

What is the worst software bug in history? - itcmcgrath
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/40477/2673

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tptacek
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.

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billswift
If you include _pre_ -history, I would say the one that causes people to see
patterns that aren't really there.

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hexley
fuzzy logic ain't perfect

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shadowfox
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25> ?

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edge17
not quite 'the worst' but an interesting story no less -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage>

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archangel_one
Debatable that it counts as a "bug" since the code functioned exactly as
designed.

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radioactive21
Y2K

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tzs
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.

