Android Error Turns G1 Users Into Mobile Phone Hackers!
Yeah, we’ve all wanted to be Zero Cool in the awesome movie ‘Hackers,’ fighting the system with DOS prompts and dial-up connections whilst dreaming about Angelina Jolie…well the T-Mobile G1 lets us all become operating system renegades with an unfortunate bug.
This glitch in the Matrix means that the G1 has an invisible pathway to the root functionality of the handset, which means that anything typed can, and will, be interpreted as a valid system command.
So..if someone was to send a text reminiscing about the 1994-2001 computer generated animated television series ReBoot for example, their G1 would…reboot!
Obviously this is not good, so T-Mobile has been quick to patch up the exploit, thus prevent people from wreaking all sorts of G1-related havoc on their phones.
Just imagine if you were to type rm -rf as a root command in a text message! Ha ha! Get it? No? Just me, then. (Note to self: Linux-based humour = not very funny.)
NB: Oh, and DO NOT run the above command, it might sort of delete everything…
Source: ZDNet blog post
Reminds me of this – http://xkcd.com/327/
[...] boffins working around the clock to plug all the holes in the G1’s security, (including the brilliant ‘hacker’ bug) there seems to be other forces working equally hard to mess it [...]