What happens when Microsoft makes a cell phone operating systems? I'll give you one guess... | NowPublic News Coverage

What happens when Microsoft makes a cell phone operating systems? I'll give you one guess...

by meyers | November 1, 2006 at 03:34 pm

576 views | 0 Recommendations | 3 comments

I would probably find this funny if it weren't *my* phone, and while I normally love it to death, my erm 'smart' phone has started crashing regularly as of recent... it's like the blue screen of death for your phone: every few days, sometimes once or twice a day - when my phone comes out of "sleep mode" (I had no idea it had a sleep mode) it has a "fatal error" and ceases functioning... can you imagine your cell just turning off on you randomly? this is insane.

you think the damn thing would be smart enough to reset or something, but no... no notification, no warning, no audio queue, just a quiet error and certainly no exception handling... you just don't get any calls or messages for a while and when you wonder why, you look at your phone to find out it's not working. Simply ridiculous...

I supposes it's not as ridiculous as bieng able to crash another persons phone by sending an SMS message, which was a pretty memorable gaffe...

Job de Haas, a researcher at security firm ITSX, gave a presentation during a recent Black Hat conference, where he demonstrated how a malformed message crashes a Nokia 6210 phone on its receipt. He did this by adapting a program called sms_client, which sends an SMS message from an Internet-connected PC, in which the User Data Header is broken.

Once the message is received it is impossible to turn on an infected phone again without somehow deleting the offending message.

The vulnerability is tied to the software used by a phone. The flaw affects Nokia 6210, 3310 and 3330 phones...

lord do i miss the 'ping-o-death' :-)

maybe i should just be thankful that my PC didn't crash while writing this story!