Android: Worst. Bug. Ever.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=680

by bockris • 18 years ago

90 24 18 years ago

blogs.zdnet.com

jcl3• 18 years ago

Wow... that's pretty bad. I just tried it and it works.

I hope they roll out a fix soon -- it's a little scary to think that each keystroke is going to both the current application and an invisible, root-level command prompt.

kqr2• 18 years ago

But I hope that they don't cut off root access!

jcl3• 18 years ago

I'm curious: What would you do with root access that you can't already do with the phone itself?

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

Luckily I don't type "sudo rm -rf /" or similar things in normal conversation very often...

jcl3• 18 years ago

True, you wouldn't type a delete command in normal conversation, but you have to feel sorry for the guys in the bug report who were running ssh sessions on their phones... They were typing UNIX commands and thus were at a much higher risk of harm.

You wouldn't need the "sudo" -- it's a root-level prompt.

(Hmm... typing "make me a sandwich" unfortunately has no visible effects...)

nostrademons• 18 years ago

Good thing you didn't post this comment from an Android phone... ;-)

zzzmarcus2• 18 years ago

I just tried it as well and... it works. It's pretty scary but has some good prank-potential until they fix it :)

dmpayton• 18 years ago

If I were a malicious person, I'd head to my local T-Mobile store to `rm -rf /`

But I'm not a malicious person, so I'll only reboot it just to check it out.

zzzmarcus2• 18 years ago

Most of what you could hurt is mounted read-only so... probably wouldn't do much harm, but it's a nice thought anyway :)

rms• 18 years ago

I thought it was going to call 911.

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

That would be the second worst. The worst would be if it called 411 when you dialled 911.

kwamenum86• 18 years ago

I guess even Google can't get the whole OS thing right on the first try.

mickt• 18 years ago

This probably isn't Google's fault, it's probably the fault of someone on the T-Mobile team or at HTC who accidently left this running on the OS image put on the phones.

mihasya• 18 years ago

That is nowhere near the worst bug ever. But nice headline attention whoring. Did Michael Arrington guest write?

rshao• 18 years ago

Yeah definitely not. It's not like the girl's ims from the other end executed on the shell.

Seems like it was an easy bug to find and temporarily patch. An official fix will probably come soon.

davidw• 18 years ago

Yeah, this is a little bit worse, for starters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

icey• 18 years ago

Type in "cat" on its own and hit enter. It'll hang the underlying shell until this gets fixed.

You'll need to do this after each reboot of the phone.

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

The worst bug ever is the arithmetic mistake made by a programmer of a FORTRAN program which crashed a probe to Venus. Millions of dollars down the drain just like that, and just a simple programming error.

EliAndrewC• 18 years ago

That may be the most costly bug ever in terms of money, but there have also been a (small) number of human fatalities resulting from software bugs. Those are arguably much worse than the Venus probe.

ropiku• 18 years ago

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25, that caused more damage then erasing a phone.

fauigerzigerk• 18 years ago

So the worst bug ever is being logged in a as root on my own device? I can see why this may not be a good idea, particularly on a phone, but it's certainly not the worst bug ever as far as I'm concerned. This is blown out of proportion.

Android: Worst. Bug. Ever.

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