The other day my friend Alice (not real name) attempted a FaceTime call to Bob. To both our surprise my phone rang with a FaceTime call from Alice (and as far as we know, Bob never received the call). Holding both our phones together, Alice phone was showing a call to Bob while my phone was showing a call from Alice. A very strange fluke which makes me wonder how robust the FaceTime code is.
FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
41–50 of 458 posts
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would this be any more reputationally damaging than the numerous other bugs with iPhone behavior? It’s not like iPhones have a reputation for not having bugs; it seems like every version has a passcode bypass or a DoS-via-iMessage. By some standards, this is worse (remotely triggerable, leaks audio/video), but in other cases it’s not as bad: the attacker’s Apple ID ends up in the call logs of the affected person.…
> Why would this be any more reputationally damaging than the numerous other bugs with iPhone behavior? Oh I don't know, someone denied the call because they're possibly in the shower, or other inappropriate moments. Oh look now they're naked on a video call... Yikes!
I feel like you're answering a different question that I asked. I don't think the bug is low-severity.
I'm asking:
Is there any historical evidence that high-severity bugs in iPhones (or really any mobile phone) are reputationally damaging, sufficiently that Apple would worry about the impact of this bug?
I'm not aware of any instance in the past where a high-sev iPhone bug had noticable long-term impact. This is similar to other issues, like the Sony PSN hack, where despite the gravity of the issue, everything continued long-term as if nothing had happened.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#43Imagine, all this time Five Eyes actually had a way of breaching privacy and they only started making noise about access enablement recently because they knew someone was going to report the vulnerability to Apple.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 deve…
So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? I don’t think that follows.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#45I'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.
This is a form of speculation which increases performance in the common case where the call is accepted.
I always wondered why FaceTime Audio has almost zero call establishment time on iOS, as opposed to WhatsApp or FB Messenger where you need to wait half a second before the audio feed kicks in after answering. Guess this is the reason!
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#46The other day my friend Alice (not real name) attempted a FaceTime call to Bob. To both our surprise my phone rang with a FaceTime call from Alice (and as far as we know, Bob never received the call). Holding both our phones together, Alice phone was showing a call to Bob while my phone was showing a call from Alice. A very strange fluke which makes me wonder how robust the FaceTime code is.
Not sure if this was intentional but in security, Alice and Bob wre the names in hypotheticals for the attacker and unwitting victim since the RSA paper.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#47I'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…
Not Apple related, but you could log into any linux box using a specific few versions of grub2 by hitting backspace 28 times: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpdqz/hack-into-...
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#48I just called my friend who was already on a call talking to his brother. He could hear me and his brother but his brother and I couldn't hear each other.
I was also able to call him, have him hang up and then see his video and hear his audio. He couldn't hear me, but I could hear and see everything.
I'm turning my phone off tonight!
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#49Earlier 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…
You need to integrate the famous iTunes into this thesis. (people have complained about it approximately since it was released)
>> people have complained about it approximately since it was released
and I ain't gonna stop complaining until I find a suitable music player to replace it!
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 deve…
So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? I don’t think that follows.
>So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened?
Yes. But it has nothing to do with pointers specifically, just the mindset and training of the average developer who has had experience with them, vs. the average developer who has not.
There's an entire generation of developers now graduating from CS programs, hiring into Apple, and getting dumped on these application teams with zero real world experience and their only language being Python or Swift. The result is you have tons of brilliant people who can quickly whip up a DFS algorithm, but don't understand that using 4MB of RAM for a JPEG is unnacceptable, or that whatever dynamic thing they are asking the runtime to do might not always work as intended. That's why we get these massive feature lists nobody asked for with every iOS release, and zero emphasis on performance.