As the Cult of Mac reports, Apple’s messaging services deletes the last word of a few key phrases in iPhone-to-iPhone texts. One is “The best prize is a surprise,” and another is “I could be the next Obama.” The only catch?

You have to leave a trailing space after the phrase.

Mac users have noticed that sending certain messages from the Messages app on a Mac to an iPhone causes similar issues, with the cryptic message “man, why are you here?  Two are in testing places” arriving without the trailing “places.” This seams to be a similar type of issue, but though I could make the iPhone glitches work, so to speak, I could not personally confirm Mac-to-iPhone problem.

One Mac user speculated in Apple’s support forums that the problem may be related to word wrapping:

David, I agree with your intuition that it has to do with how Messages wraps words and perhaps bubble size.  I think that’s why adding/deleting words or changing several words can change whether the bug occurs.

There is probably some very simple and silly explanation for this, and I’m asking Apple about it right now. It’s pretty clear, however, that there is not some kind of hidden, devious preprocessing taking place based on the content of messages which affects how they’re delivered: iPad shows the entire messages as they were sent.

Image credit: John Koetsier; Hat tip: The Verge

From personal experience I know bugfixing can be like putting up wallpaper: smooth down one air bubble, only to watch it pop up again in another place. Which apparently is exactly what Apple is doing recently with its iPhone operating system, iOS.

Exactly one day after Apple released iOS 6.1.3 to squash two lock screen bugs, another one has emerged:

This new flaw only affects iPhone 4, apparently, so it is less severe. However, it does allow access to your address book and stored photos, without having to punch in your security code. For many, that might not be horrible, but it certainly is private information … even if you don’t have any personal photos from a special someone on your device.

This has got to be getting a little old for Apple, and I can only imagine how Steve Jobs would react to yet another lock screen bug appearing just hours after Apple’s latest bugfix. Even though this might be a fairly minor security hole that requires physical access to the device, Apple’s reputation for quality is at stake.

And, it’s no small thing to update hundreds of millions of mobile devices, each requiring user intervention for system updates.

photo credit: Travis S. via photopin cc

Hat tip: Cult of Mac

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A bug that’s affecting iOS users who flicked on the “Do Not Disturb” setting in 2013 will have to wait until next week before getting a fix, according to Apple.

The Do Not Disturb setting, available to devices running iOS 6 or later, enables iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch owners to block all incoming communications for a predetermined amount of time. That means all phone calls, text messages, and in-app notifications won’t pop up on your device until the setting is scheduled to turn off. But when the calendar changed to 2013, several people reported that the Do Not Disturb setting never actually stopped working, regardless of what time you programmed the device to resume sending you notifications.

I can see how this would be very frustrating for anyone that relies on their device to stay looped into to social circles for both their personal lives and work duties. (So, if you’re just getting back to work for the first time in 2013, today might not be so quiet after all.)

While Apple has largely stayed silent about the Do Not Disturb bug, it’s pointing people to a support forum post that indicates a fix is coming Jan. 7. Until then, Apple’s instructing people to manually turn off the setting.

Via ArsTechnica

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can track your mouse movements anywhere on the screen, even when minimized. And Microsoft, which was informed of the massive potential security hole over two months ago, has no plans to fix it. Which means that as you explore the web, the web can explore you right back.

And this vulnerability is already being exploited by two advertising companies.

Spider.io, the ad analytics company that can tell if your site visitors are real or dream of electric sheep, found the vulnerability months ago — and notified Microsoft on October 1. The security vulnerability allows any display ad on any site to access your mouse movements — you do not have to install anything, agree to anything, or even be visiting some of the seedier alleyways of the web:

“An attacker can get access to your mouse movements simply by buying a display ad slot on any webpage you visit,” Spider.io’s Nick Johnson posted on Seclists.org, a security-related bug-tracking site. “This is not restricted to lowbrow porn and file-sharing sites. Through today’s ad exchanges, any site from YouTube to the New York Times is a possible attack vector.”

Source: Spider.io

IE security vulnerability demonstration

The vulnerability in IE versions 6-10 allows hackers to see what your mouse is doing on-screen … which could include typing personal information such as credit card numbers and passwords into virtual on-screen keyboards, a particularly timely security hole in the era of Windows 8 and its emphasis on touch and on-screen interactions.

“Indeed, the vulnerability is already being exploited by at least two display ad analytics companies across billions of webpage impressions each month,” Johnson added to the bug report. “As long as the page with the exploitative advertiser’s ad stays open—even if you push the page to a background tab or, indeed, even if you minimize Internet Explorer—your mouse cursor can be tracked across your entire display.”

If you’re using IE on a PC and want to test this, Spider.io created a live demonstration which you can use to observer the vulnerability in action. The company also created a game, “Steal from IE Users,” in which Spider.io is challenging more technically-oriented users to decipher mouse tracks to uncover 12 credit card numbers, telephone numbers, passwords, and email addresses.

One thing that is not yet clear is whether the vulnerability affects just the PC version of Internet Explorer or tablet versions — as in Surface — which would be even more likely to use virtual keyboards. I have talked to Spider.io, and will update this post as the company releases any more information.

VentureBeat has contacted Microsoft for a statement or comment and will update this story as the companyresponds.

photo credit: moiles via photopin cc

Old accounts are being re-verified, says Search Engine Journal. That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a potential disaster for anyone who has had search engine optimizers working on their websites.

“From initial glance at our WMT’s accounts we now have regained access to every old account we have previously been given access to, whether that is a previous client or maybe a site that came to us for some short term consultancy,” David Naylor posted on his search marketing blog today.

Source: David Naylor

Google Webmaster Tools re-verifying old accounts

Hopefully, no black hats are taking advantage of special access to former clients’ sites, as they could cause significant damage by uploading fake sitemaps, requesting removal of key URLs from Google’s index, re-configuring U.S.-based sites to target users in Kazakhstan, Timbuktu, or any other random place, and setting Google’s crawl rate at a ridiculously slow pace, among other things.

Dennis Goedegebuure, a former director of SEO at eBay, confirmed to The Next Web that he had been granted access to eBay’s webmaster tools even though he left the company almost a year and a half ago.

I personally could not verify the problem. In former lives I’ve managed sites with millions of monthly pageviews and had access to those sites’ accounts. A quick check tonight verified that I have not been re-verified for those accounts — which may mean that Google has fixed the issue, or simply that my GWT account was not affected.

The breach goes as far as granting access to sites’ Google Analytics accounts as well, at least in some cases. That allows access to extremely sensitive information that companies and sites do not want former employees or consultants seeing or sharing.

Google hasn’t commented on the issue yet, as far as I can tell, and the Google Webmaster Tools blog has not been updated since November 12.

UPDATED 1:03PM:

Google has now released a comment:

“For several hours yesterday a small set of Webmaster Tools accounts were incorrectly re-verified for people who previously had access. We’ve reverted these accounts and are investigating ways to prevent this issue from recurring.”

Meanwhile, Twitter is doing what Twitter does:

Never screw your SEO… you never know when Google will do something stupid like let them back into your Webmaster Tools account.

—
Ben Cook (@Skitzzo) November 27, 2012

Wonder how many evil thing are being done with Webmaster Tools right now. Best thing Google could do right now is switch it off

—
Kean Richmond (@keanrichmond) November 27, 2012

photo credit: tashland via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Public Radio Exchange has found and documented a bug in Apple’s iOS 6.0 mobile operating system that apparently causes multiple downloads of podcasts, boosting data usage requirements up to 300 percent.

PRX, which is public radio’s largest distribution marketplace, saw a massive spike in two of its shows, 99% Invisible and The Moth, last month. Apple’s new Podcast app had apparently featured the shows.

But the bandwidth requirements still seemed excessive, and when PRX heard that This American Life was suddenly using 10 times as much bandwidth, it took a closer look. Here’s what it found about Apple’s Podcast player in iOS 6.0:

The player appears to get into a state where it makes multiple requests per second and closes them rapidly. Because the ranges of these requests seem to overlap and the requests themselves each carry some overhead, this causes a single download of an MP3 to use significantly more bandwidth than in iOS 5. In one case, the playback of a single 30MB episode caused the transfer of over 100MB of data.

iOS 6 was released in September with new Maps, Passbook, Facebook integration, Siri updates, and FaceTime over cellular networks. Apparently it also had a few new bugs with the new features.

Source: PRX Labs

Download bandwidth data spikes

That version has already been updated by Apple to iOS 6.0.1, which does not appear to have the same problem.

The bug not only causes multiple attempted downloads — it also causes multiple repeated downloads when streaming, with catastrophic affects on data consumption, particularly for mobile users:

The strangest bit of behavior happens when the ranges on these requests reach the end of the file. We were able to consistently see that when the file has completed downloading, it begins downloading again from the beginning of the file and continues for as long as one is streaming the file. This means that, for as long as one is listening to audio being streamed with iOS 6, it is using significant amounts of data.

The obvious fix is to install the software update to the latest version of iOS 6.

VentureBeat has contacted Apple for comment.

photo credit: e_monk via photopin cc

WordPress is probably the world’s leading blogging platform — millions of sites use it either hosted on WordPress.com, or via downloading the software and running it on their own servers. This new plugin enables bloggers to post small, sequential updates for breaking news: a liveblog.

VentureBeat uses WordPress, but I installed the plugin on my personal blog to test it.

The great new innovation? Publishers can update the liveblog right on-page, and readers can view new updates appear without having to refresh the story:

Source: John Koetsier

Testing the new plugin on my personal blog

It’s fast, it’s friendly, and it’s unbelievably easy. To update the post, simply type into the box and click Publish Update. To add an image, simply drag and drop it into the edit box area. It seemingly couldn’t be easier.

Unfortunately, it also couldn’t be easier to complete delete your entire liveblog, unknowingly.

When I opened the liveblog post in the traditional WordPress editing interface to set a featured image — the image that, on VentureBeat, appears on the home page to the left of new posts — and then saved, all the liveblog posts disappeared. And no, there was no warning and no error message.

I followed up with WordPress developers, who confirmed the issue.

Apparently the plugin was developed on WordPress 3.5, the next version of WordPress. 3.5  handles comments differently than the most up-to-date version of WordPress currently available via the software’s automatic update, 3.4.1.

A fix was quickly made, and will shortly be available, according to Yuri Victor:

@johnkoetsier The change to comments is an update in WordPress 3.5.

Looks like the liveblog plugin has been made backwards compatible for 3.4.1 on github and the push will be available here on WordPress soon.

Another bug was also discovered by other users, which resulted in readers not even seeing the liveblogs. That also seems to be traced to the fact that developers were building and testing on a beta version of WordPress — and publishing to the existing version.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose, but WordPress would do well to test its new plugins on at least the most recently released versions of the blogging engine before releasing them to the world.

It’s a bit of a black eye, to say the least.

photo credit: e_monk via photo pin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Careful what you say in Skype. A new bug in the calling application is sending instant messages intended for a specific contact to others within your list.

According to Engadget, the bug came about after the company issued an update to its software in June. The bug doesn’t fabricate a message to send out, as we see with mobile malware. Instead it takes a message you’ve crafted and shares it with more than just the contact you selected from your address book.

Skype acknowledges the problem and is currently working on the issue, according to a statement sent by the company to Engadget:

“We are aware that in rare circumstances IMs between two contacts could be sent to an unintended third contact. We are rolling out a fix for this issue in the next few days and will notify our users to download an updated version of Skype.”

The issue with this is obvious. Having your messages, particularly if they include any personal or proprietary information, shopped to the rest of your buddies is a problem. It also reduces trust in the Microsoft-owned technology, which many people rely on to communicate internationally. It does seem, however, that the bug is isolated, based on Skype’s note that the problem is occurring “in rare circumstances.” Until the update is issued, take care not to message anything sensitive.

We’ve reached out to Skype to determine whether this is an issue on the mobile, PC, or Mac side. We will update upon hearing back.

via Engadget; Text message image via Shutterstock

The formula for this year’s big games seems to be something like this: launch a blockbuster, include game-breaking bugs. Those who have played Skyrim can probably agree. The latest game to be hit with a major bug? The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

First the bad news: this bug is game-breaking. This means that if you are unfortunate enough to stumble onto this one, there is very little you can do. Actually, according to Nintendo, there is nothing you can do. Your save file is pooched, and you must restart the game.

Now the Good News: Nintendo is very aware of it, and they have found a workaround. You must simply avoid the specific sequence of events that triggers this nasty bug.

The following is the official statement from Nintendo on how to avoid trapping Link forever:

We have been made aware of the issue that results in being unable to progress in the Song of the Hero quest. If the game has been saved after completing the sequence of events, it will no longer be possible to proceed through the game on that save file. The only options at that point are to either start the game over or to use an earlier save file to continue.

The situation is caused by performing the following sequence of events during the Song of the Hero quest:

1. At the beginning of the quest, go to Lanayru Desert to retrieve the song of the Thunder Dragon.

2. In the Lanayru Mine, speak with Golo the Goron.

3. Complete the Thunder Dragon’s event, and receive his song.

4. Before heading to the forest or volcano regions, speak with Golo in the mine again.

5. At this point, the forest and volcano events will no longer occur, making it impossible to continue.

Solutions:

• This issue WILL NOT OCCUR if the Fire and Water Dragon songs have already been collected before collecting the Thunder Dragon’s song. Talking to Golo in the Lanayru Caves will also NOT trigger this issue.

• If the game has been saved after completing the sequence of events, it will no longer be possible to proceed through the game on that save file. The only options at that point are to either start the game over or to use an earlier save file to continue.

I wish I had a better answer, but I’m afraid there currently is no other fix available. I can assure, however, that we are documenting all feedback we receive on this issue. Thank you for your patience and support.

Sincerely,

Sharon Matheny

Yeah, it’s not wonderful news, but at least it’s avoidable. The other bummer is that it’s not something that can be fixed with a quick patch. Just one more thing for our very own Sebastian Haley to diss about Zelda (Just messing with ya, Haley).

(Via Zelda Informer)

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Users first started noticing the bug sometime around midnight (PST), using Twitter as a platform to share their annoyance. “My facebook account was disabled for reasons unclear. Liking a story on CNN? Sharing a link about Nicolas Cage? Serious crimes!,” wrote user raeracquel, characteristic of many others who were puzzled as to what behavior led to the incident.

After his wife’s account was affected by the bug, Kansas-based designer Brian Ford noticed that all users who were complaining seemed to be females or those associated with females. “Most of the accounts have been disabled for being “inauthentic”, and several people are reporting that they can only get it back by uploading a “government issued” photo ID. Sketchy,” Ford added.

A little later in the evening, Boy Genius Report received an acknowledgement of the bug from Facebook, with the following statement:

Earlier today, we discovered a bug in a system designed to detect and disable likely fake accounts. The bug, which was live for a short period of time, caused a very small percentage of Facebook accounts to be mistakenly disabled. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately worked to resolve it. It’s now been fixed, and we’re in the process of reactivating and notifying the people who were affected.

The company seems to have followed up on its promise, and users are beginning to see their accounts reactivated. Additionally, a scan through Twitter’s search for “facebook disabled” finds no new users complaining.

While the incident only affected a very small minority of users, it’s not a good sign that a social network most users rely on so heavily in their lives could be so easily affected by a trivial bug. If the incident wasn’t so widespread, it’s unclear how Facebook would have dealt with it. As Ford noted, “Facebook provides no way (to) actually contact someone, or submit a report about the issue.”