Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray 325
theodp writes "Reports from Engadget and others suggest that Tiger Woods and Brett Favre might want to avoid Android for the time being. It seems Android's default text messaging app still has horrible text messaging bugs that can that intermittently send texts to the wrong person. 'This is ticking me off like no other technology glitch that I experienced in recent years,' reads one unhappy camper's post on a lengthy Help Forum thread opened on March 16th. 'If a bank deposited my paycheck into another person's account I wouldn't stress so much cause I can always get the money back. How the hell do you take words back? "Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?"' Over at Google Code, Issue 9392 — SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact — carries a priority of 'Medium,' even though it has 600+ comments and has been starred by 3,600+ people."
It's open source (Score:5, Funny)
So fix it yourself.
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Who are you talking to, exactly? Is it just theodp, or everybody on Slashdot, or do you want my grandma to roll out her own new Android patch?
Does releasing the source code absolve the vendor of any responsibility to support their product?
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Whom, precisely, does the OP pay to fix this problem on his phone?
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Re:It's open source (Score:5, Informative)
Software should be free.
Texts should be free.
Free, free, free (or almost free).
"When phones are on, they are ALWAYS connected to the cell phone tower. The phones and cell phone towers exchange little packets worth of information back and forth so when ever a call comes it, they can find you straight away. Can anyone guess how big the packets are? If you guess 160 characters, you are right." In other words they are charging for a service that should be free, because the phone and tower are *already sending* Texts to one another. It costs nothing for the company to append that Text to the outgoing packet.
"When you think of it on a kilobyte level it costs us $1.09 per text message Kilobyte. The markup for costs is 7300%." So using an typical 2000 messages/month, that's just 320,000 characters or 0.00032 gigabytes. It shouldn't cost 25 dollars (what VirginMobile charges me). Continued here: http://www.spoiledtechie.com/post/The-Actual-Cost-of-Texting2c-Short-Codes-and-a-731425-Mark-up.aspx [spoiledtechie.com] and here: http://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+texting [google.com]
To summarize: Phones are "texting" towers constantly as part of the cellular standard.
The appending of a personal message costs nothing extra for the company.
The rates are outrageously high for the minuscule data passed.
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In other words they are charging for a service that should be free, because the phone and tower are *already sending* Texts to one another. It costs nothing for the company to append that Text to the outgoing packet. "When you think of it on a kilobyte level it costs us $1.09 per text message Kilobyte. The markup for costs is 7300%."
Wait...so if the packets back and forth between the tower and cell phone are 'free' because it's a required part of the cell protocol, how is charging $1.09 per text message a 7300% increase? 0 * 73.00 != 1.09.
By that math, aren't you implying that text messages actually cost $0.014931507? (0.014931507 * 73.00 == 1.09)
(Also, since I haven't had to do any math more advanced than balancing my checkbook since highschool over 10 years ago, I won't be the least embarrassed or surprised to find out that my
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If you read the website (I linked to it), the author says texting costs 109 cents per kilobyte sent. But Verizon's data cost is only .015 cents per kilobyte. So do some quick math and it's a HUGE markup in cost. 109 divided by .015 == 7300 markup according to the website.
Actually that's not correct. It's actually a 109/.015 times 100 == 730,000% markup.
And also my math says Verizon Data costs $40/5 gigabyte == 0.0008 cents per kilobyte.
But it doesn't really matter.
The point is the amount charged for sen
Re:It's open source (Score:5, Insightful)
The value of a text message is what ever the customer will pay for it. It has nothing at all to do with cost.
Android comes with Google Talk. It is Free (included in your data plan) and is not arbitrarily limited to 160 characters.
ON most cell networks, SMS messages utilize a signaling path that is used to notify phones of call arrival. (Specifically using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol).
That path has a finite capacity. When that path is busy, calls go direct to voice mail without so much as a ring on your handset.
This type of traffic needs to be moved to the data plan instead of the network signaling path. Google Talk (which is simply Jabber) is the perfect tool for this and works across all platforms (cell phones, computers, tablets, etc).
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Thank you for that paragraph explaining exactly what I said in one sentence.
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You said no such thing. You claimed the price "has nothing to do with cost" as if pricing is pulled out of thin air. That is false. The price is set by company vs. company competition that slowly-but-surely drives it down to the level of actual cost for said product.
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Except of course in the case of collusion, or as actually appears to be the case here, no company feels that the expenses of trying to compete based on SMS pricing (in order to actually compete in a reasonably short term requires some form of advertising. Being able to go below a cent a message would also almost certainly require updates to the software being used, as the original billing software specs are unlikely to have contemplated sub-cent pricing for SMS.
(Not to mention that if text messages were $0.
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When you think of it on a kilobyte level it costs us $1.09 per text message Kilobyte
How the hell do you get that figure? Are you actually paying to send SMSes, or something? If you are, stop. It's 2011 now. Send your phone back to twenty years ago and get a new one.
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I don't know why you are surprised.
Not all plans include unlimited texting. VirginMobile used to have a "Texter's Delight" plan for ~2 pennies per text, but they eliminated it cause they claimed to be losing money. I honestly don't see how. I suspect an untruth.
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I suspect they were losing money, compared to their earlier plans that is.
As long as customers don't mind paying for 160 bytes of text telco's will happily accept and make it last as long as they can. They'll start to see their texting-profits erode soon enough once more customers (read: teens) discover flat-fee mobile internet with apps like whatsapp can save them a hunk of cash every month.
just recently switched to unlimited text (Score:3)
Until last month I was paying 20 cents a text, which worked out to about $3.40 a month for me. less than the taxes on the line.
I have an unlimited plan now but that's because it was bundled with some other things I wanted. about half of my friends have per text charges, and if they cared about the charges they would switch plans.
Unlimited text being the standard is a recently phenomenon (last 3 or so years), and has not been something that has been around since the late 80s/early 90s as you suggest.
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I don't think I've paid for text messaging for about ten years. My current package gives something like ten thousand SMSes free, with subsequent ones charged at 1p each.
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Yes, the number is bigger. Dollars and pounds aren't the same thing.
wouldn't that make them appear cheaper when current rate is around 1.5 to 2 dollars to the pound?
US - $2.82
UK - $5.79
Netherlands - $6.48
France - $5.54
Ireland - $4.78
Spain - $4.55
Romania - $4.09
Brazil - $3.12 - the Americas are all this price
(numbers from Jan 2010 because that's all the data I had, numbers in US dollars per US gallon. current conversion factors also from Jan 2010)
They used to be free (Score:2)
When i had to switch in the UK from analog, there was no charge made on SMS.
I was truly shocked when, a few years later, texting took off.
It was like the X.25 channel on ISDN. There, known to a few, but of little use.
Oh, silly me, i bought a phone, to be, err, a phone.
Now, if you suddenly find a way to charge good money for something which is a byproduct waste in your system, why the heck not charge as much as you can?
All you're doing is taxing cowardice. Which is a plentiful thing. Don't tell me you never
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>>>When i had to switch in the UK from analog, there was no charge made on SMS.
Precisely.
SMS texting used to be free because it didn't cost the company anything.
Now it isn't.
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To summarize: Phones are "texting" towers constantly as part of the cellular standard.
Not exactly. AFAIK, in GSM and UMTS the standalone dedicated control channel (SDCCH) is occupied on both originating and terminating sides.
The appending of a personal message costs nothing extra for the company.
The store-and-forward SMSC servers cost very real money, and the hardware does limit throughput.
The rates are outrageously high for the minuscule data passed.
As per the first point, it's not about data but signalling resource usage. Don't think too much of sending over GPRS - a voice call would be interrupted and there's still the smallish data overhead involved anyway (some 30 octets per 140 bytes of payload).
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Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?
"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." --Eric Schmidt
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An ancient piece of wisdom...
"If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Unfortunately we live in an age where narcissism abounds and people actually believe they should be immune to the consequences of their actions.
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Google responds to these claims with "you're holding it wrong."
This is an important point (Score:2)
Google responds to these claims with "you're holding it wrong."
I think what's happening here is that data meant for the 'bit bucket' is falling out through the antenna.
GNU vs. BSD (Score:2)
A lot of companies (i.e., Apple, Google, Oracle) use licensing that is "open source" in that the code can be used by anyone, however they are careful to always make sure that private modifications need not be published. Such companies avoid GNU like the plague, and only use it when forced (e.g., gcc). These companies then go further to make your stronger licensing ineffective by using DRM (e.g., Droid and TiVO) to make it even more unpleasant to hack their source base by depriving you of real control over
Re:It's open source (Score:4, Informative)
I'm wondering if Handcent or other 3rd party apps are affected by this bug also or if its just in the Google app code only.
None of the other FREE (or paid) SMS apps have had this reported.
Further, its very rare, and complicated to reproduce this, unless you frequently have a lot of message threads between many people going on, and respond asynchronously.
"Darth Mo" posted how a specific a sequence of messages [androidcentral.com] can cause this problem, and it seems to involve the Back Button on Android, after reading a message from one contact but then deciding to respond to a different prior message thread.
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I have n't been able to dupe this myself.
weird.
OTOH, if you are saying stuff behind you best friends back that would turn them into a former best friend, then maybe you never really where BFF?
Not that it excuses this bug, but just that the attempt to ramp of the alarm in the article was pretty ham handed.
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SMS (Score:5, Funny)
Hey Larry there's this bitching party down town tonight with strippers and blow!
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Sincerely
The Fuzz
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Who do you think is bringing all the coke from the evidence room?
Google Voice (Score:2)
Does the bug affect the Google Voice client as well or only the native SMS client?
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hey what is it with Hungary these days (Score:5, Funny)
!
sent from my android
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Google support (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, Google may have to realize that some of their products actually require customer support.
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Eventually, Google may have to realize that some of their products actually require customer support.
This topic comes up a much after Google released the Nexus. Ad agencies have no customer support.
"Products" never receive any tech support... their owners do. Let me further remind us all that we aren't the real "customer;" that's actually the telcos, and we can't hear them asking for any help on our behalf so far.
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That being said, I have a Nexus One and in general it's a great phone. It's just a couple of minor problems in terms of my use.
Re:Google support (Score:5, Interesting)
Google don't provide the technical support, the handset vendors and operators do. And they're in an industry which typically doesn't provide much in the way of significant software updates once their product is released, preferring to dedicate developer time to working on the Next Big Thing.
OTOH, Google are quite used to being able to ship beta products and fix them with later updates.
Put it this way, I've got an Android handset. It's great as far as it goes, but I keep finding irritating bugs which simply shouldn't exist in anything that's production quality. Things like "Address book shows numbers if I scroll through entries and choose the relevant one, but not if I search".
I need to go back to my operator, but I'm fairly sure they'll reload it with the latest version of the firmware then wash their hands of the matter - if it turns out I've got it set up in such a fashion as to make the bugs come about, I have no doubt that'll be my problem. Bugger the exorbitant cost, my next phone will be an iPhone 4. I'm sure it'll have foibles of its own, but they're unlikely to be in the basic usage.
Re:Google support (Score:5, Insightful)
Bugger the exorbitant cost, my next phone will be an iPhone 4. I'm sure it'll have foibles of its own, but they're unlikely to be in the basic usage.
As long as you don't count making a phone call or the alarm working "basic usage". =D
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That would explain Sergey Brin's text to me (Score:2)
"Where t Hell iz my Hookers n Blow??? U is 2 hours late for NY parT, dog! Bet that fuk Zuckerberg's ParT already has Hookers n Blow! WTF????"
This is fucking hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and the "fix it yourself" people need to shut the fuck up too. That's fine when it's an open-source project with fifty users hosted on sourceforge, not when it's in-production software that runs on millions and millions of phones.
Re:This is fucking hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a high priority bug that has no excuse for not being fixed within days of it being reported.
I thought the "fix it yourself" folks were being sarcastic. I can't imagine that anyone would really try to claim that this isn't a serious bug that Google needs to fix. The fact that there are free alternatives like Handcent does not in any way absolve Google from fixing the default text messaging client.
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Oh, and the "fix it yourself" people need to shut the fuck up too. That's fine when it's an open-source project with fifty users hosted on sourceforge, not when it's in-production software that runs on millions and millions of phones.
Settle down, it's just karma balancing itself.
The more time you spend shouting from the rooftops how superior your preferences are, the more people are going to get in line to take you down a peg.
Consider that the next time you decide how loud you'd like to shout about how OSS has more eyeballs.
uh.... maybe not (Score:5, Informative)
If a portion of your user population has enough trouble with your UI that they are 'fat fingering' their way into trouble, then at some point it is _your_ issue.
But that having been said, a quick glance through the support thread shows things like this: "http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=345259e6d424bad3&fid=345259e6d424bad300048dfbff785d0c&hltp=2"
The code reverses the numbers before doing its (loose) compare... so uses the 7 last digits.
Bob - 408-555-1234
Fred - 510-555-1234
become
4321-555-804
4321-555-015
And it only uses the first 7 digits, which for both numbers, is "4321555"...
So if you send a message to Fred, and it looks in the cache for the contact, there's a chance it will go to Bob.
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Okay thats interesting. The way the numbering system works in Australia I think a number would potentially match three other numbers:
+61 40 1234567
+61 41 1234567
+61 42 1234567
+61 43 1234567
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Wow. So there's a x in ten million chance (where x is the number of contacts you have minus 1) that it'll go to the wrong person. *
Stupid, but I don't think this is the problem being seen by so many people.
* - Or something like this. assuming entirely random distribution of numbers and all number combinations being valid and all phone numbers being same length.
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In US, area codes and prefixes aren't even remotely random. A town may have one area code and only a handfull of prefixes, so if your contacts are local than the probability of an ambiguity would be very high. That's the significance of the number reversal.
Re:uh.... maybe not (Score:5, Informative)
The actual code is here [kernel.org].
Reading the various compare() implementations definitely leaves room for doubt about correctness. The compareStrictly() code is a lovely illustration of the ambiguity that exists in the world of phone numbers. The comparison implementation mentioned above is found in compareLoosely() and is characterized in comments as "similar() not equals()", meaning collisions are possible. Which of compairStrictly/Loosely is actually use is subject to configuration; the caller can't know which is used without examining configuration resources.
Haven't yet seen evidence that this is the cause of the problem folks are having; does the SMS code rely on this? The comments claim the compareLoosely() method is "identical enough for caller ID purposes." One could imagine that when the user hits 'reply' on a message the code might hunt through the phone book using compareLoosely and stop on the first "match", which may be incorrect due to a collision. There seems to be some correlation between reports of this phenomenon and the 'threaded' 'conversation' stuff in Android, which could mean people are relying on 'reply' and getting wrong results.
Who knows. Bugs will happen and phones aren't trivial. The real problem in my mind is that this one has been on the books for a looong time now (six months, approximately) and it's not getting the attention it clearly deserves.
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When you're abroad, you have to modify phone numbers by an international prefix. For example, a Dutch phone number 020-1234567 becomes 003120-1234567: a zero is dropped and replaced by the prefix 0031. It makes sense to do pattern matching on the last part of the phone number, although it is debatable whether that is a good thing for other things than incoming
There's an app for that (Score:2)
Android randomly deletes all of your SMS too (Score:2, Informative)
If it doesn't send them to someone random it will just delete all of them. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669 That's also labled as medium.
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It's been fixed (Score:5, Informative)
Though I guess it'll take a while to get into builds/updates for existing handsets.
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Though I guess it'll take a while to get into builds/updates for existing handsets.
And therein lies the problem with the fragmented Android system.
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Does not seem to be the same bug, since people state they had SMS go to persons they never sent a message to before, and the link you posted states a message might go to the recipient entered in an old draft message.
This bug is bad (Score:5, Interesting)
But not as bad as the HTC 911 issues [blogspot.com]
Sending messages to the right contact and making sure 911 calls work are things OS makers should go out of their way to ensure work correctly
Do mobile vendors QA their products anymore?
Why bother with QA... (Score:2)
When they really just want to push you headlong into the upgrade treadmill?
This also seems to explain how incredibly crappy p
can i get one? (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost makes me want to buy an iPhone or a Win 7 phone. Actually I don't want (nor do I own) any of these phones. Could someone just make a phone that I can dial numbers on to call someone? Thanks!
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Nokia has a wide assortment of phones which do just that, and cost $50 or less to boot (without contract).
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Could someone just make a phone that I can dial numbers on to call someone? Thanks!
To whoever makes that cellphone: make it a rotary dial too! (It would be a pain for texting, but it'd be worth it).
Talk about bugspam... (Score:3)
Ok, I'll agree that this seems to be an important issue, but the 700 me-toos in a 24 hour period on the issue isn't going to help anybody.
Go ahead and star the issue if you'd like (and enjoy reading the resulting 700 emails you'll get every day from the idiots shouting "this is important). But, there are better ways to get the issue escalated than to spam the bug. This just makes it that much harder for anybody actually working on the problem to fix it. Also, anybody who did care about the issue and who was working on it probably will take their names off the bug as soon as they get into work next week, or at least hit the mute button on the conversation thread in gmail.
If somebody spammed a bug of mine on an open source project like this I'd do two things:
1. Fix the bug.
2. Ban anybody from the bugzilla who posted a me-too.
Me-toos that include helpful step-by-step reproduction scripts, core dumps with symbols, insightful analysis, or whatever are of course perfectly welcome. "This is important!!!" is just whining - yes, it is important, now go find something productive to do...
Re:Talk about bugspam... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right about starring rather than spamming, but the attention had the intended effect. The priority is now marked critical.
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So, based on the posts in the bug it sounds like Google has been actually working on this, but having problems tracking it down.
That being the case, perhaps you should have posted a reproducible scenario or something.
I was just amused to see that as an interested party trying to understand what was going on (and hey, who knows, maybe even spot something that can be patched), I had to wade through 750 me-toos to find the 10 posts that had actual content in them.
The many-eyeballs benefits of open source go aw
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Human nature - a silent click on a star doesn't look as persuasive as direct communication, plus it deprives the (l)user of self-expression. Plus, when the poor fellow sees that his bug has lingered on with "Medium" priority after a year and 800+ complains from unhappy campers complaining, he feels some extra "pressure" is in order.
Silly as it may seem, by the time a user starts googling an issue (no pun intended), he's already a bit tense and exasperated. Maybe a tweak in the tracker interface would help,
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Well, they provided this nice mechanism - starring the issue. Plus, after the 350th me-too in a one-day period do we really need a 351st?
In any case, I've fixed lots of open-source bugs, and I've been paid exactly zero to do it. I'd hardly say that my free contributions have been holding open-source back.
Now, admittedly Android has commercial sponsorship, but these people should really be complaining to their carriers, not spamming bugs...
Fixing this will be a nightmare (Score:3)
Surely this adds to the case for Android device manufacturers should be working together on a standard Android distribution, rather than on their own fragmented and mangled versions.
They should accept they are just producing hardware, and that the Android customisations are irrelavent (much as it is with Windows laptops and vendor supplied crapware). Because they all produce customised versions of everything and stop supporting them as soon as the new hardware is released these bugs are going to exist in existing Android handsets for a long time, potentially forever.
Another critical bug no one blogged about (Score:5, Interesting)
This is depressing (Score:2)
A tempest in a teapot (Score:2)
I have NO knowledge of this ever happening to me, nor do I ever recall getting an SMS from some random person...
3600 reports out of millions of devices. Assuming on'y perhaps one in a thousand bother to report this, then you do get a large enough sample to be concerned about unless some of those 3600 are repeats.
More interesting to me is the sad state of the POP/IMAP Email client. It's been substantially dysfunctional since birth. Only with the Android 1.6 release did it even actually delete the trash lo
subject (Score:2)
"Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?"
Actually, this is a good reminder that you should treat every single thing you send over any network as public speech.
Re:Medium is appropriate... (Score:5, Insightful)
but not a performance or security related issue.
Randomly sending SMS messages to the wrong recipient is a huge performance and security bug. Performance: if the intended recipient does not get the message, the phone is not performing a basic function correctly and the effective messaging performance is zero. Security: It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that sending SMS messages to the wrong people could definitely have a negative effect on user privacy, making this a BIG security bug.
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Performance: is in regards to phone performance and responsiveness (raw speed), not user-related effectiveness.
I call troll, but I can't help feeding you. If a bug made the phone into a brick that did nothing but execute nop instructions at 1 Ghz when idle, and just flashed random lights when a button was pressed, your definition would not classify this a performance bug.
Re:Medium is appropriate... (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems you consider sending personal data to the wrong destination "not a security issue." Messages are information. Login details routinely travel over them, like when you're resetting a password or something... now you can't know if it really travelled to the right person. If this were SSL you'd be yelling "man in the middle" attack.
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[quote]Over at Google Code, Issue 9392 — SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact — carries a priority of 'Medium,' even though it has 600+ comments and has been starred by 3,600+ people.[/quote]
It is important to many people, but not a performance or security related issue. Yep, medium priority.
I'd say sending a text to the wrong person is a big security flaw.
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Meh, information wants to be free. It's not like your personal communications will harm the world. Why aren't you just being open and honest to begin with?
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Not so idiotic to many here. They'll just argue that their communications are private, and that an elected government's private communications (further classified as secret) should be public.
Security is unnecessary for the elected government of a superpower nation with a nuclear arsenal and complex diplomatic endeavours, but it's absolutely essential for making sure you don't have to have a conversation with your grandmother about your desire to get shitfaced.
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Security is unnecessary for the elected government of a superpower nation with a nuclear arsenal and complex diplomatic endeavours, but it's absolutely essential for making sure you don't have to have a conversation with your grandmother about your desire to get shitfaced.
Well, maybe if I could make it a little more concise.
You were really going for the signature quote, weren't you? :)
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and we have to try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio good here on Slashdot.
Right. Now please refrain from lecturing. Thanks for your cooperation. EOT.
Definitely bug. One or several remains to be seen. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it is not a fat finger issue. It IS sending messages to the wrong recipient without notification, and even sorting them in a different thread than where it was sent; there are steps to reproduce in the bug report. Your assumptions about the issues are misleading others just as badly as FUD could.
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This also shows up when a message is sent to someone for whom you have two or more cellphone numbers. I saw a message I had sent my son at his foreign cellphone number (by mistake) coming up as a new thread, which I knew was "wrong". I re-sent it to his local cellphone number and it filed correctly. But both threads had the same name title, and did not have anything to distinguish them (a UI error: they should have the class of device appended in parentheses when the recipient has more than one SMS-capable
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there are steps to reproduce in the bug report
False. From the linked bug report:
Interestingly, has never occurred on my other Nexus running the same FRF50 build.
Basically, he says he *can't* reproduce the bug on just any device. Only on one particular device.
Re:Bug or inaccurate tapping? (Score:5, Insightful)
There appear to be a few failure modes; the one we definitely experience on the Gingerbread-powered Nexus S involves being routed to the wrong thread when you tap it either in the Notifications list or the master thread list in the Messaging application, so if you don't notice, you'll end up firing a message to the wrong person.
Not sure whether to file this under FUD, but the error isn't nearly as sensational as the title or summary seem to indicate. Certainly an issue if it turns out that presses are being fuzzed out to different locations than intended, but very possibly an issue of "fat fingers" on the part of customers.
Fat fingers can't explain why messages that the phone logs as having been sent to person A are in fact sent to person B, which some people have reported.
However rarely this bug strikes, it is something that should never happen, and it is definitely a showstopper bug for many many users.
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I also notice that when the screen is first coming on, if I select a contact from the call log or a thread from the SMS log that sometimes I get a s
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Just watch what you write because you can't trust it. If you want to be sure then create a new messge and select the contact manually
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Apparently you have a whole other bug than what is being reported. If the bug was what you had mentioned then the bug should be reported
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I don't know why you ever thought Google wasn't worse. Microsoft is great at implementing software (i.e. features). I really can't think of a better company at that. Where they usually fail is in the concept stage, esp. regarding security. Google is much better at that (from an architecture/focus standpoint) even though their software has [a lot] more bugs.
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You know what else was a race condition?
The Therac-25 fiasco.
What does it have in common with this fiasco?
Shitty programming.
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It has ALREADY been fixed by the community.
None of the dozen or so SMS apps in the market exhibit this. Only the stock app.
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As mentioned in other threads, its rated medium, even tho a lot of people bitch about it.
That probably changes Monday morning since this hit the press (and not just SlashDot over the holiday in a big way.
Nothing succeeds like a little mainstream press in getting Google (and most other companies attention). If you want to speed things along, get your congressman to threaten to hold hearings.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't excuse anything with regards to this issue in the Android OS, but if you, as an engineer, use SMS to iron out critical details on project, you have even bigger issues.
SMS was never advertised as a reliable communication medium, nor was it ever recognized as such. Using it for official communications, especially communications that should probably be traceable and leave an history is really not that bright. Emails are so easy to use on mobiles now, they offer a much better alternative.
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