Y2.01K

After our recent discussion of decimal/hexadecimal confusion at the turn of 2010, alphadogg writes in with a Network World survey of wider problems caused by the date change. "A decade after the Y2K crisis, date changes still pose technology problems, making some security software upgrades difficult and locking millions of bank ATM users out of their accounts. Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number. In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales. Meanwhile Symantec's network-access control software that is supposed to check whether spam and virus definitions have been updated recently enough fails because of this 2010 problem."

Comments

Spamassassin

[j_sp_r]

Spamassassin in Kerio Mailserver has a bug that flags all messages dated 2010 as spam. I think it affects the normal spamassassin as well.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[bradley13]

Two reasons

1. Many programmers are not particularly competent. Add in the untrained people writing scripts, VBA applications, etc, who have no clue about software engineering, testing, etc. No surprise that simple errors crop up.
2. Dates are really, really horrible. If you have not had the privilege of writing an international application, worrying about different date and time representations, simultaneity across different time-zones (and the date line) - well, it's an adventure, and even careful testing may not catch everything. Gratuitous real-world example: WinXP allows users to set date-separators and the like in a way that makes unambiguous date/time parsing impossible.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[Teancum]

Amen this this sentiment. The effort to make sure that the Y2K bug didn't cause more havoc and mayhem is precisely due to the herculean effort on the part of hundreds of thousands of programmers who worked overtime to see that it didn't happen.

I had the cell phone for my company to receive the complaints from customers seeking an engineering solution to fixing any potential problems on the night of December 31st, 1999. The company CEO had this number on speed dial for some very high end clients. That I got through the night with some excellent sleep is a testament to the work that did happen was well done.

It turned out for the company I worked for, there was a Y2K bug that did get missed, but it was relatively minor and only impacted the error logging system. Even funnier was that particular system had only been developed six months earlier, by a programmer who clearly should have known better. The date being logged was recorded as the year "19100" instead of 2000.

I'm far more worried about the 2038 Unix overflow bug, which is a much harder bug to try and root out of systems. We have 18 years to fix that bug, but I'm mainly worried that legacy applications on archaic computers used in situations that has no budget is where it will be the largest problem. Unix boxes in particular are known as workhorse computers that can be neglected and ignored... unlike a Windows computer that will most certainly be in the recycling bin within 18 years.

Also, one of the typical "fixes" for the Y2K bug was to set an arbitrary "century window" on the software.... with sometimes random intervals for when this window actually falls. Instead of Y2K biting you all on the same day, it will happen as a class of failures on random dates when some major epoch happens.... such as 2010. So for me, this isn't even news as this is something I'm expecting. 2020 is going to be another year to watch for similar bugs, and 2040 is going to be a particularly ugly year as 1940 was set as a common century epoch point for a great many companies. 1970 was more common, but I hope that the Y2K bug is finally fixed by 2070.