The Worst Software Bugs

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Saw this article on Zdnet listing the ten worst software bugs, in their opinion.

Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars’ gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn’t a hardware problem — it was a programming error in the smart car’s embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.

With that recall, the Prius joined the ranks of the buggy computer — a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer’s logbook with the words: “first actual case of a bug being found.”

Sixty years later, computer bugs are still with us, and show no sign of going extinct. As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don’t just inhabit our operating systems and applications — today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars. Source: Zdnet

We Say: Those are some pretty big software bugs, did your favorite make the list? I kind of like the Soviet Gas Pipeline “bug”, but is that actually a bug? Seems to me that would be more sabotage than software bug.