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iTunes 2.0 Installer Deletes Hard Drives
Cheviot writes: "It seems Apple's new iTunes 2 installer deletes the contents of users' hard drives if the drives have been partitioned. I personally lost more than 100gb of data. More information is available at Apples Discussions board. (registration required). Apple has pulled the installer, but for hundreds, if not thousands, the damage is already done." The iTunes download page has a nice warning about the problem. Ouch.
I really wonder about the legal foundation of:
"You should've backuped. We're not responsible
for any damage that erasing all your data caused."
(Yes, it's in the license. But can it be valid?)
Don't they test these things, anymore?
Really, in the current economic climate, all the monkeys should have been thrown out of the high-tech jobs, leaving only clueful people.
How does a bug like this occur?
proof of Osama's guilt..
I'm guessing this has happened to a limited number of people. I used the old iTunes2 installer on a number of machines with multiple partitions as have my friends and none of us lost any data. What conditions cause this "feature" to occur?
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
The problem appears to be in two portions of the installer script which could translate into rm -rf /your_drive, if certain paths $1 or $2 contain spaces:
Though when I looked, nobody seemed to have found where exactly $1 and $2 are defined; also it might be that disaster only strikes with localized versions of the OS.Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
you know, the funny part was i was cursing a blue streak when installing roxio cd creator 5 toasted my win2k machine. what are the freakin' odds, i would rant? why the frick is a cd software package set up to kill my machine?
well, i guess it's catching, whatever it is.
lol, i think i'll be waiting a few weeks after the release of software from now on. bleeding edge one to many times.
I will admit that most applications should just use the "drag and drop" installation and Apple agrees. But there are some cases where the use of an installer can not be avoided and this is one of those cases.
More evidence that Apple has given up on providing the best user experience. I'm loathed to move to OS X becuase it's not really a Mac OS. OSes 1-9 were a product of careful design, internally and externally. The little interface things (mouse clicks behave completely differently in so many circumstances), the robustness of installing software and fiddling with the system.
Years of experience went into tweaking the OS to be just right. Now it's all gone. They thing making it pretty is enough. Now we've been reduced to being victims of shell scripts missing quotes and zapping our hard disks. Sob. It no better than a Window's box now. Sob.
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I have a Pismo PowerBook with MacOS X 10.1, and I downloaded iTunes 2 immediately after it was released. My hard drive has two partitions, one for MacOS 9.2.1, and one for MacOS X 10.1. I also already had a previously installed copy of iTunes on both drives. I ran the iTunes installer, and everything worked fine. It didn't wipe out any data, and I am quite enjoying the new iTunes 2. I
Gee, I guess I was just lucky?
You raise some interesting points about testing in industry.
I would like to offer some comments as a tester, myself.
Yes, testing is not generally done correctly or particularly rigorously. There have been some common factors in my experience:
1) Code not developed to Specification. This is by far the most common. I can't count how many times I've been told "But this is a better way to implement XXXX."
2) Poor unit testing of software.
3) Delay in testing due to: delays in development, delays in configuration/delivery of environment. (Don't get me wrong, this is really a management issue. I have NEVER been on a project that has let the testing deadline slip even though the entry criteria were slipped - sometimes even by 3 months! It is ridiculous to not adjust testing periods.)
4) Unrealistic expectations or deadlines by PM/managers.
5) Downright incompetent testers. ("Oh, we don't need to test that.")
But, I would tend to disagree about your point concerning QA participation in code reviews of module level code. Frankly, module testing is the responsibility of development. The finest granularity that testing function should be concerned with is the interface level. (unless, of course, your org uses QA people to do module testing.) This is because testing is required to have an understanding of *more* components/modules than any given developer. To expect them to know the intricate workings of the interior of each module is unrealistic. To expect them to know the interface of those modules, how they behave together, the data flows, etc is quite reasonable. This reminds me actually of the biggest problem that I've encountered (addendum to above): poor or non-existent requirement documents. How the hell are developers supposed to do a reasonable job, and testers test it if there are no frickin' requirements?
Although not quite as disasterous as formating the entire hdd, originally when installing half-life if the install dir was changed from say C;\Sierra\Half-life to D:\games\half-life then when half-life was uninstalled it would take the whole of d:\games with it :(
distintly not fun :/
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Good lord, man. It *ERASES YOUR FUCKING HARD DRIVE*. This isn't vulnerability that'll that the script kiddies a few months to take advantage of, or something that'll cause a performance degradation due memory leak, or something that'll cause the occasional crash.
It *ERASES YOUR FUCKING HARD DRIVE*. This is the *JOKE* bug. This is the kind of thing that when one wants to make a humourous example of Microsoft, one goes "heh, heh, it'll probably erase your hard drive, heh." I mean, the viruses that take advantage of MS vulnerabilities don't even erase your fucking hard drives.
This is a *HUGE* screw up on Apple's part. Trying to compare it to a Microsoft bug-of-the-week is pretty weak - never mind trying to compare it *favorably*.
(As an aside, when Microsoft does take a while to respond (which is rare) it's an obscure bug in a system where it's complicated to fix - not a freakin' forgetting-the-quotes error in a Bourne script. Apple fucked up big time. Deal with it.)