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The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#61

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tedivm wrote: post #47
jrockway wrote: post #44

Did they open a bug against Chrome with the image file? I feel like any crash on user-provided data is a big deal, always a correctness problem, but potentially a security problem. "We deleted the image so the problem is fixed for us" is OK (I wouldn't waste time writing a blog post about it personally), but I think that Chrome needs to fix this bug.

Was it actually a Chrome bug though? It only happened when the Grammerly desktop app was installed. My guess is grammerly is doing something sketchy.

Does Grammerly hook something in Chrome? If not, then it's still probably a Chrome bug, even if some second-order effect of Grammerly is necessary to trigger it.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#62

Post by Zetobal »

neilv wrote: post #58

Why would they disable crash reporting for security reasons (which might actually help solve the root cause of their availability problem, which they never did solve)... yet run Grammarly (which I'd guess, security-wise, is less trustworthy than Google, in how they secure data themselves once they've inevitably stolen it from the customer)?

Maybe they have the enterprise licence with grammarlys pinky swear that they won't train on your data.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#63

Post by neilv »

> Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either.

They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox.

(This is potentially better than the 'solution' they much later ended up with, in which they probably only relieved a symptom of an underlying problem that can exhibit again, and in the meantime is a zero-day exploit waiting to happen. At least, with a different browser, there's a chance that the vulnerability doesn't actually exist, when it's known to exist in their Chrome configuration.)

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#66

Post by majormunky »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #61
tedivm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it actually a Chrome bug though? It only happened when the Grammerly desktop app was installed. My guess is grammerly is doing something sketchy.

Does Grammerly hook something in Chrome? If not, then it's still probably a Chrome bug, even if some second-order effect of Grammerly is necessary to trigger it.

It looks like the desktop Grammerly app hooks into all sorts of things, "An all-in-one writing assistant that works on your desktop and in your browser. Use it in apps, word processors, email clients, and more."

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#67

Post by [deleted] »

neilv wrote: post #58

Why would they disable crash reporting for security reasons (which might actually help solve the root cause of their availability problem, which they never did solve)... yet run Grammarly (which I'd guess, security-wise, is less trustworthy than Google, in how they secure data themselves once they've inevitably stolen it from the customer)?

[deleted]

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#68

Post by jdminhbg »

KerrAvon wrote: post #56
golergka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they have good time management and prioritisation skills. They found the source of the problem and fixed it.

No, they didn't. They figured out a workaround. Since they didn't find the root cause of the problem themselves and apparently didn't take it up with the Chrome or Grammarly development teams, they don't actually know what happened or when it might bite their customers again.

They say it no longer reproduces on current Chrome/Grammarly, so taking it up with them is fruitless. They're not going to investigate crashers from old versions.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#69

Post by RajT88 »

nudgeee wrote: post #51
user3939382 wrote: post #46

Reminds me of the story I read where the guy's car wouldn't start depending on what flavor of ice cream he picked and when investigated he was right. Some kind of evaporation/vacuum leak or something that was dependent on time and some flavors were farther away in the store and took more time to buy.

Vapor lock. Legend here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

I heard a similar tale in high school.

A friend of mine had an aunt who passed away, and so he ended up inheriting her car. The car came with a petrified apple pie in the back. He was insistent that the car would not start without the pie in the back window.

Several of his friends who he played in a punk band with confirmed this, that they had tested it. Take the pie out, car won't start. Put the pie back in, the car starts.

I don't think anyone ever figured out what was going on, I graduated a couple of months after hearing the story, and fell out of touch. But - timing and vapor lock makes sense, if they were always testing it by first starting the car, removing the pie, and then putting the pie back in.

As an aside, the aunt who had passed away was one Aunt Martha (after which the car was also named), which in honor of the strange car and its strange pie was what their garage punk band was named after. There's some totally unrelated band now called Aunt Martha - any evidence of their band is not on the internet.

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