Welcome to the this week’s Quotes of the Week: Apple recruits users as testers, Facebook pay out large sums to bug hunters and the DMCA is tested by a software bug.
Apple Recruits Users as Testers
“The company will only accept 100,000 iOS testers to maintain an air of “exclusivity.“”
Apple have learned some lessons from the launch of IoS 8 as ReadWrite.com reports. The company are aiming to recruit a number of users to test updates for the mobile platform. After the numerous issues with the IoS 8 launch, it seems the company want to protect themselves from criticism by allowing the updates to be tested by some of the users first. They will first put into action on IoS 8.3. Read More here
China not the easiest place for Bug-Tracking Start-Up to Start-Up
“When the internet started going downhill in China, we had to start thinking, ‘Oh, we can’t do jquery from Google because they’re blocking that”
Larry Salibra of Pay4Bugs addresses the reasons why he moved his company from its base in China to Hong Kong. The reasons include the fact that web is faster and uncensored in Hong Kong. The company offer a service that has crowd-sourced testers who earn income through the programme by addressing app bugs on the web, Android, or iOS. The company’s clients are a mix of SME’s and large corporations who need app’s tested that automation testing may have missed.
Facebook Paid Out $1.3 Million last Year to Bug Hunters
“Submissions increased by 16 percent, and the number of “high severity” bugs reported was up 49 percent”
Facebook paid out over $1 million for the second year in a row to those applying to their Bounty Programme. The programme encourages developers/testers to search for weaknesses in the platform’s code and pays for spotting the vulnerability rather than hackers publishing it online. Read More here.
Google changes its Reward Scheme for Chrome BugHunters
“For those who are interested in what this means for the Pwnium rewards pool, we crunched the numbers and the results are in: it now goes all the way up to $∞ million*.”
Google has a annual Conference and awards scheme for those hunting bugs on Chrome – the Pwnium conference. The Conference was a annual event where security researchers were presented with rewards for their exposure of bugs on Chrome. However the company have decided to make the Pwinium awards a continual event with a infinite budget to reward testers. Security researchers can now submit their bugs year-round through the Chrome Vulnerability Reward Program whenever they come across them. Read More Here.
Total Wipes Music Group Tests the Limits of DCMA
“It was a bug just on that week and this is not our daily routine, 99% of our found/removed links are about people that steal music and make moneys illegally.”
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) aims to allow companies to request major internet companies such as search engines to remove links to illegal downloads of their copyrighted material. However Total Wipes Music Group which represents 800 independent music labels in Germany made requests recently for Google to remove mainly download pages for companies such as Skype, Ubuntu, Python, Open Office, Raspberry Pi and others. The company said it was a glitch in their reporting software that caused this. Read More here.
