Apple iPhone Safari Web Dialer not safe to use

Security experts have claimed that the Apple iPhone’s web dialer accessible from the Safari web browser is not safe to use.

Billy Hoffman, the lead researcher at SPI Labs has said in a report that these calls can be tracked. Hackers can even prevent these calls from getting made at all. In addition, these calls can also be rerouted to 900-numbers.

Hoffman added that a flaw in the system can also allow hackers to put the iPhone in an infinite loop where it continues to try making calls until the user actually turns the device off.

He further wrote in his advisory: “These types of attacks can be launched from a malicious Web site, from a legitimate Web site that has Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities, or as part of a payload of a Web application worm. For example, an attacker could determine that a specific Web site visitor ‘Bob’ has called an embarrassing number, such as an escort service. An attacker can also trick or force Bob into dialing any other telephone number without his consent, such as a 900-number owned by the attacker or an international number. Finally, an attacker can lock Bob’s phone, forcing Bob to either make the call or hard-reset his phone, resulting in possible data loss.”

He added that they have contacted Apple about this problem and they are working on a fix for the iPhone.

Apple Releases Safari, Security Updates

Apple Friday released a new test version of its Safari browser and a security update addressing vulnerabilities in the Mac OS X software.

Safari 3.0.2 beta, available for download for Apple and Windows includes enhanced support for Mail, iChat and newly released Security Update 2007-006.

Safari 3 was unveiled earlier this month during Apple's San Francisco WorldWide Developers Conference. The Web browser was the first version of Safari for Windows. Apple had to release a security update just one day after unveiling the Windows version. The application was downloaded more than one million times over the first two days it was available.

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Safari brings new color to the web

Safari may not be rewriting the rules for Web browsing on Windows just yet, but it's leading the way with one significant change: photographs with better color.

Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users now aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.

However, Apple won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, likely will include support for richer color, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.

Together, the moves could help boost the Internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB color scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. But it's not likely Web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant Internet Explorer also follows suit.

While average Web surfers aren't likely to notice much of a difference, some professional photographers do care about the issue. For example, those selling images over the Web as stock art want them to look as good as possible, but they often encode their images as sRGB to make them appear better on the screens of potential purchasers.

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