Android Copies What You Type…

…not in a malicious way, but in a rather amusing and potentially destructive one.. 🙂

It seems as though there is a /system/sbin/sh running in the background with
/dev/console as stdin. That could explain why typing “reboot” and then enter (in
ConnectBot or otherwise) will reboot your phone. If you type “telnetd”, telnet into
your phone, and look at the /proc/XX/fd tree for the /system/sbin/sh process, you can
see it clearly.

Until you’ve grabbed the RC30 update that fixes this it’s probably best not to do much sysadmin work from one, especially if that involves rm -rf foo.. 😉 This was via LWN, which has the priceless comment:

I wonder how many android phones were running at half speed after someone replied “yes” to someone…

🙂