svanstrom

macgizmo said:

Seriously? With all the problems in the world, THIS is what people are choosing to focus their frustration and paranoia on? How does this, in any way, violate someone's privacy?

Besides the fact that technically speaking a global entity is now forcing you to undergo a medical procedure to be allowed to exercise your rights for support etc, which was part of the deal when you purchased your equipment?

You can twist and turn the words back and forth as much as you want, but the fact remains that here's a corporate giant that sets the precedent that they can force individuals to undergo medical procedures (in a way that's easily linked to your person) for you to gain access to what a lawyer easily could argue came as part of your purchase; or even to for you to gain access to what according to the law is more a public than a private space.

If this isn't checked early on you'll soon find yourself with your medical data linked to your id/person, as aggregated, de-anonymized, and monetised by the same people doing that today with your physical membership cards, and your online habits (as tracked by cookies/websites/advertising networks).

Isn’t that like saying that the iPhone gps caught a car speeding while the more advanced police radar couldn’t do that when the car later on was parked…?

cjcoops said:

commentzilla said:

bitsandbytes said:

commentzilla said:

bitsandbytes said:

Any app made in a day could have been made in Excel, PowerPoint, or HTML.

Nonsense.

Their app replaced a piece of paper

They replaced it with a multi-usr networked relational database application which could be accessed from computers and mobile devices, instead of a piece of paper hanging on the wall of a single room.

Or they could have scanned the piece of paper to PDF and put it on a free dropbox account for anyone to access from computers or mobile devices - and call it a multi user networked flow chart.

Then make an electronic flowchart for free on Word or Powerpoint with no coding at all and put it on a network drive, as the electronic document is easier to modify...

A one-piece-of-paper decision tree would be simple enough to get going coded in Swift and distributed to ipads and phones then tidied up and given some bangs and whistles as time permits.

Feel free to read the article the next time. You know, the place where they wrote about what was actually required, and that a simple piece of paper couldn’t handle. 

DAalseth said:

I keep wondering about a deeper issue:

How in the heck does somebody FIND these bizarre combinations? The Italian Flag combined with a Sindhi character? It seems unlikely that someone accidentally stumbled on this.

It's a different type of thinking…

For instance, if I wanted to attack a particular piece of software (without using tools like emulating the software/hardware it runs on, and that way actually seeing what's happening) I might perhaps do something like looking at who's credited with writing the code, and then checking his other (and much more public) work; and that way find his way of thinking, and/or his preferred way of coding certain things. That way I might perhaps find how he usually deals with certain ranges of data, and then see if his closed code project in anyway can be made to handle data that one way or another would be outside of what he would have expected when coding it. If I find something like that, then I would try a couple of ways of throwing such data at the software, to see what happens; and then build on that.

So it isn't just randomly finding things, but rather looking for ways to narrow down potential events that might not be expected; and then playing around with that to see what happens. (And the people actually working with this has a lot of knowhow about what people forget to think about.)

razorpit said:

I was thinking, why can’t there be a sandboxed function that every incoming text And paste command gets passed through. If the function returns a “0” the text message is displayed or the paste completes. If it returns a “1” then the text is forwarded to Apple and the message to the user is killed. 

Practically speaking that's just pushing the problem into another layer, while at the same time saying that that layer can't have any bugs; and then when a bug surfaces in that layer, then you'd say the same thing about another layer that is supposed to not have any bugs in it, and then another, and another… So practically speaking your idea is essentially the same as you simply saying "I was thinking, why can't there be no bugs anywhere".

Sure, someone will now come to your rescue and claim that what you're describing is some simple form of if…else or try…catch, but that's simply not understanding the complexity of programs beyond the most basic things in the language; because unless written by the most basic amateur there's already all kinds of catching of errors and data validation and data being cleaned and data being sandboxed and whatnot, but… then there are the bugs that couldn't be predicted, including problems with the compiler or language itself, or a programmer mistyping something, or an unfortunate case of autocorrect, or a disgruntled employee, or test code accidentally being used live, or a bad copy-paste or cmd-z or about another gazillion other things that can't be predicted and avoided or caught.

Edit: Imagine that the bug is actually in how the display in a very unique situation deals with drawing the shading on somewhat overlapping characters; so it might not be possible to trigger at all unless you in the testing actually include a return code/message from the actual physical display, so in your testing it theoretically is possible that you actually need a physical device to trigger something. So to test everything you'd actually need at least one more physical device that first tries to do everything before it's done on your device. Two phones, with yours always pausing to let the other device try everything first. And even then there's always a layer somewhere that can't be tested, and that might contain bugs.