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

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

#151

Post by Cpoll »

anal_reactor wrote: post #63
PufPufPuf wrote: post #20

I think the biggest lesson here is to back up. The reason for losing access to the phone is amazingly dumb but it could have fallen down the stairs for basically the same effect. And do your could backups cross-provider. You never know what the "big players" are going to pull, and your lifetime customer value is less than the cost of a single support call.

This is exactly the reason why I keep all my shit on an SD card despite Google deliberately making the external storage experience as painful as possible: slow access, broken writes, failed unmounts, no filesystem repair. Literally every time I restart my phone I need to put the card to my PC and repair the filesystem. Also, same card works extremely well when plugged into PC via random cheap USB card reader. On PCs…

Your case is obviously not this, but SD cards aren't a great primary drive, as Raspberry Pi power users sometimes discover. Their durability can be unpredictably spotty.

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

#152

Post by abcd_f »

nirava wrote: post #149
abcd_f wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He would've not let the abysmal slop like iOS 26 UI to ship ever. Some things he didn't appear to care much about, the polished UX was his schtick.

I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character). As for iOS 26, no reaso…

You are over-exaggerating.

As much of a snob that Jobs was it's nonsensical to say that he would've knowingly insisted on changes that locked users out from their devices. That's just nonsense. At the very least there would've been a prompt to change the password phrase or some such in upgrade. And if it did happen as an oversight, it would've been patched on the first report and some heads would've rolled.

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

#153

Post by Cpoll »

nirava wrote: post #149
abcd_f wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He would've not let the abysmal slop like iOS 26 UI to ship ever. Some things he didn't appear to care much about, the polished UX was his schtick.

I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character). As for iOS 26, no reaso…

But that's the difference. Jobs might've done something like this for a reason. That's not what happened here. He probably wouldn't have tolerated it as a bug.

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

#155

Post by thaumasiotes »

layer8 wrote: post #78
nasretdinov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unicode was introduced to solve that very problem, and it largely does. In the olden times, even ASCII wasn’t necessarily a safe bet, as many countries used their own slight variation of ASCII. For example, Japan had the Yen sign in place of the backslash. In a fictional ASCII world, Apple could have decided to remove the Yen key from the Japanese lockscreen keyboard.

> Unicode was introduced to solve that very problem, and it largely does.

What? Unicode doesn't address the problem at all. Your emoji password will look completely different depending on the encoding you use. We have multiple popular encodings right now... but instead of software that lets us specify which encoding we want to use to interpret a document, we have software that intentionally prohibits us from doing that because it's supposed to be a security risk.

UTF-8 wasn't introduced to solve the problem of there being multiple encodings of any given text, either. It was introduced to be another encoding.

> In a fictional ASCII world, Apple could have decided to remove the Yen key from the Japanese lockscreen keyboard.

That would have had no effect other than momentary user confusion. In that world, someone with a yen sign in their password would, after the keyboard update, have a backslash in their password, because their password never changed. Only the label changed.

In this world, though, it's still true that the password never changed. But what did change was that Apple implemented specific logic to prevent people from entering that password. The label didn't matter.

(And the article is ambiguous over whether the appearance of the keyboard changed or not. It's not ambiguous over whether the behavior of the keyboard changed -- it didn't:

>> Post-update, when entering the passcode, the keyboard now displays an identical accent mark in the háček's place, a feature Byrne described as "pointless; they're encoded the same."

There may or may not have been a cosmetic change to the keyboard, but there certainly was a change to the behavior of the password field.)

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

#156

Post by miki123211 »

shawnta wrote: post #15
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…

[flagged]

People have had the same issue with broken screens (and not just on iPhone).

Your touch screen stops working. You want to dump the data by plugging it into the computer. To do that, you need to click "approve" or "trust" or whatever on a touch screen. A touch screen which.... stopped working.

We have definitely moved much, much too far towards security on the security vs. convenience tradeoff. We need a "I am not a human rights activist, I neither understand nor need all of this stuff" mode.

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

#157

Post by thaumasiotes »

inglor_cz wrote: post #30

This really reads like a modern Ancient-Greek story about inscrutable gods who suddenly decide to complicate your life for some unclear reason and don't respond to any prayers and rituals. People are afraid of AI, but human organizations can be quite opaque as well. That said, as a Czech, I wouldn't use any accentuated characters in my passwords. Anything beyond 7-bit ASCII is just asking for trouble.

> This really reads like a modern Ancient-Greek story about inscrutable gods who suddenly decide to complicate your life for some unclear reason

If you read the ancient Greek stories, a consistent theme is that, if you offend the gods, they will punish you...

...but they're at least as likely to do it by cursing someone blameless who will then have an effect on you as they are by cursing you directly.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

layer8 wrote: post #78
nasretdinov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unicode was introduced to solve that very problem, and it largely does. In the olden times, even ASCII wasn’t necessarily a safe bet, as many countries used their own slight variation of ASCII. For example, Japan had the Yen sign in place of the backslash. In a fictional ASCII world, Apple could have decided to remove the Yen key from the Japanese lockscreen keyboard.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by throwaway173738 »

Matl wrote: post #143
gambiting wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally a matter of an automated test that sets a password using every character on every possible keyboard type, then tries to type that password in on the lock screen. There's not even that many keyboards, that test would take what, an hour to run?

Right, but this test basically means you can't ever remove a character if it was ever present. I was assuming that you still want to remove it (for some reason) and wondering how to safely test the change.

You create two keyboards and use them both and test them separately. Then you create a keyboard update flow. And you test that. Then you make sure you test that the old keyboard shows until the user changes their password.
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