US says it can prove Huawei has backdoor access to mobile-phone networks

Re:US says it can prove Huawei has backdoor access to mobile... by predakanga on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @03:04PM (#22312237)

It's a bit of a leap to assume that behavior like that is evidence of nefarious activity; ask yourself, if you were implementing some sort of secret signalling layer, would you design one that uses simple English words, and whose failure state reveals its presence?

Consider the other cases - it could be something like an anti-spam system; back when MSN Messenger was a thing, it would abruptly close any conversations in which certain virus-related keywords were said (mostly including ".exe", which is how I discovered it), presumably in an attempt to stop them spreading.

Or it could be a bug - there have been plenty of these, from simple strings causing mass IRC disconnections, to eerie conspiracy theories (see "bush hid the facts"[0], a conspiracy caused by a bug in Notepad).

Or it could just be a bit of debug code accidentally being triggered. This past week, I had to explain to some users why a website was talking about "DEAD BEEF". The reason was innocent (glitch in a web server config), but to the end user it was incomprehensible.

All that said, if you want to investigate further, it's simple to disable iMessage on iOS devices. If you go to Settings->Messages, there's a toggle for it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts

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Re:US says it can prove Huawei has backdoor access to mobile... by Scoundreller on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @05:11PM (#22313369)

> back when MSN Messenger was a thing, it would abruptly close any conversations in which certain virus-related keywords were said

On MSN Messenger, one way around swear words in your username/status was to use the ASCII equivalent for a letter, which would get skip the filter but render as the letter.

So I looked a little down in my chart and hoped that 0x7 for BELL would do something, but it didn’t.

But 0x0 for NULL would cause all members of your contact list to immediately sign out and back in ad Infinitum.

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Re:US says it can prove Huawei has backdoor access to mobile... by dustfinger on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @03:16PM (#22312339)

I am not assuming that it is nafarious, I appologize if I was not clear enough on that point. There are many possible ways it could be the result of a defect and you provided some interesting examples. In either case, it is a curiosity worth investigating.

Thanks for pointing out an easy way to disable imessage on iphone. Apparently after doing that iphone defaults to MMS. It still might be best to just turn off data and wifi.

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