Apple's iOS 12.1.4 Update to Fix FaceTime Eavesdropping Bug Showing Up in Analytics

[bobob]

Does anyone else know of a more friendly Apple site with other friendly actual Apple enthusiasts? Seriously, for as long as I've lurked on here it's all negative people who are Apple haters commenting. Pointless to be on here anymore. All this negative news is hardly "rumors".

100% agreed - - the majority of forum commenters here are now indeed haters, however they're also being lead by the MacRumors editorial team who write almost every story with a negative spin to instigate hostility and thereby drive click$. It has been very sad to watch the decline of this once great website during my decade here.

Unfortunately, the other major Apple-centric sites are also infested with hater and shill commenters, though their editorial teams are definitely more objective in their reporting skills.

My current favorite alternative is the general tech blog: Ars Technica. They don't cover every single Apple news item, but when they do, their reporting is generally insightful and balanced and their comment sections are full of informed and intelligent analysis. I highly recommend reading them in parallel with MacRumors to see just how far this site has fallen.

 

[adrianlondon]

Um... my post was in response to another user's – not touching on the FaceTime issue at all – but, you know, feel free to take my words out of context to prove your own point.

Feel free to miss the joke.

 

[recoil80]

This is an embarrassing bug, but clearly you’ve never developed a piece of software, have you?

I'd say being a developer is a thing, working in QA is another. I've been employed in large corporations as a developer and worked closely with QA teams, if a bug was shipped it was primary their fault, management didn't blame the development team although they expected a quick response from us.
Sometimes the QA would test scenario I'd never even imagine, but I have to say very few bugs made into each release.
In Apple's defence, they know have millions of users and so many different things can go wrong, we can't expect the QA team to find every possible bug in iOS. Having said that, group FaceTime has been in beta for a while, it shipped late so there was of course a ton of testing and the bug doesn't seem so hard to reproduce. That's clearly a QA failure, just like the root access on the Mac discovered last fall.
What I find worrisome is the person who found the bug did try to contact Apple, as far as I remember did actually filed a radar and nothing happened. If I do find a bug I file a radar as well, and if I ever find such an important flaw I can contact people working on the R&D in Cupertino so I'm sure it would get the proper attention immediately, but the average good citizen doesn't have access to people inside the company and should be able to report a bug easily.

 

[brucebrendon]

and MacOS...?

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

Does anyone else know of a more friendly Apple site with other friendly actual Apple enthusiasts? Seriously, for as long as I've lurked on here it's all negative people who are Apple haters commenting. Pointless to be on here anymore. All this negative news is hardly "rumors".

If you are looking for people only praising Apple I am afraid no forum will cover that.
It is not all negative people here. Maybe you don't like to be criticized when it is fair to do so?

and MacOS...?

Has the same bug.

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/28/apple-major-facetime-bug/

 

[I7guy]

I'd say being a developer is a thing, working in QA is another. I've been employed in large corporations as a developer and worked closely with QA teams, if a bug was shipped it was primary their fault, management didn't blame the development team although they expected a quick response from us.
Sometimes the QA would test scenario I'd never even imagine, but I have to say very few bugs made into each release.
In Apple's defence, they know have millions of users and so many different things can go wrong, we can't expect the QA team to find every possible bug in iOS. Having said that, group FaceTime has been in beta for a while, it shipped late so there was of course a ton of testing and the bug doesn't seem so hard to reproduce. That's clearly a QA failure, just like the root access on the Mac discovered last fall.
What I find worrisome is the person who found the bug did try to contact Apple, as far as I remember did actually filed a radar and nothing happened. If I do find a bug I file a radar as well, and if I ever find such an important flaw I can contact people working on the R&D in Cupertino so I'm sure it would get the proper attention immediately, but the average good citizen doesn't have access to people inside the company and should be able to report a bug easily.

Security@apple.com? That’s an email address I would try.

 

[MareLuce]

It's about time. I tried the bug out on a friend and the results were… eye-opening.

View attachment 819296

That is hysterical.

@AngerDanger I would answer all phone calls from you in the first half of the first ring because I’m quite sure it be the funniest call of my day.

 

[NobodyOwens]

100% agreed - - the majority of forum commenters here are now indeed haters, however they're also being lead by the MacRumors editorial team who write almost every story with a negative spin to instigate hostility and thereby drive click$. It has been very sad to watch the decline of this once great website during my decade here.

100% agreed, it's absolutely despicable how MacRumors keeps giving a negative spin to every Apple-related story. I mean, would it really be so hard to fairly report on this news item by calling it a "feature" rather than an "bug." They could have highlighted how the new Group FaceTime feature allows anyone to really get to know what your friends and relatives really think about you by being privy to their most intimate conversations. They could have called it "TrueFaceTime" (R) rather than "Eavesdropping Bug". Really, this negativity is just mind-boggling. But I guess all the poor losers out there need a forum to vent to make up for the lives that they couldn't get in the first place. I guess I should give Ars Technica a try. Those of us who still love and worship apple need a safe space where we can be ourselves without the constant ridicule of those apple haters, apple agnostics or whatever the most recent politically correct term is. Though, I do have to say, that they should have chosen their name better, because in British English, it has a whiff of the asswhole to it.

 

[goonie4life9]

Unfortunately, it simply not the case that I don't understand how troubleshooting works. I have been told by multiple Senior Advisors that I am required to repeat the troubleshooting with them on the phone, to prove I have done the troubleshooting, not because they need to reproduce the alleged bug (this is typically done after enabling logging on the device and doing a data capture with a computer). All this does is add unnecessary delays, but it's clear at this point that for whatever reason, rigidly following a process is more important to Apple that solving issues quickly.

Further, many of the advisors I have spoken to are most certainly "demanding," as they refuse to provide any support unless I repeat the publicly available steps. On several occasions, I have had a Senior Advisor start with running diagnostics on my phone, see that my phone has a fresh installation of iOS, and then ask me to do something that makes no sense. For example, on a phone that had a fresh installation with no apps installed (which he verified he could see from the diagnostic report), the advisor asked me to download a messaging app and delete it because the troubleshooting steps he had to follow required the customer to delete all other messaging apps (I was having an issue with iMessage). If a phone has a fresh installation and no apps installed, there is no "troubleshooting" reason to download an app only to immediately delete it other than because someone is required to follow a list (which has a step, in this example, that is completely non-functional and irrelevant).

I hope this helps you understand some of the issues in Apple's technical support process, some of which were very publicly exposed in this case.

That's just part of the Escalation Procedure, and perfectly understandable.

And they weren't "Demanding", they were "Requesting". This is done for two reasons:

1. So they are sure they can document the steps to REPRODUCE the alleged "bug", so that the Engineer who's desk the Bug Report actually lands on has ANY chance of "making it happen".

2. To make sure it wasn't a one-time "Restart Fixed It" type thing, or (as is almost ALWAYS the case, honestly!) User Ignorance/Error.

Hope that helps you understand that the "Advisors" aren't there just to TORTURE you.

 

[nt5672]

Wut. They have a very quick turnaround for serious issues such as this. Several big macOS bugs, and a couple of iOS ones in recent memory, have been released within 24 hours to a couple days of the exploit being made public. In fact, for such a big company, this turnaround time is extremely impressive.
[doublepost=1548966669][/doublepost]Hindsight is 20/20: The Thread

The point was not how fast, but whether the given time line would hold. Now we know that it did not as the bug fixes have been pushed to next week. Apple makes the schedule come hell or high water when the Keynote is scheduled, but when it comes to delivering on promises that don't involve Cook being on stage, they are developing a poor track record.

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

But again that's about fixing the bug. I'm talking about whether there's a valid use case for the action that happened to expose the bug.

Can't think of a valid reason why the Group FaceTime "Organizer" would need to add themselves as a "Participant" also.

 

[developer13245]

Does anyone else know of a more friendly Apple site with other friendly actual Apple enthusiasts? Seriously, for as long as I've lurked on here it's all negative people who are Apple haters commenting. Pointless to be on here anymore. All this negative news is hardly "rumors".

We are more experienced with Apple than you are. Most of us have been here a long time and watched a once great company slowly decay into the arrogant turdball it is now. Feel free to leave, but consider yourself warned.

 

[C DM]

The point was not how fast, but whether the given time line would hold. Now we know that it did not as the bug fixes have been pushed to next week. Apple makes the schedule come hell or high water when the Keynote is scheduled, but when it comes to delivering on promises that don't involve Cook being on stage, they are developing a poor track record.

Yup, they should push the change out earlier before it's fully ready to appease opinions like that so that when something else is discovered somewhere the same people would be proclaiming that Apple should have spent more on making sure there were less bugs. Can't really have it both ways.

 

[Abazigal]

Does anyone else know of a more friendly Apple site with other friendly actual Apple enthusiasts? Seriously, for as long as I've lurked on here it's all negative people who are Apple haters commenting. Pointless to be on here anymore. All this negative news is hardly "rumors".

Not much. Eventually Reddit feels more and more negative these days, and I guess it's just a sign of the times. When your revenue is ad-driven, there is incentive to blow up a story to generate outrage and garner clicks and views.

I realise it's not for everyone, but I am a paying member of Aboveavalon ($200 a year), and the writer, Neil Cybart, does an excellent job of analysing all news Apple-related. And because it's gated behind a paywall, the community is generally more civil and positive.

He was also recently nominated the most accurate Apple analyst for the year.

https://www.ped30.com/2019/01/31/apple-best-worst-analysts-q1-2019/

I guess it's a by-product of his business model allowing him to better align his incentives with those of his readers.

Paying for news analysis might seem like an anachronism in this day and age, but I recommend you all give it a try, especially if you desire a fresh pair of eyes. It's also interesting to note that his conclusions tend to be the opposite of what the posters at this forum generally arrive at.