Welcome to our weekly software testing Quotes of the Week and testing news where we bring you all the latest headlines related to software testing. This week; the fMRI bug that could affect years of research, the anti-virus bug and using buggy code to test bug finders.
fMRI Bug Potential to Undermine Years of Research
“It is not feasible to redo 40,000 fMRI studies, and lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices mean most could not be reanalysed either”
Anders Eklund, one of the researchers involved in a study which found that a bug in the three major software models used for fMRI could mean that up to 40,000 could be invalidated. The study found that potentially up to 70% of results in these studies brought false-positive results. Read More here
Symantec’s anti-virus software bug
“The large number of products affected (24 products), across multiple platforms (OSX, Windows, and Linux), and the severity of these vulnerabilities (remote code execution at root or SYSTEM privilege) make this a very serious event.”
A report from the U.S. Government’s Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) states the seriousness of the case of a bug found in Symatec anti-virus software. There has been patches issued for the software. Read More here
Using the Flu Vaccine Approach to bug Hunting
“The idea is to insert a known quantity of vulnerabilities into code, then see how many of them are discovered by bug-finding tools.”
A report by Tim Greene suggests that the next approach to bug programmes is to insert buggy code into a programme and see if a bug finding programme manages to find them. Research was undertaken by researchers at New York University in collaboration with others from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and Northeastern University to investigate if the programmes actually do the task they are designed to do. The results have been not been good for the programmes. Read More here
Bug Triggers Factory Reset
“Unintentional device Factory Data Reset (FDR) after multiple failed attempts to use a fingerprint to unlock the device.”
A software bug that causes Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge on the Verizon network in the U.S.A has been fixed recently. The bug caused major headache for customers who experience a factory reset on their phone if the fingerprint unlocking was not successful after a number of attempts. Read More here
Is Beta Testing right for Autonomous Driving?
“Cars are not toys and to launch a beta version of software with safety risks is not the way a company should care about the life of human beings”
Are cars the exception that software companies should be making when deciding to roll out beta-testing?
Read More here
Images: the-scientist.com, csctbsc.com
