One of these things is not like the other

If a contractor doesn't proof read their word documents, of course you can trust them to replace and configure the servers which your company vitally needs. Those little details never hurt anybody.

Broken things: iPod Classic

Somebody brought me an iPod with the timeless White Screen Of Death. That used to be pretty common and is easily fixed by reloading the firmware.

It worked, I turned it on, and things got a bit weird.

Somewhere along the way, about half the letters in every bit of text in the firmware vanished. Some shorter words had the misfortune to disappear altogether.

I have no idea why this happened. The firmware copy was fine, the loading process was fine, and if it was general corruption we'd be seeing a lot more than just missing letters.

Sadly, reloading the same firmware a second time gave me a perfectly-working iPod. Sometimes things are more fun half-broken than working.

Obscene Automated Tour Guides

I went to a rather nice museum a few weeks ago - it was quite new and focussed on doing everything in as modern a way as possible. In keeping with that, they'd replaced the tour guides with iPod touches that ran a custom app.

The app itself was pretty great. It identified nearby exhibits (via unique bluetooth transmitters, I'm guessing) and let you rate how you felt about them. You could read through some extra information if you wanted, and sometimes see related audio or video clips.

As an added bonus, you could leave the app and access the normal iPhone tools. I wasn't the first person to realise this.

These guys were able to deploy an advanced location-aware custom app, but don't have anybody who understands iPhone restrictions, the iPhone Configuration Tool, or old-fashioned Kiosk Mode. It didn't even throw any errors when I added a throwaway email account.

This wasn't just a recent problem - a lot of the contacts had been added over 6 months before, so they aren't even being wiped regularly. I can only assume the guys who made the app are long gone while the staff just update exhibit information on a local server.

To end with, here's some more detail about those gentlemanly prior patrons of the museum.

Symantec Endpoint, just stop this

More like SEMENtec endpoint amirite

Emails where you blatantly contradict yourself and render the message pointless, registering multiple computers under the same name due to a quirk in the installation, arbitrarily alerting me that half the computers are 'OUT OF DATE' because you don't like how some optional settings are configured...just stop.

You're pretty thorough at picking up viruses and shit, but this needy attention-seeking behaviour has got to stop. Every machine is up to-the-minute with updates and functioning perfectly, so why all the fuss? Just take a few deep breaths and calm down.

I didn't even know they had a firefox port

To the one guy out there actually using BeOS/Haiku, I salute you. I hope you found what you were looking for.

 I'm guessing not though.

WHAT IS THIS

Seriously, WHAT DOES THIS BUTTON DO.

It's on a keyboard I got long ago, from the mid to late nineties - you know, buttons for every function you don't need a hardware button for.

The button does nothing. It doesn't bring coffee, it doesn't open up a coffee-related webpage, it doesn't try to start a coffee machine, it does  nothing at all.

I MUST KNOW.

Vodafone Australia Leaking Private Picture messages?

Over the weekend, one of our users had a pretty strange event happen. The basic chain of events went like this:

• The user receives an (expected) MMS message to their work and personal phones at the same time. Both these numbers are on vodafone.
• The user immediately starts receiving dozens of other MMS messages from numbers they don't recognise.
• After 10 minutes, the user turns off both phones.When they're turned back on, the messages have stopped.

While they'd been wiped off the personal phone, I got to have a look at the work phone this morning. The MMSes had all arrived at her email address which makes things a bit easier to analyse.

From this we can see:

• These were, beyond a doubt, not intended for her. The only thread even linking all the recipients (and senders) is that they're australian.
•  The messages all came through vodafones servers.
• The messages all have a send time approximately that of the receive. That doesn't necessarily mean that this was essentially a live capture of their MMS traffic, but it seems likely.
• A quick look at some messages shows a high incidence of people from WA. That could mean it was a WA-only issue, or it could be due to the time difference between us and the Eastern States.
• These are real MMSes. They are not spam, they were sent by real people who did not expect them to be made public.

 Here's a good example of the kind of thing that was leaked.
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A student card. To go with his phone number, they gave us the high school, full name, date of birth, and some photo ID of a minor. Believe me when I say that this was far from the most personal piece of information there.

Most worryingly, Somebody has mentioned to me since then that a friend of theirs had the same thing happen yesterday - hundreds of PXTs being misdirected to his phone. He thought it was some kind of spam and changed his number, which is a shame.

I'd love to find somebody else who had this happen and still has some messages. With some more data we can work out a few more details:

• The time period. It was about 10 minutes for this case, but that may have just been the tail end - it could have been going for weeks in the right conditions.
• The trigger. I'm guessing it was 'receiving or sending a PXT message', but again I need more data.
•  Whether the same messages were sent to everybody. Everybody getting the same stream of messages is a much smaller problem than everybody receiving separate streams

With all of that, we can work out the scale of what happened here, and hopefully notify some of the customers who unexpectedly had their personal messages made public.

I should also mention:  I've contacted vodafone about this (via the authorised partner we deal with), but I haven't heard back yet. I'm very interested to hear their response.