4 ms·

What is the worst software bug in history?

• tptacek 16y ago
  Buffer overflows were only very rarely perpetrated by the gets() library function; since the mid-'90s, programs that called gets() would trigger a warning message on the console due to its insecurity. Far more vulnerabilities were caused by sprintf() than were ever caused by gets(). This would be a pedantic comment but for the insinuation that response made that buffer overflows in C/C++ had been somehow mitigated by changes to the C standard library in modern ANSI C. No.
• radioactive21 16y ago
  Y2K
  • tzs 16y ago
    Arguably not a bug, since most systems that would have had Y2K problems were being operated well past the lifetime they had been designed for.
• edge17 16y ago
  not quite 'the worst' but an interesting story no less - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
  • archangel_one 16y ago
    Debatable that it counts as a "bug" since the code functioned exactly as designed.
• billswift 16y ago
  If you include pre-history, I would say the one that causes people to see patterns that aren't really there.
  • hexley 16y ago
    fuzzy logic ain't perfect
• shadowfox 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 ?