That's so bad it's awesome! As an aside, I feel slightly stupider from having read some of the comments, although the "rm -rf /*" was a good suggestion.

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Bugdoor!

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Man, I don't know if I want to believe this, but just can't, or if I don't want to believe this, but must.

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The best part is that since android's not really open-source, you can't deploy any fixes yourself.

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This is close to the platonic ideal of security bugs. It's hard to imagine any worse non-totally-trivial example.

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Srsly. The only way it could be worse is if incoming SMS and email messages were also pasted to the shell.

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Don't security bugs have to compromise security in some fashion?

Although it'd be fun to check the .bash_history.

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You seem to have forgotten that the telcos (and their bitches, the phone-software-providers) consider it a matter of security that you not be able to root your phone.

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Well, yeah, but I thought a condition of accepting Android in the first place was to not give a shit if the phone gets rooted by the user. Because otherwise they would not be going with Android and would have some 110% obscurified walled-garden system instead.

That's the good they're supposed to bring to the party and all, and the OS is there to prevent foot-shooting by software not vetted by the carrier, preventing it from making calls or scraping the address book or sending spam or forwarding everything the microphone or camera picks up without the user's consent.

[I am assuming that local root on the G1 doesn't give a user much of anything that local root on a laptop with a GSM modem or a Windows Mobile device doesn't, other than an increased ability to brick his own phone.]

Maybe it's a window of opportunity for software to send whatever it wants to the shell, or talk the user into running rm -rf /, but it seems so likely to hose the phone before then (did they leave shell history enabled?) that it's more a "WTF" than a "risk."

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I keep this on my ipod just to horrify people with.

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4chan is two doors down to the right.

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I see what you did there.

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I found that episode nowhere near as creepy as the My Fake Baby women.

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rm *

this seems like an obvious thing to test, but maybe I just do devious edge-cases.

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Until somebody figures a way to combine this with a remote exploit, you're unlikely to demonstrate how l337 you are outside of face-punching range of your victim.

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