It started off as a regular Saturday morning for me. I woke up early, and started reading the news and my favourite blogs. I stumbled upon a post where Edward Snowden was criticising Dropbox for their use privacy stance. So far, so good. Then, I came upon Dropbox’s reply, which I thought was very odd:

We are working to protect user information.

WAIT! WHAT!!

What do you mean you are working to protect my privacy? Are my files not already protected? By when will this be completed? And more importantly, why don’t we know about this?

Then, something struck me — How many other things on the internet are broken, that we have no idea about?

Turns out, practically EVERYTHING.

Microsoft has been touting their OS as the best in humanity, and yet they are riddled with things that have flaws in them or downright don’t work. Heck, they even have a day where they release updates and bug fixes for their products, called Patch Tuesday!

Every other Web based platform or service I can think of is broken. This includes those RSA security tokens we use to sign into our online bank accounts — yep! Those algos were cracked in 2012.

Even Apple, who claim to never release a product until it is perfected are riddled with software and hardware bugs.

Despite all this, we as users are seemingly OK with using half baked tools and services. This is why the Fail Fast and Agile Development methodologies work in the real-world.

We will never know which serious bugs were fixed and hidden under the innocuous line “bug fixes and other improvements”.