One of the sections I want to have in this blog, is a list of cool bugs and a review on the bug report.
I’ll take a bug report out of some bugzilla list, like the Mozilla or the OpenOffice, explain the bug and review the bug description.
My aim is to learn cool techniques and ideas on bug reporting, and also to try to spot bad patterns and poor descriptions.
Wait! Should not this section be called “Bug of the Month“, or “of the Week“? No, no. I do not want to limit myself to just one bug per period. Neither I want to commit to bring a bug every week… So it’s the “Bug of this Time“! š
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At “This Time”, instead of listing a bug found elsewhere, I’ll describe a ‘Privacy Bug’ I once found in the printer of a company I worked for.They had some Xerox printers that performed as Fax as well.
In some (most) of the machines, when you wanted to print a Transmission Report on a delivered fax, you had to drill-down on the printers’ menu, and press the “Transmission Report” option. Send your fax, and after success, a neat report, with a reduced image of the first page of the fax sent is printed out. Cool.
Other of the machines, had a very similar work flow, but to get the report you had to press the “Transmission Report” entry after you sent the fax.
A nice day, I was preparing to send my fax on this machine, and did all the “Report Flow” before sending the fax (just as I would do in the normal machines). Surprise!
The machine printed immediately the Acknowledgement Report of the last fax sent, some day ago. As the report comes with a nice reduced picture of the fax, I was presented with personal information of one of my co-workers š .
Of course, I shredded the info right away, and warned my colleague of what happened.
My tester soul pushed me to send my fax and press the option a number of times, and every time the same report was printed. The printer machine did not deleted the info from its memory after being used. So if someone wanted, he could simply come once in a while and print out al the faxes sent by anybody.
This is a very high privacy concern in my opinion, as these info can as well be Credit Card numbers or delicate health matters.
Expected Behavior from a Fax machine like this one (one built to be used on a SoHo shared space):
- The machine should save the report information (front-page picture) _only_ if the choice was made through the menu _before_ sending the Fax.
- After printed once, the picture should be deleted.
That’s my Bug of this Time.
If anybody sends me his, I’ll feature it as well. It is not hard at all, there are bugs everywhere! Let me know your Testing Thoughts!