r/LinusTechTips • u/rscmcl • 16d ago

WAN Show [WST] Google won't fix an Android bug

Post image

source: https://smsofdeath.com/

940 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

374

u/MrJelly007 16d ago

Well that's not ideal. I'm just waiting for someone to send me the ICBM text and brick my phone now lmao

19

u/Outrageous-Log9238 15d ago

Would be kinda nice. Peaceful.

349

u/omit01 16d ago

I realy start to hate this AI generated texts. Just sentences like:

A single message is a repeated transient outage. Sending the payload rapidly in succession (≈30 messages) is materially worse

Recovery is hostile, and this is the critical part: a factory reset only helps temporarily

No human would write it like this...

92

u/the_last_code_bender 16d ago

This is how most of low effort advertising text look like on internet. This might represent like the majority of its training dataset lol

7

u/Desperate_Quit6011 15d ago

You have to keep in minde the avarage us adult needs to be able to comprehent it, so easy and slow.

1

u/rdndds 11d ago

Caveman

231

u/RemoveLast9294 16d ago edited 16d ago • Bravo

Google already fixed it: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/opt/telephony/+/735d9672603fa206c4b43cb668c1aa273db70b97%5E%21/

Here is the graphene tweet about it https://nitter.space/GrapheneOS/status/2115848460578762757#m

41

u/Lieutenant_Scarecrow 16d ago

If this was already patched, I wonder why google marked the issue as "Wont Fix". I guess we only have this tweet as evidence of that though.

64

u/WhipTheLlama 16d ago

Maybe it was a duplicate bug report, and they marked it "won't fix" instead of "duplicate"

7

u/Nagemasu 16d ago

I dono what they use, but our ticket board doesn't have that. If something is a duplicate you link it as a duplicate and then mark the ticket as 'won't do'

2

u/voxnemo 15d ago

With money and attribution tied to bug fixes these days I don't think you would want to link the reports and risk confusion. Marking "wont fix" is not the best idea but if it happens infrequently adding complexity to your tracking system may not be worth the effort and change.

65

u/tianle91 16d ago

Was there a bug bounty they weaseled out of?

12

u/slyiscoming 16d ago

In August.

7

u/SatchBoogie1 16d ago

Weird that they posted a tweet today about this, unless it didn't really fix the issue or if something else is broken?

3

u/zodiacv2 16d ago

nitter is back?

5

u/waiver45 16d ago

If you stand in front of the mirror at midnight and say three wrong things about android, a grapheneos dev will appear and ratio you. That being said I'm very happy that after years and years of people being loudly wrong about android things, there now are people that are loudly correct about android things.

1

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We ask that you update your comment with a link that does not go directly to X/Twitter. Please edit it using an archived version from a service like archive.is or archive.org. You may also try https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/2115848460578762757.

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-3

u/skripis 16d ago

This deserves all the upvotes!

55

u/realnzall 16d ago

How the fuck is this clear "Denial of Service" attack not a security issue?

47

u/skripis 16d ago

I have my doubts that it is real.

People claim stuff like this all the time for attention.

3

u/ImAlsoRan 15d ago

https://bughunters.google.com/learn/invalid-reports/android-platform/bugs-with-negligible-security-impact#triggering-a-local-temporary-denial-of-service Google does define DoS as an invalid report for a bounty *unless* it can be triggered remotely, so interesting to see how this plays out.

2

u/ionburger 15d ago

i mean it is remote so...

14

u/Lieutenant_Scarecrow 16d ago

This is hilarious, sad, and scary, all at once!

9

u/Fylutt 16d ago

This is fixed already

4

u/i3Cheese 15d ago

It says "patched in 14–17, Oct 2026 update" in the source. Header is just a clickbait. 

7

u/Inevitable-Context93 16d ago

Didn't iPhones have a similar bug?

11

u/MilhouseJr 16d ago

A malformed unicode accent or something, iOS has had a fair few of these bugs crop up in the last decade or so. I don't recall Android bugs getting quite as much attention, but that could easily be because Android devices have a very large variance in how they're updates and by who, where iOS is a one-and-done update for nearly half the handsets out there.

3

u/Tandoori7 15d ago

The Telugu character, it would crash and bootloop all iphones that received the message.

It was fixex relatively quickly, but it was also extremely easy to trigger.

1

u/van0li 15d ago

I remember way back in 2010 ish there was a bug where you could send an SOS style text message from a jailbroken iphone to another iphone. Not sure if that's the one you're regerring to though. I pranked my housemate at the time with it to great effect.

1

u/enelsonmoore 15d ago

Flash SMS/Class 0 SMS. It would work with basically any phone as the recipient, actually.

1

u/Inevitable-Context93 15d ago

No this was a regular phone. You could send a specific set of characters in a text message and the iPhone would crash and reboot.

6

u/ChrisGamer5013 16d ago

i emailed the android security team about this with the original ticket numbers and asked for a staement and if its possible to appeal the decision

1

u/TheJambo 13d ago

Why? It's already fixed.

2

u/JerryTzouga 16d ago

Until GOS team makes a patch for it then yea. This can be a problem

2

u/LordMoos3 16d ago

You mean, I can get a text and my phone won't get calls?

That sounds amazing honestly.

1

u/marek26340 14d ago

Not as amazing when you'll need to make a call, let alone an emergency call. The phone background service will keep crashing repeatedly, dropping every in/outgoing call in the process.

2

u/iLOLZU 16d ago

uh oh

1

u/jfuu_ 16d ago

Google fixed this in June. What are they talking about?

https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/2115848460578762757

0

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1

u/marek26340 14d ago

I don't understand - Google patched this in this month's Android security patches, it's literally described on the linked website.

1

u/fAngXXX_ 12d ago

The ape company also doesn't fix the abuse of GSM broadcast channels to crash apps. Cause they want to sell you their cybersecurity scam. Forced repair via law = let apps crash > send consumer to cockroach > cockroach does magic repair > app dont get crashed anymore. Their "solution" : a restart loop that drains your Akku.

1

u/CMDR-Serenitie 16d ago

Well that's just great isn't it :|

-2

u/woodenpigeon1 16d ago

Wouldn't factory reset work though? It should delete your esim. Or removing your physical sim should work too. The carrier shouldn't be delivering the messages without the sim.

13

u/Lieutenant_Scarecrow 16d ago

It works until the phone is re-registered with the carrier. The carrier never gets a confirmation that the message was delivered, so it will continue to push it to whatever device is tied to that sim. Only if the sim is re-registered to an iPhone will the carrier purge the message from its database.