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Push Servers Sending AIM Messages From Jailbroken Devices To Random iPhones

Submitted by Edward Kirk on July 21, 2009 - 2:54pm.
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If you're using a jailbroken or unlocked iPhone, you might want to think twice about sending anything over AIM that you don't want everyone to see. Equinux founder Till Schadde has found a bug that may be sending your AIM messages to random recipients without you ever knowing it.

To test the problem, he sent a message from iChat on his desktop to his iPhone. Not long after, he received a reply from a random recipient saying they had gotten the message. The problem is believed to be caused by the way Push notifications are addressed. Each iPhone has a unique identifier that tells Apple where to send notifications. A problem with this might cause them to be sent to the wrong device.

No information is available on which iPhones might be affected by the bug, but it seems clear that Apple's Push system is having trouble with jailbroken iPhones in general.

[via CrunchGear]

Submitted by NetMage on July 21, 2009 - 4:51pm.
If you researched a little more carefully before copying from another site, you may have realized the problem has nothing to do with jailbreak and everything to do with hacktivation and then trying to use the push fix.

Push doesn't work with hacktivated devices, and the fix doesn't really fix this properly.

If you checked out MacRumours Forums you would have seen discussions about messages incorrectly sent two weeks ago.

Submitted by rasmusjv on July 22, 2009 - 4:37am.
No, it doesn't have anything to do with the actual Jailbreak. You can find out more about it here: http://blog.dimsedutter.com/2009/07/...es-random.html and if you have an extra iPod Touch laying around, there is a simple fix for you described in the article above.

- RasmusJV

Submitted by rameeti on July 22, 2009 - 8:18am.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NetMage View Post
If you researched a little more carefully before copying from another site, you may have realized the problem has nothing to do with jailbreak and everything to do with hacktivation and then trying to use the push fix.
Wow. You seem to think everyone knows all the differences between the different steps that are necessary or possible when you decide to use the phone outside of the way that Apple designed it to be used.

The average person does not care which step failed. What we care about is knowing that we will have to become significantly more educated about all of the steps in the process if we should choose to alter our phones. Most of us do not want to bother with the processes as they only open the door to software that has minimal advantages while also exposing ourselves to software that has not been heavily tested or debugged.

I am sure that you are quite happy with your phone but do realize that you are in the minority and the nit picking that you might find with the article goes way over the heads of the rest of us. We got what we wanted from the article. Mucking with our phone exposes us to extra problems.

Submitted by weisen on July 22, 2009 - 5:55pm.
Quote:
Wow. You seem to think everyone knows all the differences between the different steps that are necessary or possible when you decide to use the phone outside of the way that Apple designed it to be used.
Actually, these boards seem to be the perfect place to learn about such things. Certainly no one was born knowing them.


Quote:
The average person does not care which step failed. What we care about is knowing that we will have to become significantly more educated about all of the steps in the process if we should choose to alter our phones. Most of us do not want to bother with the processes as they only open the door to software that has minimal advantages while also exposing ourselves to software that has not been heavily tested or debugged.
Then literally none of this applies to you, so why are you upset that the original poster is trying to educate those who do care by correcting the errors in the original article?

Quote:
I am sure that you are quite happy with your phone but do realize that you are in the minority and the nit picking that you might find with the article goes way over the heads of the rest of us. We got what we wanted from the article. Mucking with our phone exposes us to extra problems.
Actually, I beg to differ. The "nitpicking" is actually that the article gets several key points wrong and is misleading. While you may not want to know the details of what's going on here, it's the original reporter's job to investigate and understand these things (certainly understanding the term "jailbreak") and then to describe them to the masses. The problem is that "mucking with" one's phone can mean many different things to different people.

Ultimately, these "new media" sites need to evolve past copying and pasting the same story from site to site to site and start actually investigating, understanding, and reporting on stories. Otherwise, we're all in a lot of trouble if this is how we expect to get our information.

And I don't want to beat up on Ed here too much, but this story is so unbelievably straightforward and yet has been misreported by every iPhone "news" outlet that I've seen:

1. This has nothing to do with jailbreaking

2. People who activate their phone unofficially (what people are calling "hacktivation") will find that their phones don't participate in Push notification. This is because the phone was not given certain security tokens which are created during the "official" activation process.

3. People who suffer from #2 AND then try to "fix" the problem by borrowing someone else's keys, will find that they are sharing a supposedly unique ID with other people and therefore subject to getting other people's messages and/or having their messages sent to other people.

4. I don't believe that this has anything to do with AIM, per se, but rather affects all push apps.