Computer Errors or Bugs

Bugs are the beginning of Computer Crimes, because hackers look for bugs to get inside the computer and create their crime.  For this reason we are going to go over what Computer bugs are this way you have an understanding of what hackers are after.

Computer errors or bugs are terms used to describe that a computer hardware or software has an error, mistake or some kind of fault.  Since you are asking about software I’ll keep my answers related to software errors or bugs.  There are many places where a software bug could be generated, but I could say that 100 percent of all computer bugs are the cause of human error.

 You could be the programmer developing software and if you are the only programmer then you might have control of the entire software you are writing, and still make some small mistakes.  The smallest error or bug I could think of is misspelled words, of course a misspelled word is not a major bug, the program is not going to stop working but it’s still a bug.  It could also be common to mix subroutines in your program like “view” and “review” or “print” and "print view”. 

Another common error would be to be off by one byte while reading or writing a file, one byte might seem like no big deal but in a software program every character counts and you might start losing words just by this. There are also logical bugs which usually make the program get stuck in one place or give you wrong mathematical calculations.  There might be some interface bugs that cause errors in display, or communication devices. The most dangerous bug I could think of would be a security bug.  Security bugs make the software or computer system vulnerable, and depending on the kind of software you are writing it could be very dangerous for the individual or organization running the software.  Now if you are developing the software in a team, imagine to what extend the errors could be made.  At that level even a small design error could miss an entire process of the program, it would be like building a figure puzzle and missing just one tile, the picture is never going to be complete.  Another place where the error could be taking place is at the compiler that you are using to compile the program.  The compiler is  a very complex program also written by humans exposed to having errors, and this program is supposed to translate the syntax oriented high level language that you wrote the program in like (basic, Delphi, C, Java to name a few) and convert it to computer code, basically binary code only understood by the computer.

 There are many errors reported by compilers that would just make you work for endless hours and not even be a problem on your actual code.  We could now think we have a perfect compiler, and perfect software developed by you or your team of programmers, well that software now has to run on top of an operating system that might have many bugs of its own.  Take Windows for example, I would dare to say it’s the most popular OS in the PC world, and everyone knows how buggy it is.  You always have to be getting Updates.  These updates are what Microsoft uses to send fixes to the bugs they find on a daily basis.  Sometimes you get the bug solved, others you might get a work around until they fix the problem.  When they fix a very big amount of bugs they will package them all into something called service pack, the latest Microsoft OS right now is Windows 7 SP1.