Bug In Android Passes Keystrokes To Root Shell

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 8, 2008 @06:18AM from the watch-what-you-type dept.

pasokon writes "ZDNet reports on an Android bug in T-Mobile G1s with early versions of the firmware: 'When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. ... open the keyboard tray on your G1, ignore anything you see on the screen, and type these 8 keystrokes: (enter)-r-e-b-o-o-t-(enter). Poof, your phone will reboot.'"

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convenient problem by hort_wort · 2008-11-08 07:02 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Hmm, what do you know... another obvious quirk to the Android that gets it on the frontpage of slashdot. I'm beginning to suspect it could be intentional for free advertising at this point. But then, who am I to question OS compilation? I couldn't even get Gentoo to run.