Saturday, November 8, 2008

Best. Bug. Ever.

The other day we talked about mobile devices for administrators. Today I read about a particularly amazing bug on the Google Android platform that you might be interested seeing.

According to that article, certain firmwares (1.0 TC4-RC29 and below) spawn a hidden terminal window that accepts all keystrokes as commands. *ALL* keystrokes.

The person who discovered the bug was in the middle of explaining to his girlfriend why he had to reboot his phone when his phone rebooted again. Because he typed the word reboot. Good thing he wasn't explaining the various uses of the 'rm' command.

Now THAT is a bug. By the way, the best workaround (aside from updating the firmware) is to edit init.rc and take out the lines at the end that spawn the shell.