Welcome to the this week’s Quotes of the Week: DARPA’s self-repair software competition, Apple watch cant find your heart and more.
Improving the quality of Apps
“In an ideal world, the ability to bridge the gap between user frustration and developer attempts to fix problems would be part of the build”
Jon Udell writes an opinion piece on how Apps need to be improved with documentation and easier reporting for users to improve the experience for developers, testers and users.
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Bug Bounties Not Always the Right Answer
“The key takeaway is that bug bounties have limited effectiveness as a tool for finding software vulnerabilities.”
Alexander Slagg argues that the bug market needs to be brought completely into the open for it to work properly. Currently the black market serves one type of hacker while the Internet Bug Bounty Programme serves the white-hat hackers.
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Apple Watch thinks your heart isn’t working
“After installing Watch OS 1.0.1, users are noticing huge gaps of time where the Apple Watch fails to record any heart rate data.”
The latest update to the Apple Watch OS has caused an issue with its heart rate monitor. Apparently the watch fails to record any heart rate data for long periods of time. There was speculation that the company might have deliberately reduced the number of times the heart rate monitor works to extend battery life but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
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A bad install of Software caused a Airplane Crash in May
Airbus Group’s Chief of Strategy Marwan Lahoud said there was a “serious final assembly quality problem” and not a software bug that caused the crash.
A report into the Airbus military transport plane that crashed in Spain in May which resulted in the death of four people has found that the crash was caused by poorly configured software. The crash happened when the A400M four airplane’s engines stalled causing the plane to dive and crash. The control software for the engines didn’t contain any known bugs, the poor way it was installed resulted in the plane’s engines stalling prior to the crash.
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U.S. D.O.D testing its Emergency Response Software
“Normally, you are in a command vehicle and you’re out in the field somewhere…I have no way to view a different prospective.”
Scot McGuire, Ammon Fire Department division chief comments on the testing of the Department of Defence new disaster response software. The software, called called GeoSHAPE, allows first responders in the field to share photos and written reports (via a mobile phone application called Arbiter) with a command centre as well as others in the field. The idea behind the software is to allow commanders of a disaster response to get a clear picture of what is going on. The software was developed by Noblis NSP and Boundless. It’s planned to be used in situations like floods and earthquakes.
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DARPA is Holding a $1 Million Competition to find a Automatic Bug Hunting Programme
“Program analysis — software that studies other software….can solve lots of interesting problems in the lab, but it’s never been done under practical applications and it’s never been done as an autonomous system.”
Michael Walker who suggested the Cyber Grand Challenge to DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) comments on how building thinking software has become the next challenge for hackers and developers. DARPA are holding a competition for teams to develop software that will examine code for flaws and attempt to repair the code. Teams will battle againsit each other with their software next summer at the DARPA conference. The research wing of the Department of Defence are offering $2 million to the winners, with the runners-up getting $1 million and $750,000 respectively.
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