I just tried to log in to my Amazon account and didn’t notice Chrome had already pre-filled in my password so I ended up typing my password on the end of the pre-filled password and in my rush hit Enter…it logged me in!? WTF?

I logged out of my Amazon account and tried logging in with a completely incorrect password and it was rejected. I then tried with my correct password but added some arbtry numbers to the end (123456) and it still logged me in! Seriously? If your password is only X characters long, Amazon only check the first X characters that you have entered in the password field?

For Example:

If your Amazon password is helloworld (mine’s not that btw) and you tried to log in using helloworld123456 it accepts it as your password, it’s not even respecting case sensitivity and is accepting HELLOWORLD. Likewise if you enter any of the following in the password field it will accept it and log you in:

• helloworldhelloworld
• helloworldblahblahblah
• helloworld_this_is_not_very_secure_surely
• HELLOWORLD
• HeLlOwORldABC123

Is this normal password verification behaviour? That’s the sort of password verification that I’d lose marks for implementing in my university coursework, not the kind of verification I’d expect from the World’s largest online retailer.

On Amazon’s help page there is a “Protect Your Password” section that states:

• Passwords are case sensitive. For instance, “PASSWORD” and “Password” are two different passwords.When choosing a password, remember the capitalisation you use.
• Passwords must be a minimum of six characters

UPDATE: I’ve just tried it on 3 different machines using Chrome and Internet Explorer and they were 3 workstations I’d never used before and it let me in. I then asked two other amazon users to try and it rejects anything but their exact passwords and is case sensitive for them.

Why would my account be different?

I just called Amazon help line and call centre lady suggested I try changing password to see if that helps. I told her I wanted to know why this was happening and get an answer from their web dev team before I change anything on the account. No point trying to change password, if that does resolve it then there’s nothing for their dev team to investigate.

UPDATE 2: It looks like this is a known issue and Amazon are yet to roll out a fix after it was first reported a year ago. It’s from an old password policy that flattened passwords so they were no longer case sensitive and also only the first 8 characters were checked.

THE FIX: Simply using the change password facility from your account section in Amazon and changing the password to the same thing it currently is will fix this issue. Why Amazon haven’t rolled out a background fix for this in the year they’ve known about it is beyond me.

Initially he thought it was just one of his Safari plugins but even after disabling all Safari plugins the [SP] still appears as shown in the screen shot below.

I suggested it could be to show that it’s a Secure Page hence the SP but it shows even on non-https pages and can clearly be seen on the basic vanilla Google homepage in the screenshot above.

If anybody is able to help shed any light on this please leave a comment below as he seems to be one of only a handful experiencing this strange problem.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, @benmarsh managed to solve it all on his own…he’d enabled the Debug tools in Safari and unchecked the option to “Use multi-process windows” so the [SP] stood for Single Process.

benmarsh Ben Marsh

Aha! [SP] refers to Single Process – I remembered I unchecked Debug -> User Multi-process Windows yesterday! D’oh!

I noticed TomTome HOME software had a “Backup my device” option which is meant to just take a complete snapshot of your device to allow for a full restore at a later date.

After clicking to run the backup I was presented with a progress bar:

and then after a few mintutes I was told the backup had failed “An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer”

with the option to click to view further details, which look like:

ERROR: DesktopLib/FileCopy/Error: An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer.
@ .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp(161)
An error occurred while reading this file: “F:\autorun.inf”
An error occurred while writing to this file: “C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\TomTom\HOME\Backup\ONE\Backup01\InternalMemory\autorun.inf”
Access is denied.

in .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp:161
Stack:
0. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/commit.js:82
error(textOrException);
1. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/ttwizard.xml:1061
this._commitFailed(i, commitPage);
2. chrome://tthome/content/logic/util.js:79
return func.apply(obj, arguments);
3. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:77
this._errorCallback(e);
4. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:69
this._errorFatal(error);

Time: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:15:29 GMT

Straight away I knew what the problem would be, my anti-virus and anti-malware software. The first error occurred reading a file called “autorun.inf” and it seems trying to copy this to my local disk. Auto-copying an autorun.inf file will almost certainly set alarm bells ringing in most good anti-virus software.

After disabling the anti-virus software

and running the backup option again it all went through without an error.

Versions:
TomTom Home v 2.8.2.2264
Windows XP SP3
TomTom One IQ Routes Edition
Trend Micro Worry Free Business Edition

Some YouTube users, myself included, are having issues when they upload a video to YouTube. Once the video has been processed the first few seconds are just grey/pixelated. Fortunately there is a simple solution…just add audio! I only get this problem with videos I upload to YouTube with no audio so I tried just adding a single 1 second audio sample at the start and reuploaded the file to YouTube. That resolved the issue.

Original upload without audio and hence faulty at the start:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

To fix this I simply added a 1 second sound effect from iMovie’s collection to the start of the video and reuploaded, works fine now:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Don’t waste time like I did trying to export from iMovie in a different format, that didn’t work either, adding a tiny audio clip seemed to be my only resolution.

Finally, one of the greatest features missing from Aplpe iOS devices ( iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) has now been made available as of iOS4.3…Home Share.

Home Share has been around in some guise for a fear or two now, allowing computers on the same network to see, browse and play music and videos from other iTunes Libraries on the network. What was lacking, however, was the ability for an Apple iOS device to see and stream this content whilst on the same network, it was restricted to OS X and Windows operating systems running the latest iTunes.

Let’s say I’d just purchased the latest XX Album in iTunes on my Mac Pro, if I wanted to listen to that on my iPhone 4 whilst in the garden (still connected to WiFi) I’d have to connect the iPhone up via USB and sync the new album to the iPhone. Not a big hassle but still inconvenient [hopefully one day soon Apple will pull their finger out and enable WiFi syncing of content to an iOS device, USB cables are so 2000].

The idea of Home Share is that now, any iOS device on my WiFi network can see, search and stream/play any content from another computer running iTunes on the same network, just what I’ve been after. Finally I can keep movies on my Mac Pro’s huge RAID hard drives and lie in the garden or in bed and stream a movie to my iPad.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it working, no matter what I selected in the iTunes preferences pane the “Shared” option wouldn’t appear on my iPhone or iPad.

I double checked on the iOS devices that I had entered the correct Apple ID in the Home Share settings:

Settings–>iPod–>Home Sharing

I made sure the iOS devices were updated to iOS4.3 and iTunes was on the very latest 10.2.1 and rebooted everything.

It still wouldn’t work. I powered on my Macbook Air and enabled Home Sharing on that and that instantly showed up on the iOS devices….so the iOS devices are behaving correctly but for some reason iTunes on my Mac Pro wasn’t playing ball. I checked to see if it was a firewall issue but the firewall on my Mac Pro is off (Firewall is handled by the router and TimeCapsule). Eventually I found out what I had to do….and felt like a right idiot for not spotting it sooner!

In iTunes I’d been check in the Preferences to “Enable Sharing” but what I had failed to spot in the Advanced menu was “Turn Home Sharing On”!! Err that could be the reason it’s not working. By default this option is set to be ON but I do vaugely remember turning it off last year when trying to debug some network latency issues with my Apple TVs.

In iTunes click on Advanced in the tool-bar at the top:

Select the option to Turn On Home Sharing [if it says turn Off Home sharing then your Home Sharing is already on and you have another problem, sorry]

Once you’ve done this, you should see a new Home Share icon in the side bar:

Click on that and then in the right hand pane enter your Apple ID (email address) and password and hit Create Home Share:

You should then be greeted with a screen saying that Home Sharing is now on and confirming the email address used to create the home share.  [NOTE Make sure this matches the email address entered on the iPod settings screen on the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch.]

Now on your iOS device, when you go into the iPod app and click on “more” in the bottom right corner on the iPhone/iPOd touch or Library at the top left of the iPad you should be able to see the new Shared section and select the library you just shared:

So if you’re having difficulty getting your Home Share visible on your iOS device:

1. Make sure your devices are on the same network, this is crucial! If you have multiple WiFi networks all devices that home share MUST BE ON THE SAME NETWORK. If, like me, you have an Apple Airport Extreme or TimeCapsule computers connect via ethernet cables are classed as being on the same network as the WiFi devices.
2. Make sure your iTunes is fully up to date, at the time of writing that is version 10.2.1
3. Make sure your iOS devices are fully up to date, at the time of writing that is version iOS4.3
4. Ensure you have entered the same Apple ID on both iTunes and iOS settings.
5. Finally, and most important, make sure Home Sharing is turned ON in the advanced settings of iTunes, see above screen shots.

IMPORTANT :iOS5 users click here to jump to this section first

After updating my girlfriend’s iPhone 3Gto iOS4.1 she noticed that the camera roll had a bug and was showing a large black box in place of some thumbnails. You could still tap on the blank black area and it would load the correct photo full screen, so the photos are still there, it just seems the thumbnails have become corrupted.

Fix #1 – You can connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC and download all the images off the iPhone and then erase all the images so your camera roll is empty and the thumbnails should work for all future photos you take. This isn’t ideal though and if you want to keep the images to hand on the phone you’ll need to create a new photos folder and resync the photos to the iPhone for future viewing.

Fix #2 – This is a little more complicated but will restore the thumbnails whilst leaving them in the camera roll. The solution is courtesy of CharismaG4toMBP on the Apple support forums.

1. Go to MacroPlant website and download iPhone Explorer, it’s FREE and there’s a Mac and Windows version.
2. Navigate to the Media->PhotoData folder, highlight and then delete the following three files:► com.apple.photos.caches_metadata.plist► Photos.sqlite► PhotosAux.sqlite
   

   ** Note for Windows Users **

   [thanks to @shane for highlighting this in the comments section]

   The screen shots of iPhone Explorer above are from the Mac version. If you are using the Windows version  there is no “Delete” button. You must RIGHT CLICK & choose “Delete Selected” to delete the files.

   Select OK at each prompt:

   

3. Turn your iPhone OFF.
4. Turn your iPhone back ON.
5. Click on Photos app and it should start rebuilding the library. Don’t panic if it says no photos found initially, give it a few minutes depending how many photos are in your camera roll.
6. FIXED!

UPDATE November 2011 – Having looked at my site analytics it seems this page is being read a lot , especially since the launch of iOS5 which seems to have broken camera roll thumbnails all over the place. Hundreds of people are finding it useful and leaving comments below, thank you very much for all the praises in the comments. Every single comment comes through to my iPhone and I read each and every one.

A few people have contacted me directly asking if they could make a small contribution for saving all their holiday photos or saving them hours on the phone to Apple Care. You may have noticed some adverts scattered around my site, I put these on to try and make enough money to cover the hosting cost for my blog but very few people ever click on them, I could probably get a better click rate if I smothered my site in annoying pop-up ads but I’ll never do that, however, if you have found this post helpful and would like to make a small donation every pound/dollar/euro/cent/pence would be greatly appreciated. You can click the PayPal button below to go straight to PayPal site and  make a contribution from £0.01 upwards. Many thanks

IMPORTANT iOS5 USERS several readers have commented saying the 3 files to delete are no longer present since upgrading to iOS5 and were unsure which files to delete. I shall be updating this post properly soon to reflect this but in the mean time (if you’re feeling brave) you can try deleting all the files in the subfolder mentioned in the original:

• changes-shm
• changes-wal
• Photos.sqlite
• Photos.sqlite-shm
• Photos.sqlite-wal
• Photos.sqlite.aside

Which some people have reported worked after a restart of the phone.

OR you could try a safer route that I’ve just experimented with and delete the contents of the Thumbnails folder only. The thumbnails folder is new in iOS5 and not present at all in iOS4 and earlier. I just tried deleting all the files in the Media/PhotoData/Thumnbails folder, namely:

• 120×120.ithmb
• 158×158.ithmb
• blacklist
• thumbnailConfiguration

Looking at the camera roll straight away showed all black boxes except for a few recent ones, after a phone restart all thumbnails had been rebuilt and no photos were lost. As I said, I need to do more testing on this but having just deleted the Thumbnail folder contents myself just now it does seem to do the trick with corrupt thumbnails. If you have another issue, like photos actually missing from the camera completely, then try the above method of deleting the sqlite files.

Now go back to the top

At first I thought I was going crazy and that it must have always been there, but then I thought the icons looked like they’d been squashed together a little, I compared it with another iPhone 3G which didn’t have it and I also put the question out on Twitter to see if anybody else had seen this.

A few on Twitter [1|2]said it happened to them too for no apparent reason, it’s not like I was roaming onto another network whilst abroad, i’ve not even hijacked/cracked my iPhone it’s 100% stock. The folks on Twitter suggested it will clear itself after a reboot of the iPhone but I wanted to see if it would clear itself and within a few hours that’s exactly what it did.

I’m at a complete loss as to what caused this to appear but if you no anything about it please leave a comment below.

This is what it looks like normally:

My iPhone 3G has started showing random “phantom” voicemails from “Unknown” dated 1st January 1970. There are three empty voicemails, 0 seconds long and they cannot be deleted.

Actually that’s a lie, they can be deleted and they go into the deleted messages folder, you can also clear the deleted messages, but as soon as you go back to the main voicemail screen they re-appear instantly.

Powering off and on doesn’t resolve the issue, I’ve not tried a force reset yet or last resort full restore.

A quick search of the web reveals many others have been having this problem over the last year, but as of yet I’ve not seen any explanations or resolutions.

The firmware is supposed to address some of the “bugs” introduced with 1.1.3 such as the SMS sorting bug and wifi connectivity problems. 1.1.4 is also rumoured to contain the framework to allow 3rd party application to be installed without the need to hack/jailbreak your iPhone. Some of these 3rd party apps and games will be made available for download from the iTunes store in due course.I am currently updating my iPhone to 1.1.4 as I type and shall hopefully report back with some good news on bug fixes……

…..140MB download and 5 minutes install time later….

1.1.4 has successfully downloaded and been installed on my iPhone. I didn’t encounter any errors, warnings, or weirdness (using iTunes 7.6.1(9) under OS X 10.5.2)

Unlike 1.1.3 there aren’t any NEW features  for those of you who are looking, but I have checked on the SMS sorting bug by sending myself a series of SMS in a short period of time and I’m happy to report it works as expected now.  I didn’t have any SMS conversations saved that were in a mess from 1.1.3 so if anybody reading this has a conversation that was in the wrong order could you please have a look at it after updating to 1.1.4 and report back in the comments section below?

There haven’t been any immediate issues with wifi connectivity either which is promising. If you’ve read my post about wifi problems with 1.1.3 you’ll be aware that there were problems as soon as the phone had finished updating to 1.1.3. One person has so far reported that under 1.1.4 his wifi issues are almost resolved but the widgets (stocks/weather) are unable to update when connected to wifi. I have just done some thorough testing of stocks and weather running under 1.1.4 connected to my Airport Extreme and can report I have no problems.

Summary

• SMS Sorting Bug = FIXED
• Wifi connectivity = FIXED (no problems for me at least)

UPDATE (27 Feb 2007) - SMS bug is fixed now in 1.1.4

It looks like there’s a bug with software version 1.1.3 that affects most people but only under a few certain conditions:

1. If you send short SMS to people and they reply very quickly
2. The clock on your iPhone is set slighlty off true “atomic” time (GMT) in my case.

I have taken a few photos to demonstrate this to you but to give an overview, the new software seems to sort outgoing SMS by the iPhone time it was sent but sorts incoming messages by the time on the SMS server of the 3rd party. If you’re iphone time happened to be 1 minute behind the time of the SMS server, then if your 3rd party replies and you send another message out in under 1 minute, initially the SMS will look ok on the screen, but exit to all SMS list and then re-view the thread and your messages will all be out of sync.

Trust me it’s much easier to visual in the photos and try replicating by sending yourself some SMS:

I then tried updating my iPhone clock to exact GMT but it doesn’t allow me to set seconds, although seconds may set to zero when hitting save. As you can see in the last two image, I must have set the phone a little ahead of GMT as the problem was reversed with my messages grouping after the replies!