Safari bug can burn holes in iPhone user's pocket
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 04 November 2009, 15:08 IST   |    5 Comments
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Safari bug can burn holes in iPhone user's pocket
Bangalore: Apple has been well known for making a compact phone which prevents software bugs. But now a bug in Safari browser in iPhone has surfaced which can be pretty costly to fix. The bug is not that common and won't be harming most of the users, according to TechCrunch. The flaw, as discovered by Estonian Apple Site AppleSpot: If the user visits a site which uses Motion-JPEG (most commonly used for security cams and live feeds) in Safari, Safari will continue to gobble up bandwidth even after Safari is closed. Safari is one of the few apps that Apple allows to process in the background, and Motion-JPEG streams appear to continue streaming, even if the stream is in another tab or in the "closed" application. Apple gives no indication that Safari will continue to stream - and considering that most applications on the platform aren't granted such privileges, it's unlikely that a lay user would understand the consequences until he receives his bill. This bug will be very costly for users who pays per mega byte for internet usage as safari will keep streaming (which consumes chunks of mega bytes). Person who has unlimited data plans will not be affected but many unlimited plan also have a fair use policy. The original discoverers of the bug claim to have been able to rack up over 740 megabytes in silently streamed data during one hour of testing. If the same thing had happened to someone without a data package, they say that one hour of unintentional data usage would have worked out to roughly 30,000 Estonian kroons in fees - or almost $3,000.

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