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BugBlog Bug of the Month

Every month the BugBlog picks its Bug of the Month, representing the most significant bug found in the past month. Sometimes, the bug will be the one which could potentially cause the most damage; sometimes it will be the bug which affects the most users. And sometimes, it will be the bug that is just the most interesting bug. This bug will be selected either from the free Bug of the Day, or from the subscription-only BugBlog Plus.

This month the Bug of the Month goes to Sony, because they are the ones who made the batteries being recalled by Dell and Apple.

First in the 8/15 BugBlog:

Not really a bug, but your laptop going up in flames certainly qualifies as something bad happening to your computer. Dell has a new site, called https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/ with information on the laptop battery recall. When I checked it this morning, I got a warning message about a problem with the security certificate. Chances are, that happened due to the haste in getting up the separate site. If you go to dell.com, there's only a little tiny link to "Battery Recall" at the bottom of the page.

And then in the 8/25 BugBlog:

The Sony battery recall has spread to Apple. There is a recall of 1.8 million 12 inch iBook G4 and 12 and 15 inch PowerBook G4 laptop computers, due to a fire hazard. The detailed information from Apple on what batteries are affected is at https://support.apple.com/ibook_powerbook/batteryexchange/. Sony says they think that there won't be any more battery recalls. Read about the whole thing at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2008146,00.asp and read about an effort by manufacturers to ease fears of exploding laptops at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2008264,00.asp.

Why this bug? Well, first of all, the sheer size; it's over 4 million batteries for Dell, plus the 1.8 million for Apple. Of course, the videos of exploding laptops also leant an air of urgency to the problem. The latest alarm over terrorism with electronic devices on planes hit the news at the same time. Combine all that with the really warm feeling you sometimes get when you have your laptop on your lap, and you can see why Sony wins the Bug of the Month.

Previous Bugs of the Month

August 2006: Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage

July 2006: Yahoo! Mail

June 2006: Symantec Enterprise AV

May 2006: Microsoft Wins Special Lifetime Achievement Bug Award

April 2006: Adobe Macromedia Flash Player

March 2006: Microsoft Windows Media Player

Feb 2006: Apple QuickTime

Jan 2006: Microsoft WMF Bug

Dec 2005: Sony's Secret DRM Scheme Leaves Users Exposed

November 2005: Four Separate Bugs Leave Windows Open to Takeover

October 2005: Acrobat Screws Up MS Word

September 2005: Apple Security Update Breaks 64-bit Apps

August 2005: Cisco IOS Vulnerable to IPv6 bug

July 2005: RealNetworks Fixes Four Bugs in Their Media Player

June 2005: Flawed Rollout for Netscape 8

May 2005: TCP/IP Fix for Windows

April 2005: Denial of Service against Symantec Norton AntiVirus

March 2005: IDN Spoofing Bug

February 2005: Windows Animated Cursor Bug

January 2005: Windows Firewall Problems with Dial-up connections

The Bug of the Month is also posted at Blogcritics.org