January 26, 2012

iPhone: WTF is “ttou”?

Comparing my iPhone 3GS to my new iPad today, I spotted something really odd. On the 3GS, in the Settings->General->About page, was a menu called “ttou” with some rather odd content. See for yourself!

Hmmm, I wonder what this "ttou" menu is all about?

This is clearly a bug, and looks like an error message is overwriting the expected fields to be parses and presented by the GUI. Sloppy programming at best and a potential buffer overflow at worst. Nice going Apple!

But what hardware could all this nonsense refer to?

I restarted the phone and the weird menu and error is gone. Still: WTF?

Restarted and it's no more

It kind of reminds me of the time when everything went green in my iPhone camera, or the weird “fractured” appearance another time.