“More details surrounding the major FaceTime eavesdropping bug that 9to5Mac exclusively reported on yesterday are emerging,” Michael Potuck reports for 9to5Mac.
“A woman has claimed that her teenage son discovered the flaw and warned Apple about it last week,” Potuck reports. “Now a video has surfaced as evidence for the teenager’s discovery dated January 23rd.”
Potuck reports, “While Apple works on a patch, it has taken Group FaceTime offline for the time being.”
One of many emails sent to Apple 1 week ago attempting to report the Group FaceTime bug. @cnbc @cnn @foxnews @9to5mac pic.twitter.com/l9IFMZmKh6
— Michele Thompson ☀️ (@MicheleT_inAZ) January 29, 2019
https://twitter.com/BEASTMODE/status/1090298850764644352
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Maybe the bug report went into the same black hole where Apple Maps corrections go to be compacted into nothingness.
Apple’s like a diamond. It looks great from the outside to passersby, but experts can clearly see that it’s shot through with obvious, glaring, systemic flaws.
Apple’s eavesdropping problem – a number of users have been able to use FaceTime’s app, specifically the group call function, to listen in on other people’s phones without them knowing, @joefryer reports. pic.twitter.com/qr0LD8u2Vp
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) January 29, 2019
SEE ALSO:
Apple, champion of ‘privacy,’ utterly blows it with massively stupid FaceTime bug – January 29, 2019
Apple to patch audio bug in FaceTime that allows users to hear audio and see video from users who have not yet accepted a call – January 29, 2019
Apple CEO Cook calls for U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation in TIME op-ed – January 17, 2019
Apple CEO Cook promotes privacy as ‘fundamental human right’ via tweetstorm; asks ‘What kind of world do we want to live in?’ – October 24, 2018
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
We’re talking days here, not weeks, and they have turned off the feature. Problems like this aren’t always a couple of lines of code to fix. It isn’t always obvious what causes the problem. Suppose the problem is a hardware glitch in a device Apple doesn’t make? Suppose the problem surfaced after a firmware update to the device that now has to be backed out of some god awful number of of these devices?
Ha! Suppose Apple inadvertently activated Chinese spying code!
If they could just press a button to fix the problem I’m sure they would. Keep in mind if they rushed a fix out and broke something else, they’d never hear the end of that either.
@thelonious
Yeah, we hear ya, but things like this have become synonymous with Tim Cook’s Apple.
Cook talks big on privacy, but it’s all drag. He sells all our personal information to Google each year for billions.
He also ran off all the good Apple developers years ago, because they didn’t want to take part in destroying the Mac, they didn’t want to carry Rose Gold iPhones, and they refused to march in pride parades wearing tiger striped shorts.
Zerorandy has a one-track fear of homosexuals. This rant has nothing to do with reality. I suggest that he starts by examining his own sexuality.
Ignorant people that think things can be fixed with a push of a button. Probably many things that can be broke if not fixed correctly! Then patches will be needed to fix the patch like Microsoft!
There are many kinds of bugs and programming errors in due course of programming. I get it. But this particular one does not appear to be a normal bug. Unlike any such bugs that appear in the normal course of the programming, it is so obvious that it is a failure of software quality control, the final debugging and checks to see if it functions as programmed. For quite some time, a complaisant has been setting in many places of Apple.
There is a difference between “did nothing” – and didn’t respond to the sender. Reliable sources tell me that they immediately jumped into action, assigning a special task force to the issue.
There are some places that have privacy laws to prevent you from eavesdropping on others without consent. Just because year old can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it.
Just because you can do something…
One can only imagine how many other “bugs” are in those millions of lines of code. It’s the unknown unknowns that get you.
It’s likely floating around in the spaceship HQ somewhere looked to land, or 1 Infinite Loop…
Just because Apple did not immediately respond to the sender of the bug doesn’t mean nothing wasn’t done.. Course the finder wasn’t magnanimous, he trips over a bug, and all he thinks is $$$$…
PHaïk Nęwš is Chuck U Shumer’s Face. Make Android Great Again by never buying it. No I’m not unsane, just in.
When I see stuff like this I wonder how many of the numerous employees of Apple are responsible for security of their OSes, applications and services.
Apparently not enough is the answer.
Who knows, maybe it wasn’t a bug, maybe it was created to work like this, and we shouldn’t know about it. Yep, I know I sound like paranoid 🙂