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Apple Temporarily Disables Walkie-Talkie App for Apple Watch Due to Eavesdropping Vulnerability

Marekul said:
imo yes.


It is not a good thing when you have critical vulnerabilities in your software. Password-less root login, Facetime eavesdropping, keychain "keysteal" exploit, walkie talkie eavesdropping, so many more, and still no bug bounty program for MacOS. How you could spin this as something good is beyond me
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The “spin” on the timeline is solid work on apple’s part. The above spin that somehow Apple lives in an alternative universe free from bugs is laughable. The Apple infrastructure of yesteryear was a tinker toy compared to today.
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Marekul said:
That is just wrong. Most reputable companies have established vulnerability disclosure programs, processes, bug bounties and do not ignore vulnerabilities.
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Please provide citations. Especially given you used the words “most reputable”, which in an if itself is subject to interpretation.
 
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smileman said:
Dear Apple,

For those of us who don't use Walkie Talkie (or some of the other built-in apps) please give us the option to disable/delete them.

Having an extra app on any device that one is not using just creates a potential additional security hole + takes up storage space.

Thanks.
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DougieS said:
We can now do this in WatchOS 6 beta!
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Shirasaki said:
watchOS 6 allows user to delete some built in apps. Hope walkie-talkie is delete-able.
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As DougieS said, Walkie Talkie is deletable in the latest iOS beta. Walkie Talkie was the second app I deleted (after Cycle).
 
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EldonChew said:
Just curious how are they doing this?

Does it go along the line of:
All iDevices/Mac pings and checks with a list on Apple server everyday can if an App is blocked on that list, iOS/macOS will not run it?
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Basically, yes. Each application (Apple’s and third-party developers) is signed with a unique key to ensure it hasn’t not been modified. Anything on that list is trusted. There is also a certificate revocation list, which is used to say that a previously valid certificate is no longer valid, which in turn is functionally equivalent to if the application was modified outside of the trust chain.
 
Tried the feature once with my wife. Found it to be useless. IF you can manage to get it to connect, it persists that annoying yellow icon every time you look at the watch. Then it disconnects at the most inopportune time requiring re-pairing when you might as well just text.
 
kildraik said:
I’ve honestly never used the feature. None of friends or peers use it either. Is anybody else not missing this?
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Tested it a few times when it was new; very hit-and-miss. Ultimately couldn’t see any reason to keep it active—I got tired of that little yellow dot obscuring my real notifications indicator. Turned it off and haven’t missed it.
 
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tomnavratil said:
Toxic comments as usual. This is a standard process when a critical bug is found. No company is bug-free even if you have a robust QA process in place. Anybody who worked in a bit more complex software development can relate to this, often you find bugs that could have been in the code for years.
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Except this isn't a run-of-the-mill bug - it's one that seriously compromises the privacy of its users. And it's a bug that should've been found soon after the FaceTime group call bug because Apple should've immediately audited all logic related to the sharing of video and audio on their devices after discovering the FaceTime bug.
 
kildraik said:
I’ve honestly never used the feature. None of friends or peers use it either. Is anybody else not missing this?
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I tried to use it but even when I had it set to app only it still came across 24/7

Sorry but I don’t need my mate saying “What the **** are you doing” whilst I’m in school, with someone, or at church
 
BootsWalking said:
Except this isn't a run-of-the-mill bug - it's one that seriously compromises the privacy of its users. And it's a bug that should've been found soon after the FaceTime group call bug because Apple should've immediately audited all logic related to the sharing of video and audio on their devices after discovering the FaceTime bug.
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Hence the definition of a bug. I’m guessing Apple probably did have a protocol in place to review certain things, but there is always a limit. (See zoom web server vulnerability)
 
smileman said:
Dear Apple,

For those of us who don't use Walkie Talkie (or some of the other built-in apps) please give us the option to disable/delete them.

Having an extra app on any device that one is not using just creates a potential additional security hole + takes up storage space.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Swipe UP on your watch, in the bottom of the control panel features is a button by the water and iPhone location icon, is a Walkie Talkie enable/disable button. Make that icon turn off (as opposed to lit). Or you can go to your Watch App on your iPhone and disable it there.

Frankly, it was more annoying than useful. A phone call is easier, more convenient and only 1% as obnoxious as yelling into your wrist.
 
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Played with this with my husband. It worked a couple of times, but then I wasn’t sure how to get rid of the blinking icon (wouldn’t go away after exiting the app), so I made myself “Unavailable”. Turned out that was when the feature would have been most useful.

We had wandered off from one another during shopping and neither of us were absolutely sure where the other was. My husband had tried to reach me via Walkie Talkie and of course, since I was unavailable, he couldn’t reach me that way.

It probably has some limited use cases, but honestly, before he bought his Watch, I didn’t have anyone else to really use this with. Texting remains the default.
 
Hodar1 said:
Swipe UP on your watch, in the bottom of the control panel features is a button by the water and iPhone location icon, is a Walkie Talkie enable/disable button. Make that icon turn off (as opposed to lit). Or you can go to your Watch App on your iPhone and disable it there.

Frankly, it was more annoying than useful. A phone call is easier, more convenient and only 1% as obnoxious as yelling into your wrist.
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Thanks, wasn't aware there was a walkie talkie toggle in the control panel (mine was already turned off).

Still would like to be able to fully delete it, which it sounds like WatchOS 6 will allow.
 
where is it said:
Is Apple becoming the new Microsoft of old? Bug ridden software, slowly being hacked away. Even the official statement contradicts itself. What is going on over there?
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No it is not that. Anything big has bugs.
You need to remember some of those major things that we use every day in software is head together with duct tape and coat hangers. Banking world backend is basically 747 flying on nothing more than that.
Your phone company same way. I can promise you Apple had a lot of that since day one in iOS. When they demo it at WWDC it was set up to only do certain actions as it was going to crash otherwise. At release I can promise you that it had a bug.
Things that are big and complicated have issues that get missed.
 
Incredibly stupid feature if the recipient can't approve the WT first. Some sort of 5-10 min approval timeframe that a sender requests when they start a conversation. Otherwise, I'd be in meetings and it just bursts out an idiotic walkie talkie if I forgot to DND. Apple replied to me saying it defeats the purpose of the WT feature but it doesnt given my solution to the situation.
 
I couldn't ever start a Convo on my applewatch 4. I could reply but never start one. very hit an miss. I loved the feature just never worked.
 
Maybe while you are at it, fix Siri on the S3? Why should it take 3-4 seconds for siri to wake up after I press down the crown? Why should I have to wait 30 seconds to never for siri to "tap me when she's ready" - why should I have to write out ever other text because dictation has failed. I seriously never had so much frustration with an Apple device as I do with my watch
 
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I have never used this feature, ever, probably due to the fact that none of my close friends have Apple Watches let alone, iPhones. I would actually love to try it out, as it might bring me back to my Nextel days (Undergraduate College) then when I went to medical school was the year the first iPhone came out, switched to AT&T, and bought one, never looked back. I buy a version of every model that comes out, right now I am on the XS, which really, for how much it was, was not worth upgrading over the X. Still use my X everyday though. My 7 Plus is my "backup iPhone", running iOS 13 and my 6s is still going strong running iOS 13 as my final backup phone.

Kudos to Apple for getting the service offline/unusable, if not we would have had a whole thread of everyone that would want to do a class action lawsuit against Apple for not doing what they did.

Some people in this forum really should not be on here. I saw one kid write something about code, well, if you code, you would know it is insanely hard to find bugs sometimes. Also, some bugs have been in software like iOS/iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS for years and they finally get found.

Try being a developer or hell just a plain jane coder, and if you make a mistake you will be looking through thousands of lines of code to find that bug, and fix it.

Bunch of whiners, that have had everything given to them their whole lives!!! Good luck in the real world.

:apple:
 
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Not that i would care at this point, the feature was not the most user friendly. I loved the concept. Reminded me of the old nextel days, but that "it just works" mantra is nothing but nostalgia now. I can not for the life of me get this stupid thing to work anymore consistently. I have to be next to the person to get them to hit me up or me to hit them up just to make a connection. Other than that its useless to 5 people who have it with me.
 
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