Ask Lemmy

I work in IT, so if I ever walk upon a tablet (or something similar) that is accessible to the general public my first instinct is to check if they did care enough to properly restricted access.

Story time: Me and some friends met in Berlin last year and while walking through a mall we stumbled across a "presentation" from Lego. Basically it was a giant screen with an IPad connected to it and you could type in your name, select an animation and it would then display it on the screen. Nothing fancy and probably quite fun for kids. However, I guess you can imagine what happens when about 7 IT nerds see an unattended IPad in public. We of course tried to check, if we could get access to other programs we were not meant to get access too.l or exploit the programming in any other way (AS example inserting funny things like "null" into the name field). After some experimenting, we found out that if you pressed for a longer time on the field where you could insert your name the option "autofill" and "share" popped up. This meant, that you could theoretically insert and open files through this and you could also share contacts. This meant, that we just discovered the about 200 contacts, that were saved in the iPad. This meant, that if we wanted we could have just write down information like name, phone numbers and E-Mail adresses. There were also separate groups of contacts called "family" and "work". We of course did not do anything with it and reported it to the person attending everything, but I think that person did not realised, that its bad to expose all of someone's contacts to the general public saying things like "It was meant for kids" and "no one would do this". Well, guess who didnt stop a group of adults trying to break the software on that tablet.

Also I think I dont really have to say, that I usually experience physical pain when I see how movies depict programming or hacking like its something you can do in a few minutes. And its usually even worse, when any form of actual code plops up in a movie and you realise, that they are either doing updates on a Linux system or its code that doesn't even have a correct syntax and matches the corresponding action even less.