Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to eavesdropping vulnerability

I&#x27;ve found that it&#x27;s pretty easy to get people to inadvertently accept FaceTime calls if you continuously spam them. (I was on the receiving end of this attack.) Here&#x27;s how it works.<p>1- It&#x27;s very easy and instantaneous to redial someone on FaceTime if they decline your call. You can just spam the call button and the target will get a continuous ring, basically.<p>2- Even if they turn on Do Not Disturb, many people have &quot;Repeated Calls&quot; enabled, which lets repeat FaceTime calls break through Do Not Disturb. Neat!<p>3- Now they are frustrated and want to throw their phone in a bucket of water to shut it up. The only way to block you is now to get your &quot;info&quot; in the recent callers list, scroll down and hit the &quot;Block this caller&quot; option. However the constant stream of incoming FaceTime calls takes over the UI every couple seconds.<p>As they fiddle with their phone trying to navigate to your info and&#x2F;or hit decline, eventually they inadvertently hit accept, and you see their face.

I have to say, I think it&#x27;s great that Apple doesn&#x27;t try to do damage control on their reputation, but instead does damage control toward the customer. They could&#x27;ve kept the service working, created a fix and silently pushed it, but they didn&#x27;t.

&quot;It turned out that the teen who discovered the bug, Grant Thompson, had attempted to contact Apple about the issue but was unable to get a response.&quot;<p>Good they fixed this. Too often security vulnerabilities remain unaddressed, I think that was the case with Mariot hotels data leak, the staff knew for quite some there are privacy troubles. Now they&#x27;re being fined for not taking action.

remember this idea how weird it is that everybody runs around with spying equipment, you have a always-online device with multiple cameras and microphones. I think people would be uncomfortable knowing that someone was listening or recording video without their knowledge, that&#x27;s why people put stickers on their laptop cameras. I think its obvious by now that manufacturers aren&#x27;t capable of developing software that keeps the cameras&#x2F;microphones secured. In the future we can just assume that any camera&#x2F;mic in any phone is recording at any given moment and sending it to some malicious entity. Since there is no practical way of disabling the cameras&#x2F;mics on phones, we just have to learn to live with it.

I prefer this verge link <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;7&#x2F;11&#x2F;20689983&#x2F;apple-watch-walkie-talkie-bug-disabled" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;7&#x2F;11&#x2F;20689983&#x2F;apple-watch-walk...</a><p>as techcrunch privacy settings are yahoo driven and I was never able to manage them - not sure they really give you an option

I have a series two Apple Watch and while the app shows up I was unable to get it to work back when I tried. I didn’t care that much so I just tried a couple times and gave up.

Also: apple mail is so horrendously broken, any multipart email is likely to fall apart and attachments get chopped off or corrupted every other email.