Disqus
A strange yet somewhat shocking bug has been discovered in the G1 firmware RC29 and below. When I read about it I simply had to report on it. The bug interprets text entries as system commands which are then executed with superuser privileges! Crazy!
A bug report sent in to Google outlined the issue:
I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded. I had just rebooted my phone and the first thing I typed was a response to her text which simply stated “Reboot” – which, to my surprise, rebooted my phone.
Imagine the level of frustration after encountering this. You for whatever reason type ‘reboot’ into your device, and bam, your device actually reboots! I can picture my reaction to the event…it would probably be a stunned silence, followed by 2 or 3 more test ‘reboots’ to confirm the issue… Then the silence would turn to a few vulgarities and perhaps a few calls to some friends to rant about the issue.
To see for yourself if you’re vulnerable, from the home screen select Menu > Settings > About phone, and look for the Build number. If you see this: kila-user 1.0 TC4-RC29 115247 ota-rel-keys,release-keys, then you are vulnerable. Anything later than RC29 will be ‘fixed’.
Have RC29 or earlier and want to test it out? First, make sure you save anything you’re working on. Don’t want to lose anything here. Second, pop open the keyboard tray and ignore anything you see onscreen… Then type these 8 keystrokes: <return>-r-e-b-o-o-t-<return>. Your device should reboot if you’re running RC29 or earlier.
What a horrible bug! But don’t let this get you down, a new firmware update (RC30) is being rolled out to G1 owners to fix the issue… I hope!
[Via: ZDNet]
About The Author
James Falconer
James was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. Almost 15 years ago he started out in the 'real world' as a web and graphic designer. Through the years he has finely tuned his skills in SEO, internet marketing, conversion strategy, and project management. To date, he runs his own successful consulting business where he advises companies all over the globe. A co-founder of www.crackberry.com, and sole proprietor of www.mactropolis.com, James in recent years has become very active in the tech blogosphere. Online community building and strategy is fast becoming one of his passions. Watch for James' no frills attitude, unique perspective and to-the-point comments here on IntoMobile!
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