Boydo's Tech Talk

*** Update ***

It seems after an intense amount of feedback, Google has elevated the priority of this flaw to critical.

Just a heads up for those of you with Android based smartphones.

A bug has been lodged with Google back in June 2010 regarding a bug in the sending of SMS from an Android device. Essentially, a user sends an SMS to a particular recipient which appears to send successfully yet ends up going to someone else. Viewing the corresponding SMS thread for the original recipient shows the phone number of the incorrect recipient. There are some theories in the bug report including comment fifteen and nineteen which get into the guts of the code that may manifest this particular issue.

What is more concerning is that this problem is not tied to particular handset manufacturers or even handsets with Google’s flagship handsets (the Nexus One and Nexus S with the latter running Android 2.3 – AKA Gingerbread). Certainly, for corporate users, this could raise questions regarding information security where company secrets could be inadvertently leaked via SMS (although one would hope that company policies would prohibit the transmission of such information over insecure links). On the personal front, people may send messages intended for loved ones which end up going to work colleagues or other social acquaintances potentially leaving users embarassed.

Finally, the bug has been assigned a medium priority (which appears to be the default allocated for new bugs) whilst other bugs such as no alarm clock sound or vibration being assigned high priority and Bluetooth connectivity problems under Android 1.5 & 1.6 being assigned a critical priority. The priority can only be altered by Google’s Android developers which leads me to believe that there is little standardisation as to how these priorities should be applied to bugs.

Looks like Google has a couple of things to tighten up from the get go in 2011.

A quick one for this evening.

According to unofficial news site, Google Operating System, Google is planning to bring multiple login support for its services. This might prove useful for people who may have multiple accounts to segment their activities (such as work, personal and junk).

Google isn’t the first to market with this sort of functionality though. Microsoft with it’s Windows Live platform has had the concept of “linked IDs“. With Microsoft’s service, you can link up to five accounts and switch between them fairly easily by clicking on your avatar in the top right hand corner of a Windows Live service.

There are a couple of drawbacks in enabling multiple login support such as the missing offline mode in Gmail. The other quirk is that when you use a Google service not yet enabled for multiple login support you will get bumped back to the original account that was used for authentication. Initially, the following services will be supported (which could make or break your decision):

• Gmail,
• Google Calendar,
• Google Code,
• Google Docs,
• Google Reader,
• Google Sites.

Additional information is still somewhat scarce apart from that this feature will be available “soon”, so keep your eyes peeled!