Awwwwww, FREAK OUT!

As you may have heard, everyone's favorite little phone that can has kind of a big bug that kinda sorta makes it, oh, seem like you might be protected when, in fact, your "hysterical" buddies poked holes in your entire pack of prophylactics with pins and didn't tell you until after spring break.

So, yes, it's a bad bug and, yes, Apple needs to fix it post haste. Which, of course, is license for everyone to freak out.

InfoWorld's Peter Sayer sagely notes:

One way to avoid such unauthorized access to e-mail messages or Web favorites would be not to add e-mail addresses or URLs to favorite address book entries.

Right. Don't email your friends. Become a hermit. Put the phone in a mason jar and bury it under your front porch.

Or, if you're just lazy and don't like to get a little dirt under your fingernails, you could just change the setting for Home Button to, uh, Home. Which, if the Macalope's not mistaken, is the default setting. So, you may not even have to get up.

But Pete's idea is good, too. Living a life of solitude might be good for you. What with your sex addiction. Whatever.

Again, the Macalope's not arguing that this is a bug. It's clearly a bug. It's bad. It needs to be fixed.

The Apple Blog's Bob Rudis, meanwhile, just causes the hoofed one to scratch his furry head.

As Alex Hutton points out, you can mitigate the threat by disabling the "home button double-tap" feature of your device.

Well, no, you can't "disable" it, you can only select the behavior. And by changing the behavior you can "mitigate" the threat all the way down to a little number the horny one likes to call "zero".

For the umpteenth time, Apple has a real security problem and needs to better address the issue and this is just another thing that make the company look stupid. In and of itself, though, it may not be worth phoning home about.

Although, if you need to phone home, just hit Emergency Call and double tap the Home button and...

[KiltBear]

Could we get an accurate count of the actual percentage of users who actually know that they can even lock their phone, nevermind actually have this feature activated?

That asked, yeah, really really stupid bad on Apple's part. ( especially for corporate iPhones. )

[ripragged]

My iPhone is in my pants pocket. If you reach for it I'll think you're after something far more personal than phone numbers.

Don't do that. Someone could get hurt.