So typing “old” (space) into iOS Safari crashes the whole damned app. Ditto “wel” and “okd”. I may be late to this but WTH?
I’m sure this kind of “oops” only applies to user inputs. Pretty sure there aren’t any such bugs when processing external inputs ;)
@matthew_d_green, that is an enormously important bit of snark. So I will elaborate.
Even if this very specific bug is limited to something mostly harmless, it shows all signs of being the kind of bug that is known to have dire security consequences. So if your software development practices allow for this bug in one place then you need to look carefully for other places you might have done so.
@matthew_d_green and so continuing, I like to use #epochfail examples. Any time I see a "last synched December 31, 1961" or the like I know that someone took a failure to read a value as zero. This is a case of giving an interpretation to malformed input. Even if those bugs are very hard to exploit, they suggest that there will be other places of bad input validation and error handling.
@jpgoldberg @matthew_d_green TBF that can also be the case of picking that artificial value as "time before all the real events' timestamps", which is a questionable choice but does not mean there has to be a bug (other than arguably displaying that as an actual date).
@robryk @matthew_d_green, treating the absence of a date as a date is a data validation bug, but you are correct that it isn’t necessarily an input validation bug. At some point we get a zero timestamp for an event that isn’t at the start of the epoch. To me, that reflects a failure to handle cases of “no data” correctly.