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A persistent denial of service vulnerability affecting iOS

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Re: A persistent denial of service vulnerability affecting iOS

#31

Post by prox »

userbinator wrote: post #21
sodality2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine anyone would disagree with 1024 characters.

"But that doesn't fit in a byte; why not make it 64k instead so it's 2 bytes?" "Why not 1023?" "Even 1023 is too long, I don't think anyone would need that." "What if ?" "How about 32?" Having been in a few meetings that went in that direction, I am not surprised that they couldn't agree on a limit. "Design by committee" at its worst.

Another team that didn’t read nor adapted practices from About Face : on interaction design. What the team wants is irrelevant, how the user will adopt it is important, and for that you need to actually do tests.

Re: A persistent denial of service vulnerability affecting iOS

#32

Post by viktorcode »

Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Why didn’t they add a string limit?

Don't know, but in general arbitrarily set limits are bad. Note, the bug is not in the long name. The bug is in the inability of system services to handle a long device name. That I imagine is hard to fix, but this is exactly what needs fixing. Limiting the name length is akin to band aid.

Re: A persistent denial of service vulnerability affecting iOS

#33

Post by codeisawesome »

mjsweet wrote: post #29
sebastien_b wrote: post #9

There are so many bugs in iOS that are years old and still unfixed. One example is the cellular-data draining bug[1]. The only "solution" for this is to wipe your device, and set it up again, without restoring any backups, at all. Which makes the whole point of backups of the device totally pointless. For a company that spent $6B+ on a (now mostly empty) campus, you'd think they could spare a few $million into proper…

I had to do this last year. Three calls to Apple Support... in the end I just wiped the phone and started over. The first time in 10 years. I was burning through my entire quota in 20 days and then racking up $10 per Gb over the quota with Optus. Very frustrating.

Happened to me as well just a month or two ago! A total reset was the only fix…

Re: A persistent denial of service vulnerability affecting iOS

#34

Post by userbinator »

viktorcode wrote: post #32
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Why didn’t they add a string limit?

Don't know, but in general arbitrarily set limits are bad. Note, the bug is not in the long name. The bug is in the inability of system services to handle a long device name. That I imagine is hard to fix, but this is exactly what needs fixing. Limiting the name length is akin to band aid.

In theory I would agree, but in practice (which is different from theory, as the classic saying goes), I disagree; I have another comment here about the perils of debating limits, but I don't think designing the system to handle 500,000-character names would be a good thing either, because we know from experience that if something can be abused, it will. Needlessly making something "limitless" is an invitation to test that --- and in the real world, we know that there definitely are limits even if they are as volatile as "available memory"; and doing something like that is not good for reliability.

Re: A persistent denial of service vulnerability affecting iOS

#35

Post by kmlx »

sebastien_b wrote: post #9

There are so many bugs in iOS that are years old and still unfixed. One example is the cellular-data draining bug[1]. The only "solution" for this is to wipe your device, and set it up again, without restoring any backups, at all. Which makes the whole point of backups of the device totally pointless. For a company that spent $6B+ on a (now mostly empty) campus, you'd think they could spare a few $million into proper…

i haven’t restored a backup on a new iphone in years. i was doing it for a while and always ran into issues. there were so many issues each time i restored that i simply didn’t have time for all the bs. since i stopped restoring everything went back to normal. now i just buy a new iphone every couple of years and simply set it up as new.
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