3 ms·

I remember the "reboot" bug on the HTC G1... Apparently everything you typed was executed in a terminal, so if you typed "reboot" anywhere, including in a chat

I remember the "reboot" bug on the HTC G1... Apparently everything you typed was executed in a terminal, so if you typed "reboot" anywhere, including in a chat window, it would reboot your device.

monktastic1 7y ago
Wait, how did this work? Surely not every typed word was issued as a command.
- praptak 7y ago
  Every typed word between two CRs.
- scintill76 7y ago
  I think it was more like every keystroke was sent to a virtual terminal as well as the GUI, so <enter>reboot<enter> would reboot.
- donio 7y ago
  That was indeed the case. A better use for it was running "telnetd" which was how we got root access to the device initially.
practical_lem 7y ago
Source? I could understand (!) `reboot` (with backticks) evaluated by mistake inside a shell script; but still reboot needs high privileges.
- ChrisClark 7y ago
  Yeah, it ran everything you typed as root. So open up a chat app, type return, reboot, return. Tada. I can't find some original sources, but there is a summary I found on Slashdot. https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-android-passes-keystrokes-to-root-shell https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-an...
deleted 7y ago
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