Command your G1 Android phone to reboot itself

Looks like we're all in for a big surprise from Google; Android was capable to reboot itself if you order it to do so.

A user named jdhorvat writes this bug report in Android forum:

"I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded. I had just rebooted my phone and the first thing I typed was a response to her text which simply stated 'Reboot' - which, to my surprise, rebooted my phone."

And when Ed Burnette from ZDNet (via Valleywag) looked into this matter more closely, he found out that everytime Android phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges.

He even shows us how to do this exciting reboot sequence: "Save anything you’re working on (this will reboot your phone!), open the keyboard tray on your G1, ignore anything you see on the screen, and type these 8 keystrokes: -r-e-b-o-o-t-. Poof, your phone will reboot."

But for a quick heads up, if you love to be able to command your own G1 phone to reboot itself like that, then you should avoid getting the latest Android update (RC30). You do noticed that I'm using a past sentence up there when I started talking about this Android newly found trait, right? Because Google has patched this up, along with the crackin' security hole. ;-p

[blogged with my Treo 750v]