A whole week! My god it’s a miracle society survived. Good grief.
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Apple Sheds More Light on iOS 17.5 Bug That Resurfaced Deleted Photos
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A whole week! My god it’s a miracle society survived. Good grief.
Not good enough Tim, I demand 200 million in compensation for emotional distress. If not, I'm taking this to Judge Judy.
Sure Apple. Sure.
And people ask me why i wont use online backups. Even local backups are ****ed up...
And people ask me why i wont use online backups. Even local backups are ****ed up...
Please, all knowing genius, explain how you know they are keeping and storing the data? Don’t spew opinions, use facts.
Based on your response it sounds like you misread or misunderstood the article.
It’s mentioned more than once that iCloud Photos sync is not involved here. If you have ever deleted local photos from your device, and then ever restored from a backup either local or from iCloud (restored a backup, not synced) you could still be affected.
I thought it was a thorough explanation so not sure what else you want from them in the way of “how/why”.
It’s possible. Some people don’t follow directions to wipe devices and simply sign out of iCloud and hand over the phone.
In that situation it is possible that a second party got access to restored photos.
Yes, "small" is relative. But why do you otherwise question their truthfulness? This explanation makes sense. Absent a true "wipe," which Apple says would have worked, that data is there, and we all know the indexing trigger is there. What do you think is dishonest?
FWIW, I also believe their explanation for throttling the battery when that took place, as that is a more useful behavior to most users than having the battery suddenly shut down the phone. They of course should have disclosed this behavior, and they were burned by not doing so, but there is no evidence tying that to "planned obsolescence" as many alleged.
The encryption keys are deleted, which is effectively identical to filling the filesystem with random data. That's why Apple were saying that the person who reported doing factory reset and seeing the photos in the new user's library was just not possible ( and note that user deleted their report)
You assume the corrupted database was actually marked for deletion. Maybe the system still saw it as Photos data without a thumbnail, or “Other” storage.
Whatever was done didn’t “take” so it was likely never available for overwriting, making it very plausible that data could be carted around for years until 17.5.
That could well be the original error - it deleted the record of the photo from the database, but the final step of deleting the file failed, so the photo vanished from the library until Apple added a cleanup step to 17.5 to find the orphaned files and show them to the user.
I imagine the dev who added the cleanup step thought they were being helpful and people would be grateful to see the 'lost' photos!
Is the bug that you’re actually at work when it says you’re at the bar, or simply that it tells her when you’re at the bar?
Imagine a bin labeled “Trash”(Deleted Pics)
Everyone including Tim dumps their trash into it expecting it to be taken out on pickup day 30 days later (Permanently Delete).
From time to time Tim misses the bin and the trash falls onto the floor (corrupted database entry). When the janitor comes on pickup day, they don’t know to collect the trash that fell on the floor, even though it was also intended to be discarded.
This trash takes up space but because no one is looking for it, they are unaware of the amount of space it’s taking or even the fact that it is taking up any space at all. That is until 17.5 is hired and notices items on the floor and says “What are these doing here? Let’s put these items back on the desk!”
Some people are happy to have their missing items back, but others are very unhappy because the trash stinks and is a reminder of a darker period of their lives that they thought was gone for good.
If a Chinese company was involved this discussion would be in a different tone, but because is Apple we just let it pass??
This is not how solid state disk filesystems work these days. The actual FLASH is encrypted with a hardware key. When you erase an iPhone it just generates a new key. The original data is unreadable and it's safe to sell your device.
When you reinstall iOS or erase your device, your files ARE gone.
I suspect what's likely happening here is when you do an iCloud backup then restore your device from the backup at provisioning time it restores the files on the filesystem then immediately recovers them into Photos app and that's being misinterpreted as being left on the device.
I do development for a living and don't require details on how they fixed the issue. 99% of people would not even understand it if they did.
Plenty of people have not “let it pass”.
This is a technical issue, not an ethical one. A company providing a reasonable technical explanation deserves a pass.
If Apple is hiding the ball on this I’d like to know how. The explanation seems sound to me.
This is the issue that is cumulating in the U.S.
Most don't have any clue how files are handled at all, and would not understand the idea of 'over-write' files.
I wonder how many phones were traded in where the user wiped the phone (e.g., erase all content and settings) prior to trading it in or selling it, that now have this problem?
The comments here really confirm that Apple should not have taken the transparent approach to explain the glitch.
I mean, they are clearly explaining a very technical glitch in plain english, transparently, and people are like
I mean, they are clearly explaining a very technical glitch in plain english, transparently, and people are like
- "Really not a satisfactory response from Apple's side. I guess we'll never know the whole truth"
- "Took them a week to respond which is a lot of time to clarify such bug."
- "Sorry don't buy it. If the data is marked as deleted it can be overwritten and their claim that very old photos, some a few years from what I heard, are not over written over time doesn't sound plausible to me. I still think cloud services are involved but they'll never tell you if they were."
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Everything is present on the disk until something else overwrites it this is how storage works.
Well this thread certainly proves that very few people seem to know anything about their devices!
Zero, when you set up the phone as new it gets new hardware encryption keys, so old data is useless.
Or if the database is corrupted and the "deleted" data is backed up and restored to another device. That seems to be one of the concerns here.
But that is also how backups work, it copies everything and then restores everything, it didn't have much bigger issues.
Edit: I should add one point here and with this bug, the files were not fully marked for deletion which is most likely why they got backed up.