'There will be bugs' on social media sites

An industry expert has claimed that it is inevitable that complex applications such as social networks will have bugs in them.

Social media websites may still have bugs in them which hackers could exploit, suggested an industry insider.

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley pointed out that social networks cannot be classified as websites, since are actually very complicated applications.

He claimed that there are hundreds of thousands of lines of code involved in services such as Facebook and MySpace, so there is "no doubt" that some bugs will exist.

Mr Cluley explained: "Any code of that complexity will inevitably contain bugs - there's no such thing as a perfect program."

In his view, the real question is how serious these bugs are and how much of a risk do they pose to users.

The error recently found by Yvo Schaap was a very important glitch that could have had terrible consequences for MySpace and Facebook and all their users.

It occurred because while the sites normally prohibit external applications from accessing the service, it was found that one tool slipped through the net and was able see protected data.

12/11/2009