iPhone Safari Bug Could Cost You Cash

tech.nocr.at on an iPhone

Here’s one thing you don’t hear of too often, a serious bug in Apple’s iPhone version of Safari that could end up cost you, the user, some serious cash.

Although it’s not a very common bug but thanks to someone who probably spend countless hours trying to poke a hole in Apple’s mobile device, all iPhone users might avoid being hit with extra operator costs.

Estonian Apple site AppleSpot discovered the bug in question. If an iPhone user visits a site which uses Motion-JPEG (usually found on websites that show live feeds of web cams) in Safari, Safari will continue to use up bandwidth even after it’s closed. Safari is one of the few apps on the iPhone that is allowed to run in the background. So let’s say you have a web page up that uses Motion-JPEG streams and even if that site is in another tab or worse yet, Safari has been closed, the stream will continue and if your on a mobile carriers network then bandwidth will continue to rack up.

Now just imagine you were traveling outside your home country where you would be nailed with international data roaming charges and you decided to visit that ~~sexy nurse pay live stream~~ nature wildlife live cam, you could easily rack up some serious charges. The guys at AppleSpot have claimed to rack up over 740 MB in silently streamed bandwidth in one hour of testing. That would cost something like $3,000 in international roaming charges. Yikes!

[Link to AppleSpot]

iPhone Safari Bug Could Cost You Cash originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/03.

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