161–170 of 237 posts
Just interns pushing to prod without any review? What the hell is going on in the software industry?
Such mistakes a trillion dollar company can not allow to happen.
Surprised that no one commented on the clever title!
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…
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Won’t that wipe all the user data?
He can upgrade, but not downgrade, for security integrity.
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Won’t that wipe all the user data?
He can upgrade, but not downgrade, for security integrity.
If I burn someone’s wallet and throw the ashes to the wind nobody can pickpocket them for it. Secure.
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.
> 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. As a non-English speaker (Czech, actually), it is clear to me to not use non-ASCII characters in passwords, or generally not use characters that are at different position on default English keyboard and locally used keyboards, i.e. use only ASCII alphanumeric chars excep…
Do you think most users know this?
Also, most devices nowadays ARE single user. And most (all?) OSes allow you to use alternative keyboards at the user-selection screen.
Also, all orgs recommend special characters in passwords. Czech keyboards default to accented letters on the top row instead of numbers, so why wouldn't your average Czech use those?
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He can upgrade, but not downgrade, for security integrity.
Doesn't this mean that no matter how securely your phone is locked, Apple (and probably the three-letter agencies) can always unlock it by installing an appropriate update?
BUT you must trust the entire Apple trusted chain to protect you.
That is a rather big BUT.
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I doubt that. The group of people you're talking about are those who have their phone maliciously stolen by people who are actively working to hack/exploit their way into the devices and then actively exploit the information stored on them. That is a utterly negligible percent of users, or even of users who have their phone stolen. The overwhelming majority of thieves of intent move the devices onto professional orgs…
In this world stolen iPhones are mostly worthless because they can’t easily be wiped without the password. In your world, they could be. I imagine iPhone thefts would go way up. They’re worth $1000 and we just carry them everywhere - if they were easily resellble it would be a very obvious quick-money theft opportunity.
I don't know for certain why thieves are generally not typically interested in abusing user data, but I'd imagine it's because the penalties if caught would go way up. That'd go from what is generally just petty theft, which carries a slap on the wrist, to wire fraud and a whole slew of other charges, which can leave people spending most of the rest of their life in prison.
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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 th…
> 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.
No. The analogon to TFA would be that the old keyboard would have a Yen key and no backslash key, and the new keyboard would have no Yen key and still no backslash key. The point is that the Yen key would be removed because its character code is not part of the shared common subset of ASCII. ASCII doesn’t imply that you have a keyboard capable of entering all 128 codes. Just like Unicode doesn’t imply that your keyboard allows you to input arbitrary code points.