Audi Pulls Website Because Of Y2K

pinhead writes "Audi (USA) has voluntarily pulled their site because of the Y2K scare." What, are they afraid that the website will suddenly start displaying pictures of Volvos? The funniest notice we've seen today is this memo from the Auckland Airport issued 1900 years ago. Y2K has appeared mostly harmless thus far, but we may die of laughter. Update: 12/31 04:30 by E : The Auckland Airport page has been fixed.

Comments

Re:Shutting down the site

[phil reed]

Hey, I said talking about. I'm not planning on doing anything.


...phil

Ebay, Audi, Y2K, and execuses

[smart2000]

This is on eBays site today. The eBay site will be unavailable for Y2K verification from 15:30 PST to 18:00 PST on Friday, December 31 and from 23:00 PST, Friday, December 31 to 03:00 PST, Saturday, January 1. If you try to connect to eBay during these times, you may receive a "Failed to connect" error message.

What's the point of Y2K verification if you aren't going to be around on Y2K?

Re:its the same as any other time!

[treat]

Who's to say they didn't just pop another box in here right now on that IP so that if there is any exploits, they won't harm their real content?

Are the people who took down their website because it's a new year -really- going to be intelligent enough to even think of that?

Besides, www.audiusa.com/anything gives you a very nice not found page, with links to their entire site. It's still up. They just changed the main page.

Shutting down the site

[phil reed]

We're talking about shutting down our site, but more because of script kiddies taking the opportunity to mess with sites than because of a Y2K problem.


...phil

Re:Shutting down the site

[phil reed]

Because, your opinion to the contrary, I believe it does contribute, if only to show a certain position. Your mileage may vary.


...phil

slight problem with the airport

[jlb]

Any Y2K problems are not going to make ANYTHING think it's 100AD. More likely 1900AD. It's funny, but I guess I'm just picky.

Re:slight problem with the airport

[ddstreet]

Well, it doesn't matter who is at fault, it's a Y2K bug anyway. Having said that: it's actually always a coder.

No, it's not a Y2K bug. The code(r) didn't either add 1900 or prepend 19 to the string. So in 1999, it would appear as the year 99. A Y2K bug is one that works before 2000, but not after. Clearly, this would not work at any time. So it IS the coders fault (not a Y2K bug - that was the comparison I was making, coder vs. Y2K, not between the code and coder.)

Re:slight problem with the airport

[ddstreet]

which starting 1/1/2000, is going to be in fact 100

Yeah, and before that would be 0-99, so I guess if this page was up yesterday the date would have read Dec 31, 99? Obviously if the method of generating this year generates 100 now, it wouldn't have added a '19' previously. The coder (if this date is truly generated and not hardcoded) is at fault, not the software; if a 0-99 was expected before, a 100 should be expected now. That's what they got.

Re:I have an idea!

[aqua]

Anyone thinking about Y10k? -- Me Dan Bernstein. He was the one that lobbied the Usenet committees to make date formats survive y10k, and proposed the TAI64 time format, which helpfully lasts from the big bang to the big crunch. Add another 64 bits and you can individually address every attosecond in the whole span.

Volvo...

[Oscarfish]

I can understand why they pulled the site...I mean, "What, are they afraid that the website will suddenly start displaying pictures of Volvos?" might sound trivial for most people, but not if you're stuck driving one. 240DL stationwagon, 10 years old, 200,000 miles, beat up to hell (many small pieces are broken off, in various parking lots and highway shoulder rails).

Re:Script kiddies

[stevied]

i think i speak for most of the windows users on slashdot as i say:

huh?

Yeah, Windows users seem to say that a lot..

:-)

Re:*sigh*... Stupid Perl Programmers Strike Again

[mce]

Speaking of being lame, in JavaScript, things are even lamer. In versions prior to 1.2, if the year is less than 2000, you get the number of years since 1900, but after that you get the full year. To make matters worse, this has been changed in later versions. See http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Ken_North /y2k_web.htm for more details.

I really wonder who came up with all these wonderful ideas and what stuff they have been smoking at the time.

--

First New Zealand flight of the millenium

[timjones]

Am I the only one to notice that the first plane to take off in the new millenium was headed from NZ to California?

Hmmm, they take off at 1/1/2000 00:04, go east, cross the date line, where it is still 12/31/1999 and about 16-18 hours later, experience the millenium rollover AGAIN?

Three cheers for getting back to work!

Tim

LinuxLocal.com for full-time 100% Linux Consultants

Any mirrors?

[Uberdog]

Can someone put up a mirror of the Auckland Airport page before it got fixed. Picturing the "100" there is almost funny enough.

its the same as any other time!

[Mo B. Dick]

Do they not realize that their security problems will be the same during Jan. 1 as any other time! Do backdoors and exploits magically show up on Jan. 1 2000? wow thats news to me if they do!

They may have a good reason??

[vanguard]

We turned off an application or two for 24 hours on our website. I guess they/we didn't want any change orders created while it was 2000 in some parts of the world and 1999 in others.

AllAdvantage also did this...

[pen]

Here's an excerpt from the email...

Y2K is nearly here! That means we can finally stop guessing about what Y2K is going to do to the world's computers - and get on with our lives. As a precautionary measure, AllAdvantage.com is going to disconnect its servers from the Internet and watch the millennial date change from the sidelines.

We will be disconnected from 23:59 PST (GMT -0800) on December 30 through 12:00 PST (GMT -0800) on January 1.

You will be UNABLE TO ACCRUE PAID SURFING TIME DURING THIS 36-HOUR PERIOD.

We value your privacy and the security of your data, and this temporary suspension of service is designed to protect our community from any unanticipated effects from the date changeover.

I don't think any comments are needed from my end...

--

Well, it's 7:30am here and I'm still getting spam

[Kris_J]

So that's a let down. But I'm using Yahoo as my e-mail server and it's still in the last millennium, so there's hope yet.

I do, however, enjoy the fact that "there have been no major events", oh, except for two reported false alarms in Japanese power stations. I'm sorry, but a false alarm in a power station does just fall into my "major" category - there doesn't have to be a mushroom cloud for it to be of concern.

What I am particularly concerned about is the immediate "The geeks were wrong and we wasted all that money" attitude that's been expressed on the TV things I've been watching. Um, people, there was a problem. If it doesn't manifest itself that's because we fixed it, not because it went away by itself. But I'm preaching to the converted here.

Not smart enough of an ass

[Nicolas MONNET]

If you have a processor that needs to have bytes aligned on a 4 bytes boundary, then you probably have lots of memory to spare. Hint: the C library dates back from a few years ago. At that time, there was no such need for alignment ... and much less memory available.

Hey, we switched our entire company off

[Kris_J]

That's right, I spent yesterday afternoon backing up the servers then shutting the entire company down. We left up the PABX, an answering machine, a couple of faxes and the fridge - but everything else was turned off.

See, while our major telecommunications giant stood up and said that ther would be no Y2k problems, our power utility only ever went as far as to say "the disruption should be minimal". Since the quality of the power in our building is crappy at the best of times (the UPS for one server trips every morning when the air conditioning is switched on) we decided that we should turn off and un-plug everything we cared about.

Anyway, it's just a moderately sized local real estate agent - it's not like the computer systems will be needed until Tuesday anyway. Better safe than trying to source parts in January.

Blocked ICMP

[Inoshiro]

Those stupids blocked ICMP packets, including ping and MTU discovery. I'm guessing it was Al Gore's fault.
---

*sigh*... Stupid Perl Programmers Strike Again

[wdr1]

The page is more than likely a bad Perl program. The localtime function (what most people use to get the date), returns a list with the hour, minute, day, month, etc. It returns the year as the number of years since 1900, hence in 1999 it would have returned 99 and now it would 100.

Some Perl programmers (use the last part loosely), have been concatingating "19" to the front of the year instead of adding 1900. I wonder if Perl will get a bad wrap as these programs start to break and die. I hope not; I Perl.

Script kiddies

[Signal 11]

nmap -sS 198.137.240.92 -O -F -o oops.log

What was that about script kiddies now? =)

Re:VW.com also!

[jcroft]

For the record, the Volkswagen Motors Group owns all of these: VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Rolls Royce, Bently, Bugatti, and Lambroghini.