Top stories

Microsoft’s My Documents Folder Makes Triumphant Return – On iPad

20100209-mydocuments.jpg

Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.
I read that [...]

Top 5 Things To Check Out at Macworld 2010

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the [...]

Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

20100208-imacipad.jpg

The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset [...]

In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the [...]

Safari Data Bug Could Mean Huge Phone Bills for Some

iphone-3g-money-screen_w300.jpgAn Estonian website claimed Tuesday to have broken news of a major bug in iPhone’s Safari app that could put unsuspecting iPhone users at risk of running up huge bills with their cellular service providers in certain cases.

The danger appears related to Safari’s failure to close connections with web servers that run Motion JPEG to stream video over the Internet. In the case where an iPhone user uses Safari to browse, for example, to the webcam on the island of Keri and then closes Safari in favor of another app or simply returns to the iPhone’s home screen, data continues to stream over the phone’s 3G or EDGE connection from the Motion JPEG-running server.

The Estonian report claims to have been able to run up over 740MB of data transfer in a little over an hour in this manner and that the only way to get Safari to properly sever the data link is to browse to another site before closing the app.

The bug would appear to affect only those iPhone users who do not pay for ‘unlimited data’ as part of their standard service plan, and thus poses no risk to at&t subscribers using their phones in the US, or to many European users with similar plans in their home countries.

With the rise of limited data plans in some countries, however, and in the case of users traveling with iPhones overseas using limited International Data plans, this could cause a real problem.

A request for comment from Apple PR remained unanswered at press time.

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer, musician, web designer attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

Email the author | Read more posts by Lonnie Lazar.

4 comments

    Not no mention using up bandwidth, thus slowing down other applications wanting to use it at the same time.

    Another reason to use Firefox.

    I suspect (but cannot be sure) this is due to Safari’s default behaviour to run in the background. Someone should test with a jailbroken iPhone with safariquitter installed?

    Yes, this problem exists because Safari is able to run in the background. You can also use this behaviour as feature, e.g. when listening to web radio while doing something different.

Add your comment

Name(Required)

Mail (required, but not published)

Website

Comment

Buy Inside Steve's Brain Buy from Amazon.com Buy from Barnes & Noble