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Advertisers Already Using New iPhone Text Message Exploit

Posted by timothy on from the you-rang? dept.

Andy Smith writes: The annoying App Store redirect issue has blighted iPhone users for years, but now there's a new annoyance and it's already being exploited: Visit a web page on your iPhone and any advertiser can automatically open your messages app and create a new text message with the recipient and message already filled in. We can only hope they don't figure out how to automatically send the message, although you can bet they're trying.

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why does this API exist? by cdrudge · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why is there an API for sending a text message from a web page? Why does this need to exist at all?

    You'd think someone at Apple, when they came up for this idea for this, would be shot down by someone else saying "Sorry dude, this is a feature that can be abused."

    It wasn't shot down when mailto: was included in the HTML spec. As long as the API doesn't allow you to actually send it without further consent, how is it any different than every other app's "Send to Facebook|Twitter|Email|Whatever" functionality?

  2. Re:See by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Server-side scripting is just a fancy way of saying "static HTML generated by the server and sent to your client as-is". It's not a script you have to run, as that would be client-side scripting (a.k.a. Javascript).

    For all practical intents and purposes, "server-side scripting" produces static HTML. (The only reason there's a distinction at all is because of page caching.)