Matt Gray
Broadcast engineer who dabbles in photography, video and web stuff.
Based in North West England
Broadcast engineer who dabbles in photography, video and web stuff.
Based in North West England
Sunday 17th May 2009
Quite a few iPhone users have recently found strange messages appearing on their phones, only accompanied by a black background and a big green dismiss button.
These messages are actually a special type of text message, known as a “flash” or “class 0” sms. Generally used by network operators, on most phones it appears immediately as a text message, but does not save to the phone or SIM. On the iPhone, however, it displays on the aforementioned screen, looking incredibly similar to what one would assume was an error message.
It has recently come to light on the internet that anyone on the O2 network can send this type of message by prefixing the sms with “*go”, which is very handy for pranksters who have confused owners of official-firmware and jailbroken iPhones alike.
From my experience testing this, the iPhone appears to be in the minority of phones not displaying the source of the message, with the close runner up being Windows Mobile phones showing the text as a “Network Message”.
I hope this has eased any worries you may have had, and hope you have a lot of fun confusing fellow iPhone owners.
[Edit] O2 have now fixed the hack and it is no longer possible to send these messages.
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