The Mendicant Bug

Warning:  this is a rant as old as the iPhone.  I just have to vent into the interetherwebs or else explode.

Complaining to a friend, I’ve managed to work myself up into quite a state.  He just got an iPhone and so we’ve been discussing how frickin sweet they are.  But then I remembered a pix message I got a couple days ago and my blood began to rise in temperature rapidly.  For those without iPhones, when you get a multimedia message (picture, video), you are given a link that is clickable and a big ass username and password that you must either write down or remember and then manually enter into the site you’re taken to.

Ok, I understand they didn’t want to support multimedia messaging on the iPhone.  That was widely known when I bought it.  No big deal.  But here is my problem.  You can slap the username and password into the url and automatically log in from the link to view the message.  It is so easy to do, not doing it is ridiculous.  Security?  Bah!  The damn text message has the password in plain text.  I can only conclude that AT&T does not do so out of pure malice.

In summary, AT&T, please hire a Bangladeshi programmer and pay them the $2 for the fifteen minutes it would take to implement this.