It turns out the bug in Android I wrote about yesterday was worse than we thought. When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. Wow!

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Funny story behind finding this:

I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn't responded. I had just rebooted my phone and the first thing I typed was a response to her text which simply stated "Reboot" - which, to my surprise, rebooted my phone.

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Here's a workaround I just discovered: Open the keyboard and type these 5 keystrokes: <return>-c-a-t-<return>. That will cause the phantom shell to not listen to commands any more, at least until the next reboot.