So, hi everyone, my name is Mia and I'm here to tell you something about the weirdest
bugs in history, who knows what this thing is, raise your hand, 1, 2, 3, quite a few people.
So the story starts in September 1999 at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.
So this is the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was one of the biggest projects of NASA.
Now this thing basically, it's a robotic probe, it's about the size of a small car,
and there are no astronauts on warm nothing, just a bunch of sensors and a bunch of electronics.
And so it's something like a weather satellite for a Mars, so the idea was that it would
cruise to Mars, get into the orbit and study the weather and climate there.
The team had been working on this for many years, so this is a huge project, it was kind
of a big deal, it cost millions of dollars.
And after 10 months of just traveling through space, it was finally getting there.
So this was the deployment there, and everyone was watching it live on TV, and what
was supposed to happen is that the orbiter was supposed to enter orbit and then come
behind the Mars and say, hey, I made it.
And so people were waiting, everyone was watching it live on TV, and there was a silence.
They were waiting for a few minutes, for a few hours, but there was nothing, there was absolutely
no signal there.
So what happened?
At first, no one knew, they didn't get any signal, but they had no idea why.
What was supposed to happen is that it was supposed to be around 110 kilometers from
Mars.
However, at some point, they realized that it was 57 kilometers from Mars, so that means
that it was very close to it, and that altitude the Mars and atmosphere just tore it apart.
So it probably broke into pieces or burned up, no one actually knows.
So what happened here?
What could have pushed it so far of the course?
So the spacecraft was built by an external contractor, it was a team that built a spacecraft,
and now it's the whole team that was operating it, right?
So there were these two teams.
And there was one piece of software that was calculating the force of thruster firing, and
it was integrated with the navigation software that was used by the operation team.
And they took the numbers afterwards to realize that it was happening, and all the numbers
were right.
But the meaning of them was off, it was off by a factor of 4.45, and then they realized
where it was the problem.
So the software that was outputting those values was using pound for seconds, which is basically
the imperial measure of impulse.
And the navigation software that was reading the same data was using Newton's seconds,
which is metric.
So basically, had two teams.
One team was producing some data.
The second team was reading the data, and they saw that they were using the same units
but they weren't.
And think about it, this is the project that was running for months, and for years, it was
quite a big deal, and every time during the mission, when the orbit is small thrusters
far to adjust its course, basically, the data was misinterpreted.
So you might be wondering, how is it possible, and this is such a stupid error?
Well, this is most a communication failure, because NASA's team just assumed that everything
was in metric, they never actually checked it, and they didn't have any tests, they just
assumed it's metric, because while we use metrics, so why not?
And the worst part of it is that actually, some people at NASA, from some inconsistencies
weeks before the failure.
So they reported to the management, but management said, now that could not happen, it's
impossible.
And so yeah, this is what happened afterwards.
Speaking of single mistakes that caused worldwide destruction, and I think this, you're
a developer at Google one day, you push a comment.
It's a very small change, and what happens next?
Every website in Google is marked as dangerous, including Google itself.
So this is exactly what happened in 2002 when a Google engineer made one tiny typo.
So for 14 minutes, every Google search said, this side, my hardware computer, and even
Gmail was affected.
Email started going to say, to scam spam, and the best part is there's only one service
that wasn't affected, which is the ads.
And they're now up here in random, here in my slides too, because the ads are everywhere
and un-destroyable.
You might be wondering why I know the ads, I have no idea, I guess ads always work.
So what went wrong?
Well, one of the engineers, while updating the malware registry, which is basically just
a list of dangerous websites, and instead of entering a specific URL, they accidentally
added just one character, which is a forward slash, and in technical terms, this means
everything.
So you might be wondering, did they have tests?
Well, they didn't.
That's not every bug, it's fixing, and some bugs are so iconic that they actually never
get fixed.
Who knows a game civilization?
Oh, go ahead, a lot of people.
So it's a strategy game where you build and grow civilization in your competing against
historical leaders like Napalau and Cleopatra or Jinguis Khan.
And then there's Gandhi.
It's a leader known for peace, for diplomacy, and at first, everything seemed normal, Gandhi
preferred negotiations over war just as you would expect.
But a players' progress or the game, and civilizations became more advanced, they actually
started noticing something strange.
The moment Gandhi unlocked atomic technology, he started dropping nukes of everyone.
So why did this happen?
Well, popular story says that developers gave Gandhi the lowest aggression rating, because
he was the most peaceful development right, and later in the game, when all civilizations
became more peaceful, the game automatically lowered all aggression scores.
So because his score was one, when it lowered, it became minus one, which is basically
in binary, the highest possible number.
And now here comes the plot twist, actually.
So many people know this story.
And actually, it's not true.
How this started is that it started at Reddit.
Someone made a joke about it.
Hey, Gandhi is throwing nukes.
And game developers thought, well, actually, this is a really good joke.
People are tweeting about it, I guess there was no Twitter back then, but whatever was
there.
They said, let's maybe write the way, let's use it, so let's introduce the bug.
So because people are making jokes, and ready, they introduced the bug, and so that's
how a myth became a joke, and it never got fixed.
And to be nice, I knew employee had some micro-sistered California cap mysteriously disappearing
from the database.
People started investigating what's wrong with the database, with the application software,
used to realize that the system wasn't with the software.
It was with his name.
His name was Steve Null.
And in terms of the bug in the 80s, lots of systems didn't know how to parse the string
null properly.
Of course, the director reproduced it in postgres, this was the first thing I did.
And it worked fine.
However, you can find still bugs like this in various super-all systems, for example, I found
an open issue in Apache Flex, which has been open for like 15 years.
And we all know this urban legend.
I have absolutely no idea if this is true if anyone else please tell me.
So this is a person who changed their license plate to drop database to attempt and SQL injection
attack.
And speaking of SQL injection attacks, it cannot mention this comic.
Hi, this is your son's school.
We are having some computer trouble.
Oh dear, did he break something?
In a way, did you really name your son, Robert, job table students?
Oh yes, little bobby tables, we call him.
Well, we've lost the CS students records.
I hope you're happy.
And I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs.
And sometimes it's not a problem just with SQL injection attacks, but it's a problem
with lots of data that is testing data or looks like testing data, but it's not.
So there are lots of systems that just remove data that was
testing data, for example, everything was which starts with test, which starts with ABCDE.
And if you're now thinking, well, ABCDE isn't that like testing data, well, actually I have some news for you.
Between 1990 and 2020, over 300 babies in the US have been called ABCDE.
I can imagine how well it goes and holds itself for.
For a long time, we thought that the most expensive book ever was a Codex Eye Sister.
This was a book written by Leonardo da Vinci in the 16th century.
And it was later bought by Bill Gates for 30.8 million in 1994.
So this was a book filled with the thoughts of one of history's greatest minds,
hundred and pages of scientific observations and ideas that were centuries ahead of our time.
So what kind of book would have to be to be that record like some rare manuscript or some historical book?
Well, actually in the 20th century, I book appeared in Amazon, which with a price tag of 23.7 million.
So you might be wondering what kind of book it is?
Well, it was a book about the genetic development of slice.
And just like the cover, it's bug two.
So how did it happen? So on Amazon, there are third-party sellers and they can set their pricing rules,
based on competitors. So for example, you can have a rule always be 0.07% cheaper than the next lowest price,
or always be 27% more expensive than the lowest option. And you have lots of people there,
it was fine because they sort of balance each other. However, the problem here was that there were
only two sellers. So what happened is that those got stuck in a loop. So every time the algorithm ran,
one went up, the second one went up. And again, again, until the book was listed for 23.7 million.
And as soon as people noticed, the problem was fixed and price dropped back to normal.
Our field can sometimes be mysterious to outsiders. When WhatsApp said the maximum number of people in
a group chat, the independent reported it with a comment, WhatsApp increases group chat size limit to 256 people.
It's not clear why WhatsApp set it on such an oddly specific number.
And speaking of 256, did you know that trains in Switzerland weren't allowed to have 256
axles? Axles is this thing, so basically, which connects the wheels.
So to keep track of trains on the Swiss rail network, they place the textures along the rails.
And these sensors will activate with a wheel pass over then and count the number of wheels.
So these detectors stored the axle count in a 8-bit number. So of course, when the count reaches
255, if you add one more, it draws it to zero, which basically means that the train is the
Phantom train. And if you check Swiss Railway Regulation, you will find a section which states exactly
that the total number of axles in the train must not equal to 156. This is actual.
Sometimes it's hard to say what is the button, but it's a feature. Take X of, for example,
all of us use it. In 2016, researchers in Melbourne analyzed 18 genum research journals in
founded 19.6 of gene studies contained errors. Well, did you know there are genes that are called
March 5 or September 15? Excellent, of course. It ought to correct them to date.
And also around 90% of business spreadsheets contain errors, says the European spreadsheet risks
interest group. Yes, there is a non-profit in Europe that analyzes errors in spreadsheets.
There is a story about JP Morgan, who you spreadsheet to calculate risk. There is something
called value at risk, which means what's the most money we could lose in a single day with 95%
certainty. And you can have the glow, which means you can take higher risk or you can have a high
meaning that the risk should be low. And there's one specific calculation that was done in a series
of spreadsheets. And those spreadsheets had some math errors. And there was another control group
that was making sure that the spreadsheets are correct. And there also had errors.
And what happened is actually that it got so bad that what employees started their own unofficial
spreadsheet just to track it because all of them were full of bugs. And by the time they called
the mistake, it was too late. And they published a report that says, after subtracting the
all rates from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided their sum instead of their average.
This error mutates vulnerability by a factor of two and lower the value at risk. What does it mean
that the super complicated, but what does it mean is that JP Morgan lost six billion of dollars
just because someone added two numbers instead of average them in a spreadsheet.
And sometimes, about doesn't cause a disaster, sometimes it just deletes your whole operating
system. Bumblebee was a project designated to enable and video dual GPU support and linked
up laptops, allowing users to off-log graphics rendering to the discrete GPU. Everything was
working fine until one update in 2011. A user created a GitHub issue with a rather urgent
message. Install script does RMRF user for Ubuntu. So basically what happened is that they wanted
to delete some specific folder called XORG. But instead of there was an empty space after
users, so that means it's just wiped out the core of the operating system. And the
author quickly pushed a fix with the comment message, giant bug closing user to be deleted.
So sorry. And of course, this being of insert the community did not hold back in the
comment section. So you could find 884 comments on the comment. How can you complain about
bugs, Mr. Anderson, when you have no operating system? Bleeding Edge really bleeding for someone
now. Now I'm a lack of disk space now. I don't like the folder anyway. I'm here by
it's thank you for your attention.