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By Chris Meadows

Ed Burnette writes about what may be the “Worst. Bug. Ever.” in Android phones. It seems that an “invisible” command-line shell is opened when the phone reboots, and any text entered into the phone, no matter what the application, is also interpreted as a command. (This was discovered by someone explaining that he’d just experienced a reboot for other reasons: he typed “reboot” into a text message and hit enter, and lo, his phone rebooted!)

Fortunately, the fix is simple enough that users can make it themselves: just comment out a couple of specific lines in the phone’s init.rc file. And a patch should be coming soon from Google.

Until then, as Ed writes, “be careful what you type.”

[Other coverage: Slashdot]

 
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