iPhone or spyPhone?

As we've all seen with Windows, it's no surprise that along with the power to work, rest and play on one's PC comes a glaring vulnerability to attack. One of the iPhone's purported strengths is also that it can act more like a full computing platform than many phones on the market, and in particular it runs the Safari browser which should enable all sorts of intersting capabilities to be available cross Mac/iPhone in the future. Alas, that very flexibility is also starting to become one of its weaknesses.

These issues covered in detail here. Basically, the attack dsicussed involves exploiting the fact that if the iPhone browser opens some evil web-page on a server somewhere, the code it finds will run with inherited administrator privileges. Not good, as anyone who has ever got even the mildest of PC viruses will atest.

Among the things this would open the device to would be copying and relaying all SMS messages received or posted, sending out stored passwords, even acting as an audio eavesdropping bug by placing an outgoing call without the owner being aware of it.

Redmond has spent years having the wider-world find countless vulnerabilities in Explorer, a level of hard-won maturation that Safari can't even begin to match. This may just be the start of what will soon grow into a wave of postings on this topic, throwing up who-knows-what in the way of further holes in the iPhone's defences.

Browsers beware in the meantime!

iPhone - Not My Phone

No, I don't have one. No, I'm not lining up for days on end to be amongst the first owners. And no, despite being smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, I don't in fact plan on getting one any time soon. Here's why:

1) $600 is too much for the release 1.0 features announced so far. ($900 + on eBay)

2) It will be buggy: newly integrated software stacks always are.

3) One of it's strengths is that it can act as a platform for other Safari browser-based applets; one of it's weaknesses is that few yet exist. Though I think this ultimately will prove to be it's strongest suit, I'd rather wait a while to see what plays out here.

4) Cingular is the exclusive service provider for this thing, and that's not an option for where I live. (GSM networks have less coverage here than CDMA ones.) Furthermore, Cingular has about the worst data rates in the USA with their EDGE network that the phone will fall back to if it can't find an open Wi Fi network for internet access.

5) I already have two phones, and don't need any more plans, devices, numbers or bloody chargers to lug around.

6) It's a bit big for a phone, a bit small for a pocket PC, a bit pricey for a PDA.

7) While the gesture-based UI looks to be innovative and appealing for some functions, still not clear to me how well this touch-screen with "fingers only" will work for basic things like typing e-mail messages etc.. TBD, I guess.

Kudos to Apple though: the fact that (a) they must have got one sweetheart deal out of Cingular for exclusivity almost guarantees that they are going to coin it regardless of how this all plays out; (b) the scheme whereby you *have* to have an iTunes account in order to unlock the thing is a stroke of genius; and (c) the saturation media coverage seen over the past days has been largely free and gratis, courtesy of the 4th estate.

Hit or miss, Apple wins.