As this post is being written, 100+ testers from around the world have already submitted more than 500 bugs in Walmart.com, Amazon.com and Target.com – another remarkable display of talent from our testing community.

But it’s not over yet. There’s still time to complete your last-minute holiday bug hunting, so be sure to sign in to the uTest platform and get cracking. Remember, our judges are more interested in quality over quantity when it comes to the bugs. In other words, one great bug is all it takes, as evidenced by our past winners.

If you can’t find any bugs to submit – but still want a chance to win cash for the usability survey – then raise your hand in this uTest Forums thread. After all, there’s nearly $4,000 in prize money at stake, so what do you have to lose?

Thanks to all those who have submitted bugs for the competition, and good luck to the remaining participants.

Doron was among a select group of speakers chosen to present at GTAC, including Microsoft, smartFOCUS Digital, Sauce Labs and of course Google, where he examined the complimentary role a community of professional testers plays in mobile testing.

Check out Doron’s presentation below! All other presentations can now be seen on YouTube.

Remember, this Bug Battle competition ends Wednesday, November 11th at 11:59pm EST  — and there’s nearly $4,000 in prize money at stake. So if you have been sitting on the sidelines, it’s not too late to seize the opportunity now.  Remember, it just takes one interesting bug to win!

If you prefer usability testing, you can also test the navigation and workflows of these three e-tail leaders with the feedback survey portion of this Bug Battle competition.  We’ll be awarding prizes for the best feedback, as well as the highest-quality bugs.  As always, it’s the quality of your testing work — not the quantity — that catches our judges’ attention!

Good luck…and happy bug hunting.

The SNCR holds this event to recognize companies that are exploring new and innovative avenues of communications and marketing.  We were fortunate enough to be among those companies and agencies who were honored for our use of new media to build and engage our community.

It’s great to be counted among those who are pushing the limits of social networking, blogs, forums and other forms of media, but we’re just getting started.  We’ve already established a vibrant presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but we’re always on the lookout for new ideas.

So with that, I’m inviting you to drop us a comment or shoot us a note with your thoughts about how we could make our social media more useful, informative or entertaining.

Bug Battles are available to all members of our community. You can get more details in our uTest-only forums.  To participate in the Bug Battle, just sign in to your uTest account.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Amazon.com
Walmart.com
Target.com

The competition – which kicked off at midnight – will give testers one week to search these sites for the most compelling bugs, and to report them through our online platform. And as usual, we’ll be dishing out more than $3,000 in prize money based on:

• Top overall tester (based on the quality of bugs and feedback)
• Top novice tester (same criteria)
• Top individual bugs in each of the sites (most interesting, most severe, best documented)
• Best survey responses (comparing the feature set, functionality and usability)

For more details about the competition – including info on rules and prizes – check out our Battle of the E-Tailers page.

Which site has the buggiest shopping cart? The smartest wish list? The best price comparison? We’ll be sure to give you all the details in time to complete your holiday shopping. Is midnight on December 24th OK? Kidding, we’ll get them to you sooner than that (in the form of our Bug Battle Report).

So testers, go forth and track down some bugs, make some money, and be hailed as a Bug Battle victor within the community!

Special note: uTesters can get the full details and discuss the Bug Battle in the uTest Forums.

What makes this problem really terrible is that many mobile users are charged for their bandwidth usage.  Even AT&T users, who are used to having unlimited data plans in the United States, can be charged for data consumption while traveling internationally.  That can mean big bills when they get back home.

Cellular service providers aren’t immune either.  Networks around the world are struggling to keep up with the data demands of the iPhone, and providers certainly don’t need to deal with unnecessary data consumption caused by broken software.  That means companies like AT&T are building out extra infrastructure to support buggy apps – something that costs you and me money in our phone bills.

For the security researchers who uncovered this bug, one hour of testing resulted in $3,000 worth of data charges. That is serious money, and anyone developing mobile apps should take heed.  Your broken app can cost enough money to buy 10 iPhones, and that’s a great way to get some bad press.  Further proof that mobile application testing needs to catch-up to the standards of web and desktop testing.

(Click to enlarge chart)

And while Twitter and URL shortening services aren’t dangerous in and of themselves, they present a wonderful tool for blackhats.  In this case, Wired published the findings of a study from computer security firm, Kaspersky.

You can read the full article here, but the top-level findings are, in a word, scary.

As many as one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs who have deployed a tool that examines URLs circulating in tweets.

The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter, which generally hide the real website address from users before they click on a link, preventing them from self-filtering links that appear to be dodgy.

1 in 500 doesn’t sound so scary to you? Check out what that .2% really means after the jump.

Of the URLs examined, between 100 and 1,000 a day are found to be hosting malware, the company said

And that’s just from the half million Twitter links that Kaspersky’s Krab Krawler checks each day.  The larger issue for many, including some at CNET, is the security (or lack thereof) that’s inherent in URL shorteners, which prevent users from seeing their ultimate destination before they click.  And with more than 200 URL shorteners flooding the market and Twitter not budging on its 140 character limit, we haven’t heard the last of this.

Do you click on shortened URLs on Twitter?  How about if they’re used elsewhere (in an email or blog)?  If so, how do you protect yourself from the risk of malware?  Leave us a comment after the beep.

today’s theme

That’s right, it’s Halloweekend (that lame pun is mine). And so despite the warnings from that old guy in Pet Sematary who said that “Sometimes…dead is better,” we’ve decided to help a few scary software bugs rise from their graves. What could possibly go wrong?

Grills to Cook Babies and More

From OrigSoft.com: “It’s a well-known problem with websites that if you trust user-submitted data that you will get burned. Sears literally did get burned by their own incompetence when their website started promoting ‘Grills to cook babies and more’. The problem wasn’t a huge lack judgment by the Sears product team, but rather a lack of understanding about displaying variable names and values in the URL. A lot of sites do this by default, but the Sears site took it one step further. If a specific page became popular, the results were cached and displayed to users.”

The Ping of Death

From Wired: “A lack of sanity checks and error handling in the IP fragmentation reassembly code makes it possible to crash a wide variety of operating systems by sending a malformed “ping” packet from anywhere on the internet. Most obviously affected are computers running Windows, which lock up and display the so-called “blue screen of death” when they receive these packets. But the attack also affects many Macintosh and Unix systems as well.”

Donkey Kong Kill Screen

From Wikipedia: “Donkey Kong also featured a kill screen in the 22nd stage, and the 117th screen. This is an example of a kill screen that is not due to an integer overflow in a level counter (since programmers prevented this), but a different oversight on the part of the designers. The amount of time allowed for any given screen is determined algorithmically during play by the level the player is on. The timer is calculated 100×(10×(level + 4)), and has a maximum value of 8000. When the level reaches 22, the game reads 100×(10×(22+4)) or 100×260. However, the 8-bit counter rolls over at 256, meaning the game calculates 100*4. This causes the timer to be set so low that there is simply not enough time for the screen to possibly be completed.” (Note: we’ve blogged about this before)

AT&T Lines Go Dead

From DevTopics: A single switch at one of AT&T’s 114 switching centers suffered a minor mechanical problem and shut down the center. When the center came back up, it sent a message to other switching centers, which in turn caused them to shut down and brought down the entire AT&T network for 9 hours.

Cause: A single line of buggy code in a complex software upgrade implemented to speed up calling caused a ripple effect that shut down the network.

Life’s a Glitch, Then You Die*

From StudentLife.com: “It’s Y2K, and Homer is the only technician in the world who forgot to debug his computer. So when the ball drops, the virus spreads and pandemonium ensues. Planes fall from the skies, and nuclear missiles are deployed. Dick Clark’s face melts off, revealing him to be a robot. In short, the world is doomed. But there’s an out; the Simpsons discover that something called “Operation Exodus” plans to rocket the world’s most important people into space so they can start a new human civilization. They yoink a ticket off Krusty’s body and sprint to Houston. But only Lisa, Marge and Maggie are allowed on the ship (Lisa’s their proofreader), and all hope seems lost until Homer and Bart spy another rocket about to take off. They leave Earth behind, but something about this shuttle doesn’t seem right. Homer looks around in panic at Dan Quayle, Pauly Shore and Tom Arnold, realizing they’re far from being the world’s best and brightest people. Also, their ship is headed directly into the sun. Rosie O’Donnell leads all of the passengers in “Clang, Clang, Clang,” and Homer decides death can’t come fast enough, as he ejects his and Bart’s seats from the shuttle, where their heads can pop in peace.”

OK, so only 4 out of the 5 bugs actually occurred. Forgive us then for “exorcising” our “Poe”tic license on that last one. It is Halloween after all.

Now Wordpress has gone one better with their new Plugin Compatibility Beta.  Blog owners can now vote on how well a plugin works with different versions of Wordpress, making it easy to see if a plugin is well maintained or dying.  The new feature is already available within the Wordpress plugin directory, and anyone with a Wordpress login can vote.  Here’s an example with WP-Polls.

And the future looks even brighter.  According to the development team:

Eventually, we’d like to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, allowing you to vote directly from your plugins admin screen. The ultimate goal is to use this information to inform you of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process. For that to be useful we need a large set of high quality compatibility data. Start voting!

Hopefully, selecting the right plugin for your needs will become even easier and more reliable.