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Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

theregister.com

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Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#51

Post by thephyber »

The side of my brain that manages organizational changes wonders: how does Apple, a 50 year old company of tens of thousands of engineers and over a trillion USD market cap, manage to keep feature velocity high while not making more of these types of errors?

The bug seems low likelihood but high severity for the few affected users. Other than simply never changing the login keyboard (or any of the keyboard code) or having nearly 100% test coverage, how does a company not accidentally have more of these types of issues?

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#52

Post by jakeinspace »

tomaskafka wrote: post #47
nasretdinov wrote: post #11

As a non-English speaker I can really relate to this. I think the real mistake was Apple allowing to enter a non-ASCII password in the first place. E.g. on macOS the password fields have been locked to English character set, and I'm not sure why it changed on iOS.

Are you aware that billions of people live in countries where they could go on the whole life without seeing an ascii letter?

That's not really true in any country these days.

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#53

Post by compounding_it »

thephyber wrote: post #51

The side of my brain that manages organizational changes wonders: how does Apple, a 50 year old company of tens of thousands of engineers and over a trillion USD market cap, manage to keep feature velocity high while not making more of these types of errors? The bug seems low likelihood but high severity for the few affected users. Other than simply never changing the login keyboard (or any of the keyboard code) or h…

They do. It’s just that the people using these devices won’t go public with it. I’ve seen so many bizarre bugs in my own experience but I’ve gotten zero articles on them by popular tech journals.

This bug got popularity that’s all.

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#54

Post by stevage »

RobotToaster wrote: post #40
Matl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you and don't really get what Apple gets from removing a valid Czech character, but how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users? The one way to do this that I could see is to include both the new keyboard and the old one and if someone fails to unlock with the new one auto report that to Apple (not the code, just that the unlock failed a…

> how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users? You basically can't ever remove an available character. That includes emojis if they're allowed in IOS passwords.

Probably the better solution is to include some kind of special lock-screen keyboard that provides some fallback mechanism to input any character. Presumably there are similar edge cases where someone creates a password using one keyboard, then switches keyboard layout, and now can't re-enter it using the active layout...

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#55

Post by Matl »

jakeinspace wrote: post #52
tomaskafka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that billions of people live in countries where they could go on the whole life without seeing an ascii letter?

That's not really true in any country these days.

Regardless, why should a Vietnamese person be forced to restrict their password to ASCII? If you want to sell your devices in a country, the least you can do is to adopt to the local market. I get that Western cultural dominance makes this hard for some, but I think it should be the bare minimum.

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#56

Post by Matl »

halapro wrote: post #27
userbinator wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "real mistake" is changing things that used to work.

You can use emojis as passwords, do you think that's a good idea? They work now, there's a good chance that they won't be the same forever. See what happened to the family emojis

I think there's a distinction to be made between 'is it a good idea for someone informed enough to know how these things go in the real world?' i.e. the HN audience and 'should this be a real worry in a sane world?' to which I say no, it shouldn't be a worry that if I was allowed to enter a password today I may not be able to tomorrow.

That's just excuses for moronic decisions of trillion dollar companies.

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#57

Post by cedws »

nikanj wrote: post #48
bpavuk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

afaik you can update your locked iPhone with a Mac or Windows in iTunes... but it will still require a passcode after update, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nope, the ”trust this computer” dialog needs you to enter your passcode before any other actions are possible

Probably the only hope is jailbreaking.

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#58

Post by lapcat »

userbinator wrote: post #8

after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"? In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone…

> Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?

I don't think we can assume the team is large.

Re: Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

#59

Post by red_admiral »

nasretdinov wrote: post #32
trinix912 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why should non-English speaking users be forced to use an ASCII password if the rest of the OS supports their language just fine?

If you remember what was the encodings situation before UTF-8 became the norm... Let's say it was really ugly. E.g. there were at least two popular encodings for Russian Cyrillic letters — CP1251 and KOI8-R, and it was _very_ common for applications getting it wrong. Restricting things like passwords (and ideally even file names) to ASCII this was a practical necessity rather than an inconvenience.

It was hard enough to spell Français correctly.
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