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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Q: What do you call a bug that's been documented? | 86 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Q: What do you call a bug that's been documented?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 13 2013 @ 01:59 PM EDT
A: A feature.

Apple didn't invent that gag, of course; they merely appropriated what was
already a well-known joke in the nascent software industry. (For extra credit,
compare and contrast this appropriation with Apple's use of the "open
source" BSD x86 microkernel in their proprietary OS X.)

As for Snapchat, I would never expect a random Android/iOS app to clean up after
itself on the device - assuming such a thing is even possible, which I would
suggest is either unlikely or downright wrong. (Flash modules used in a consumer
device should have a transparent wear-levelling layer in their driver that makes
overwriting a physical block problematic - at best. Doing otherwise would
dramatically shorten the useful life of the device.)

This is yet another way that consumer electronics companies are doing a serious
disservice to their everyday customers: they're failing to disabuse anyone of
the idea that "deleting" data means what the common-sense
interpretation of "delete" suggests, when that isn't even remotely
true. See any of the regular discussions of secure erase for hard drives for
many more examples of how an average user can be unpleasantly surprised to find
that "deleting" data generally only makes it invisible to a casual
user, rather than actually erasing it. (And consider that data is even less
likely to be deleted when it's on a solid-state device like flash or SSD, as is
the case on modern portable devices.)

Aside: I see a lot of people on this site thinking that SSDs work exactly like
hard drives. They don't, and thinking that they do can be pretty dangerous; the
inadvisability of secure-erase on SSD is only one example of the practical
differences. I think I could provide a fairly understandable explanation of why
this is so (and why it isn't ever going to change) but it would take awhile and
might well be seen as "tl;dr", so I don't want to do it here. If any
of you are interested, please reply and I'll put a fresh post in Off Topic of
the most recent article.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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