted. Who did that? And why? I'm not suggesting malice but I do wonder at the lack of defensive programming.

It reminds me of this MacOS bug from last year, where simply hitting the login box over and over with no password would eventually bypass the security entirely:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/root_access_bypass_...

And this other MacOS bug, also from last year, where the password hint would contain the plain text encryption password:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/05/apple_patches_passw...

All within a month of each other.

Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up

#39

Post by throwawaymjabba »

I would like to bring up something that happened to someone I know during WhatsApp call. Person A was in US and person B in India and were audio calling through Whastapp on something work related. Person A starts hearing someone else on his side, nothing unexpected on Bs side. A started a new call and everything was fine. A said it reminded him of the crosstalk that was common during the landline days. Could it be a bug or was someone listening and forgot to turn off their mic? No idea.
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