On Friday there were already stories (security flaws & activation) out that the iPhone is being hacked and I mean hacked in the harmful sense and not in the "hey lots modify it for fun" sense. I think this is great. Hacking has given me hours of extra work as I try and make products more secure. Now I freely admit that in the early days of software I worked on we did not put a lot of effort into make sure products were hack proof but over the last 10 years the emphasis has greatly increased in any and all projects I have worked on.
It is very shameful and lazy that within the first week Apple is already has security flaws in their product. Granted I am sure there was people out there that wanted to be the first to expose flaws but to have then show up in the first week really shows that despite the claims of elegance in their hardware and software design they did a poor job in their software/hardware testing. Now I would love to compare to Windows Mobile OS or Palm OS in the v1 release but even a quick internet search did not show security flaws for those version this bad. There was a quote in one of the linked articles that says that the Apple OS is more secure that Windows Mobile OS but I could not find anything to validate this statement.
To be fair Apple is not to be fully blamed as AT&T/Cingular seems to be one of the reasons for an exploit but since the iPhone only runs on their antenna stack and wireless service you would think they could have tested this fully. I am sure the testers at Apple took the lazy way out and just drew a line and only tested on their side of the line instead of testing scenarios end to end. Shame on you Apple!
A digital recording of my life 