Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

It's stories like this that makes me love my N900 and Maemo even more and more.

http://gizmodo.com/5592521/how-a-guy...-tethering-app

One could think that when people take measures like these they should perhaps consider another device altogether...

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

how can something like that slip through testing? does apple have worse QA than maemo extras? :D

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

Thats pretty cool on his part. :D

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

Well, apparently you had to press the colors blue, yellow, red (in sequence) to activate the true app. Perhaps not very easy to discover, I guess. I'm also guessing Apple QA doesn't really lay that much effort into testing another flashlight app.

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

I'd bet the same horse too.

But aren't you seeing some massive security issues with "another [insertsomecommonapplicationhere] app"? Where are the boundaries if the kid could alter system settings?

I hope for everyones sake that there are automated tools to check each app for malware....

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

My understanding is that automated code scanning is part of the testing they do for each app.

More importantly, why did they even approve such a seemingly pointless app? I'm sure the iphone has no shortage of such apps.

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

On what ground should it be rejected?

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

What I said:

Apple's app approval procedure is far from transparent or consistent, but similarity to already approved apps has been used to reject apps before. But the bottom line is Apple can reject apps because they can. Unless the app they reject comes from Google and Google wouldn't accept the rejection without a fight and Apple eventually backed down :cool:

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

Just out of interest, I know it's open source but could this happen to N900 apps, does the code get checked in new applications?

Could anything (malicious?) slip in by obscurification?

Could the 'compiled' version on extras differ from the source code made available? What checks are in place?

Not trying to be funny, just interested!

Re: Tricking Apple with disguised apps
 

first things first: there are no sources for every package available.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Help_testing_software