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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

#421

Post by josu »

tammer wrote: post #417

I encountered a bug a while back — when I would connect to a dial-out call to get onto my company’s conference service from its app, while using a pair of cheap Bluetooth headphones (I’ve upgraded since then!) the mute button didn’t work. As in, the mute button would be clearly activated, but my audio still carried through to the call. As in, I discovered this in quite an embarrassing way. I filed a radar but never g…

I have serious trust issues with mute buttons. I rather not say anything I may regret while the mic is muted.

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

#422

Post by m3kw9 »

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.

Is rarely that they didn’t test it, it was likely caused by a new scenario that they have not thought of that brings out this bug.

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

#423

Post by _t2kx »

dannyw wrote: post #58
0x0 wrote: post #3

That's a pretty huge flaw. Millions if not billions of people can suddenly remotely spy on almost any other ios or mac anywhere in the world, just by knowing their email address or phone number? Perhaps Apple should simply pull the plug on the facetime servers for now.

Perhaps apppe should disable Group FaceTime calls until an update is out.

They have Group FT disabled on the backend for now according to The Verge article about this.

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

#424

Post by asveikau »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #359
whamlastxmas wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's much more likely their code is a mess and it's not super obvious when stuff starts and ends and this is just an unintentional mistake.

You hear this excuse all the time, don't FAANG employ the world's very best developers? Maybe their code is a mess for orthogonal reasons - management, profit-motive? Aside: I thought I'd heard devs have automated analysers that step through and find all possible code paths, allowing complex code to be audited for security issues and such? Presumably that's how these sorts of bugs should be found in testing.

> don't FAANG employ the world's very best developers?

People have to stop putting these types on a pedestal. Some of the least intelligent people I've known have worked for some very big names. You shouldn't trust someone based on who they work for or what name is attached.

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

#425

Post by rjf72 »

kimburgess wrote: post #109

It may be entirely unrelated, however this is the exact sort of behaviour you would expect to see associated with providing compatibility with Australia's newly introduced AABill, or to implement GCHQ's ghost participant proposal ( https://www.lawfareblog.com/principles-more-informed-excepti... ).

The bizarre thing is how little people seem to have paid attention to Snowden. Apple joined the NSA's PRISM program in 2012. [1] PRISM enables the government to access data from participating companies including audio, video, and live chat. I'm linking to Wiki there only as a catalogue of sources. The page itself is useless and has overtly fake (though at least mildly amusing) quotes from Google. There's no need for new bills for these sort of issues to be a concern.

I also tend to agree with you that this is not necessarily related to these programs. The reason I mention this at all is because I think there is a reasonable chance that this is related, that this overall issue is very important, and that the amount of cognitive dissonance on this is surprising and regressive. These programs are real. Companies facilitating access, including real time, to your data and "private" conversations is real. And it seems to only be getting worse. Yet people seem to convince themselves otherwise, including throughout this thread. Part of the reasons these programs are able to carry on mostly unchallenged is because people convince themselves that what is happening, is not.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#M...

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

#426

Post by dreamcompiler »

brownbat wrote: post #345
yalok wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it’s an unfortunate combination of several problems: - audio and video capture has to start going before call is actually established at signaling level, in order to minimize call establishment delay. Audio maybe going through Bluetooth, for example, and waking up Handsfree mode of BT may take 1-2 sec - most of the group calling functionality was developed by a separate team, and group calling signal…

They were trying to reduce a latency and accidentally made it negative.

> They were trying to reduce a latency and accidentally made it negative.

Ha! Facetime is now a non-causal filter.

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

#428

Post by hi5eyes »

neya wrote: post #336
npunt wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock manipulation perhaps? Happens a lot with Tesla apparently, short sellers will pump up any negative story and try to get it into press. This person was making several attempts to get in contact with press after all, and a story about a teenager finding a big privacy bug in a company that publicly touts its privacy chops has ‘news at 11’ written all over it. Personally I think a bug report story is not a particul…

Is it still called stock manipulation if the bug is critical and for real and the company deserves to lose shareholder value simply for the critical nature of the bug? Imagine how many people are vulnerable out there - I'm already starting to read some complaints on the internet that some people were unknowingly sharing a video of them taking a shower, etc.

you have to admit it is at least slightly curious the bug received attention only recently since today $aapl is set to report their earnings

odd that this is so recent and the twitter account is so fresh, with so many facetime sessions esp with ios being popular among those in infosec

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

#429

Post by NegativeLatency »

jasallen wrote: post #390
brownbat wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were trying to reduce a latency and accidentally made it negative.

"negative latency". That's a Jobs worthy dodge right there.

It's weird seeing my username come up in a comment.

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

#430

Post by spockz »

heywire wrote: post #353
tuxxy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fee years ago, I discovered that if someone was running dual monitors and using XScreenlock, you could unplug one of the monitors and it would bypass the lock screen. I have no idea if this is still possible, I've not used XScreenlock since then.

On Windows 10, if you have dual screens and unplug one while the screen is locked, it will reconfigure the displays and give you a flash of what was under the lock screen. Hope you didn't leave anything sensitive on your screen!

I’ve noticed this as well on my MacBook with an external screen actually. Also sometimes when resuming from sleep..
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