I'll be interested to see if anyone else can reproduce this. I created a request bin [0], then created a QR code pointing at it, then downloaded that QR code. I'm not sure how often this "image scanning" is supposed to occur but just downloading it didn't cause a hit nor did the 10min I waited, nor did using QuickLook, nor opening it Preview, nor scanning it with my iPhone, the only thing that caused a request was clicking on the detected link in my iPhone camera app.
Obviously if this is a background daemon that runs periodically then my test wouldn't catch it (unless I got "lucky") and for a longer-term test I'd probably want to use something other than request bin. That said request bin says it keeps bins for 48 hours so that might be enough time.
I'll be interested to see if anyone else can reproduce this.
Indeed. This is a really bold claim and so far we have one person who has reproduced it on a single machine.
I'm no Apple apologist by any means but I'm a little skeptical of the claims in the twitter thread. It's easy enough to imagine that the poster made some kind of mistake in his methodology or some other variables are at play that he didn't consider. I'd withhold judgment until there's some corroboration.
The Twitter thread says it was created "a few days ago" and was hit "this morning" so I'm guessing 10 minutes might not be enough (if it is even something time-based).
I'm willing to bet that if you triggered a spotlight database rebuild that it would be triggered in that process. My guess is that spotlight sees an image to index, ocrs all the text and adds it to the index. It probably also detects qr codes and generates a 'preview' of their content by following the link. Possible it may also do that if you were to take a picture of a url clearly enough that it could be OCRed.
Absolutely and I called that out, I just thought that opening it in QL/Preview or even scanning on an iPhone might manually kick off the same “processing” that’s being speculated about here.
I will try it, I will leave a tcpdump running in the background. The tweet is not very helpful giving information on how it was detected, or how to reproduce it.
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I'll be interested to see if anyone else can reproduce this. I created a request bin [0], then created a QR code pointing at it, then downloaded that QR code. I'm not sure how often this "image scanning" is supposed to occur but just downloading it didn't cause a hit nor did the 10min I waited, nor did using QuickLook, nor opening it Preview, nor scanning it with my iPhone, the only thing that caused a request was clicking on the detected link in my iPhone camera app.
Obviously if this is a background daemon that runs periodically then my test wouldn't catch it (unless I got "lucky") and for a longer-term test I'd probably want to use something other than request bin. That said request bin says it keeps bins for 48 hours so that might be enough time.
[0] https://requestbin.io/
Indeed. This is a really bold claim and so far we have one person who has reproduced it on a single machine.
I'm no Apple apologist by any means but I'm a little skeptical of the claims in the twitter thread. It's easy enough to imagine that the poster made some kind of mistake in his methodology or some other variables are at play that he didn't consider. I'd withhold judgment until there's some corroboration.
The Twitter thread says it was created "a few days ago" and was hit "this morning" so I'm guessing 10 minutes might not be enough (if it is even something time-based).
I'm willing to bet that if you triggered a spotlight database rebuild that it would be triggered in that process. My guess is that spotlight sees an image to index, ocrs all the text and adds it to the index. It probably also detects qr codes and generates a 'preview' of their content by following the link. Possible it may also do that if you were to take a picture of a url clearly enough that it could be OCRed.
You can use the mdimport command-line tool to manually index individual files.
Absolutely and I called that out, I just thought that opening it in QL/Preview or even scanning on an iPhone might manually kick off the same “processing” that’s being speculated about here.
I guess we all regroup here in a week or so then, right?
They may have received it through iMessage, which will hit a url and grab the 'opengraph' meta tags to generate a preview.
That's not how it works. The metadata is captured on the sender side and sent with the message.
I will try it, I will leave a tcpdump running in the background. The tweet is not very helpful giving information on how it was detected, or how to reproduce it.