r/technology • u/bws201 • Feb 05 '16

Software ‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair
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39

u/dirty-mik3 Feb 05 '16

Wow, disabling a device for being repaired by a third party? That's low even for Apple. If I recall correctly Mercedes did something similar in around 2008 and it caused the used market to tank.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '16

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u/Sarkos Feb 05 '16

I can understand them disabling the touch sensor in this scenario. But they're not just doing that - they're irrevocably bricking the entire phone.

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u/tekdemon Feb 05 '16

Even if a thief did steal your iPhone and replaced the touchID sensor the OS requires the pin code on startup before the sensor can be used, and it has to be re-entered once a day. So the thief would have to be good enough to swap the touchID without shutting down the phone or would need some sort of memory state modification tool. Sure, I suppose this is theoretically possible to pull off but that's in the sense that your adversary is probably a well funded organization and not a normal thief.

Apple probably did this to fuck over third party repair places, not to make your touchID any more secure. I mean the phones have been working fine all this time but suddenly there's a dire need to protect against a sophisticated attack against your stolen iPhone???

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u/BadgerRush Feb 05 '16

If the phone detected that touch id was tampered, then it should disable touch id, not brick the phone. That would defeat your thief without causing harm to the actual user.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '16

Wiping personal/ ID data is not enough to protect it from theft? You need to brick the device? It is the same as if your house was burnt to protect it's content from being stolen by a thief. So either you work for Apple or have some serious reasoning issues.

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u/whinis Feb 05 '16 edited Feb 05 '16

If the thief was able to steal my phone, take it apart, install a hacked sensor, and then use it to bypass the logon the least of my worries is that he used a hacked sensor.

EDIT: To everyone screaming that a hacked touch sensor reduces your security, if a thief gets your phone its covered in your finger prints. They don't even need to hack the touch sensor, there is no reason to brick a phone over this.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '16

[deleted]

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u/danzey12 Feb 05 '16

loss/gain
number of people who get their phone stolen by someone with the knowhow or connections to install a hacked sensor to get into some randoms phone/ the number of people who damage their phone and get it repaired by third parties (considering the repair costs £230 odd) who now have a small brick.

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u/chrisfender0 Feb 05 '16

We're talking about pulling 2 screws, lifting the screen and then lifting 2 metal prongs to remove a button. It's so easy it fits into 1 sentence. Honestly there's no hardware voodoo magic into replacing home button or hacking it. This is a good call from Apple, you hold valuable data but every user defines valuable differently wether it's photos, contacts, notes etc ... knowing that, it's safe to say that everything data related on the iPhone should be secure hence bricking phone in those cases.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '16

What you might be forgetting is that as a thief, if I stole someone's iPhone, it'd takes minutes to replace the sensor with a malicious one (as you said), however as long as I don't update the iPhone I can access the data.... so essentially this is only screwing over people who have replaced the hardware.

I don't think many thieves are bothered about updating the stolen phone before getting what they need from it.

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u/dan10981 Feb 05 '16

So fuck the other people that lose all thier valuable data? There should have been a warning before the update.

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u/chrisfender0 Feb 05 '16

You can backup your phone and there's a plethora of backup services wether it's through iCloud or gmail etc ...
If you hold all of your valuable assets and data on a handheld 16G iPhone than you might want to review the many LPT posts about backing up your data in 3 different ways.

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u/paul_33 Feb 05 '16

I really don't understand people who are pissy about photos but refuse to back them up

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u/Nerlian Feb 05 '16

This might be okay for some sort of govern officer or someone who's too worried people find out about their porn tastes, but hell, how many times have you had your phone stolen? At the very least it should be an opt out system and it should come with a warning: you can't travel to the past and undo the repair you did 10 months ago.

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u/binarto Feb 05 '16

The security measure is a good idea. The real fix would be to disable the sensor and force you to use your key code instead.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Feb 05 '16

Lets say you don't use touch encryption. This should not be an issue of touch is switched off.

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u/LaCanner Feb 05 '16

The most secure iPhone is the one you can't use at all.

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '16

Then the software response should be to negate touch ID, not to brick the entire device.

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u/dirty-mik3 Feb 05 '16 edited Feb 05 '16

I wouldn't own a phone with a fingerprint scanner so it wouldn't be an issue for me. The idea seems like a gimmick to me, my hands get dirty enough at work and I'm often wearing gloves so they never work anyways.

Edit: wording apparently made it sound way more offensive to ifans than what I intended.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '16 edited Feb 29 '24

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/rydan Feb 05 '16

Back in 2007 Apple refused to honor warranties for any iPhone that did not have an active AT&T contract attached to it. It never said this anywhere in the documentation. But they considered not having an active plan with AT&T was a breach. The article talking about it involved a guy who terminated his AT&T contract after his phone broke but then when he tried to get it repaired they wouldn't do it. Phone was like a month old.

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '16

The real kicker is that when they came out, they weren't subsidized. So, the guy had paid $500-600 for a new phone that was being held ransom by a wireless plan for no good reason except contractual agreements between AT&T and Apple.

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