iMessage

You might think that wiping your lost or stolen iOS device would prevent another party from receiving messages via iMessage on the wiped device. As it turns out, Apple will be doing some work to issue a security update in future iterations of iMessage.

Users have discovered through an unpleasant trial and error process that the only way to stop text messages coming in via the iMessage service is to change your Apple ID. Wiping the lost iPhone and deactivating the phone number does nothing to stop a thief from receiving and reading your iMessages. These texts will be delivered to your old iPhone as well as the new one you just purchased to replace the lost device.

Sure it may not happen right away, but one developer has already found evidence pointing to a future compatibility between iMessage on iOS devices and iChat on Mac OS X computers. The snippet of code leading to this conclusion revealed two new properties in OS X Lion's version of iChat software.

These properties could be the beginning of Apple adding full support for iMessage to iChat instant messaging. The "time delivered" and "time read" fields are not used or needed in iChat, however they are already used by iMessage to track instant messaging. According to MacRumors Apple would have no other reason to add these lines of code.