Shipped Without Bugs

Last month I purchased Linux For You magazine, since after taking Computer Security as my subject I got more interested in Open Source and Linux based systems. While reading articles I found someone had written about Microsoft’s faulty code that got shipped in Microsoft Zune-30 media players which caused it’s clock freeze down on December 31 2008, which was last day of leap year. After reading that I recalled my college days when I used to talk about companies shipping devices and services with faulty or bugged programs with friends and for sure this is not first time Microsoft has shipped any device with bugs in software.

The first thing I can recall where faulty code appeared in Microsoft’s list is his first operating system better known as (#-Link-Snipped-#DOS) Disk Operating System. It is still available in all Microsoft’s flavors to provide backward compatibility. The faulty code used in DOS would give user an open interface to hardware without authentication. Microsoft still claims DOS structure was designed so and it was not faulty programming practice but programmers never entertained it and many programmers switched to Linux after using DOS. The next bug I can recall is Microsoft IIS Unicode exploit in Windows 2000 systems, many people say it was vulnerability which got exploited but I don’t think on the same lines. The IIS parser that was interpreting Unicode was faulty which granted directory traversals to anybody from inside or outside of network who can understand and create universal hex code. Though this vulnerability has been patched and does not exist anymore but this can be termed as one of the silliest mistake that got shipped with OS.

With evolution of Windows a new type of fault got introduced in Windows system due to paging code problem. This fault was not repaired from Win 1.0 to Windows Vista. Windows 7 does not have this bug since it got fixed in it. The code used to overlap memory if too many program used to run simultaneously finally crashing system with Blue Screen of Death. And we must not forget the interactive command prompt scheduler problem that existed until Vista came in play. The problem is still un-patched for Windows XP systems ultimately leaving Administrator privileges open for every Guest user. The next in list came Windows Vista in which Data Execution Prevention (DEP) code sometimes used to stop games as malicious activity due to which for some time many gamers switched their machines to Windows XP again.

The compatibility layer program in Windows Vista and 7 are still faulty and need no explanation how they interrupt your job. Before we end up I want to make sure you should not take this article as some kind of accusation against Microsoft. This is just meant to clear how mistakes can happen no matter how skilled, experienced and expert working faculty you have. Microsoft is one of the biggest giant in software industries and also one of the biggest initiator of new types of bugs in programming code. As a general user we think the company has big name and fame and there should be no possibility of silly mistakes in programming acting as bugs but believe me, no matter how expert your programmer or developer is, there’s no guarantee you will never be Shipped Without Bugs.