
iPhone Owners Irate After iOS Update Bricks Cellular Data - soared
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/ios-12-1-2-cellular-data-bricked,news-28922.html
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sschueller
"Addresses an issue that could affect cellular connectivity in Turkey for
iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max" [1]

What exactly did apple do here? Kind of suspicious that they made adjustments
to the eSIM specifically for Turkey when Erdogan announced he would be banning
iPhones because of coup fears [2]. Did they enable Turkey to listen in?

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209084](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT209084)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/business/turkey-
erdogan-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/business/turkey-erdogan-
apple-iphone.html)

~~~
gruez
>Did they enable Turkey to listen in?

why would they need an Apple backdoor to do so? AFAIK carrier equipment
already have "lawful intercept" mechanisms built in (which is no surprise
because it's not e2e encrypted).

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toofy
Yikes, this is very unfortunate timing for the regions who have holidays this
time of year.

This reinforces my constant reluctance to update anything around holidays or
other chaotic travel periods.

I wonder if Apple shouldn’t have waited until after the holiday season to push
major updates. I mean, we all know stuff happens, this is just reality, but
waiting a few measly days would not only have saved the inconvenience for the
iOS team members who were surely pulled in to work during family holiday time,
but probably more important to Apple, it would have saved the customers
ability to communicate during the busiest family travel time of the year.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
I read a rumor that Apple pushed this update to work around Qualcomm patents
so they can keep selling iPhones in China. Would explain why the update
appears rushed. Must suck for the devs to be called back to work over the
holidays.

~~~
londons_explore
That would make a lot of sense. I bet they've re-written big chunks of the LTE
stack in a real hurry to work around various patents.

Mobile standards and modems are a massive kludge of compatibility layers and
hacks. Just look at the 'Hacks' section of the mediatek modem engineering app
and you'll see all kinds of tweaks to allow the phone to connect to a certain
network in a certain country which does something slightly wonky.

My guess is that hurried rewriting of bits of a mobile stack probably led to
them not perfectly replicating all those hacks, so certain phones with certain
combinations of base stations, mobile networks, sim card models and
authentication servers no longer connect properly.

On the plus side, most of those mobile networks will probably now be snowed
under with complaints from angry iphone owners, so rapidly updating their
systems to become compatible again, even if apple refuses to re-implement the
hacks.

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j7ake
The worst is that if you don’t update the iOS constantly reminds you to update
and if you say no you are given passcode to give it permission to update it by
itself in the middle of the night.

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traderjane
Previous discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18747302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18747302)

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benguild
Yikes, during the holidays, too....

~~~
commandlinefan
Whether you’re traveling or not, this could be a problem - I’m at home all
week, and I’ll be on WiFi. If I hadn’t seen this, I might not have thought to
check to see if I was impacted for another week.

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Overtonwindow
I never update my iPhone. Or rather, I update the software when I buy a new
one. I don’t trust Apple, I believe in forced obsolescence, and I find it’s
just better not to update.

~~~
gruez
enjoy not getting security updates and getting hit by RCEs that were patched
months ago.

