For a big part of the population, the IT world ends with the system update on your computer screen. You press ‘agree’ and go about the rest of the day. But sometimes, the programming world trolls us big time, like Samsung, who accidentally sent out a mystery alert to thousands of devices yesterday night.
People reacted immediately, claiming the alert woke them up and wanting to find out what it was all about. After all, getting a ‘1’ notification looks very suspicious indeed.
But Samsung isn’t the first company to send out bizarre notifications to a wide audience of clients. Last year, OnePlus accidentally did the same by sending odd text in Chinese characters, which turned out to be an internal test for a software update (and which obviously failed).
Samsung has issued a statement on Twitter saying: “Recently, a notification about “Find My Mobile 1” occurred on a limited number of Galaxy devices. This was sent unintentionally during an internal test and there is no effect on your device. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers.”
As you can imagine, the incident was already picked up by people online as it fueled a fresh burst of jokes and memes.
Such instances show a couple of things. First, accidents do happen. Second, even though Samsung claimed it won’t affect any device that received it, that doesn’t mean it’s not scary. Everyone’s on edge with the pandemic blues already, and such accidental stunts are doing more harm than good.
After we all had a good laugh, it’s up to programmers to clean up the whole mess. Because if there’s a code, there’s a bug, and the two won’t live without one another.
Not all technical bugs come and go, and some of them have taught us valuable lessons, sadly, at the cost of innocent people—like the Therac-25 disaster that occurred with the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine. It was produced by Atomic Energy of Canada, but caused accidental radiation overdoses. As a result, it killed six patients.
The Therac-25 case’s investigation showed that poor software and insufficient system development caused the malfunctioning of the system. These could have been caused because there were difficulties in performing automated software tests.
Nancy Leveson, an expert who investigated the case, found that inexperienced coders created buggy software. Moreover, it’s speculated that a sole programmer was in charge of creating the software which they based on code from the Therac-6 and Therac-20. It’s thought that the tragedy was really down to human error, which makes it all the more devastating.
