
Android: Worst. Bug. Ever. - bockris
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=680
======
jcl
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.

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

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

------
icey
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.

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

~~~
rshao
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.

------
rms
I thought it was going to call 911.

~~~
kirubakaran
That would be the second worst. _The_ worst would be if it called 411 when you
dialled 911.

------
fauigerzigerk
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.

------
kwamenum86
I guess even Google can't get the whole OS thing right on the first try.

~~~
mickt
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.

------
dmpayton
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.

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

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

------
Allocator2008
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
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
Also see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25>, that caused more damage
then erasing a phone.

