「 "The 2038 problem" relates to an issue with how Unix-based systems store dates and timestamps. Most Unix systems use a 32-bit signed integer to represent the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. This is known as the Unix epoch or Unix time 」
We are watching the #Y2K documentary on HBO and it’s wild how modern the public reaction to this sounds in retrospect. Ultra-conservative militias, etc. stirring up larger panic and exploiting the panic to sell preppers ammo and MRE’s. My wife was like “History doesn’t repeat…it rhymes.” https://youtu.be/d6Q8v7Z7TJs?si=VfrmEZagzsA47yqR
When I was a front end cashier at Sobeys in 1999/2000, I wasn’t allowed to wear nail polish. I had to wear all-white sneakers with no visible brand name, something that is almost impossible to find. I had to wear the same ugly smock over white or nude pantyhose every day. I rebelled by wearing PVC miniskirts, rude tshirts, and kinky underwear under my smock.
I wasn’t allowed to ever sit down on the job, even when I was very unwell. I wasnt given enough time on my lunch break to go to the bathroom and eat my lunch. I wasn’t allowed to drink water while working, and all of the cashiers were frequently sick because whenever anyone entered or exited the store in winter, it was so cold that we could all see our breath. Pneumonia and bronchitis were frequent, and I had to go to emergency at the hospital several times because of asthma attacks triggered by the cold air.
On NYE 1999, on the cusp of what everyone thought would be Armageddon because of the Y2K bug, none of the cashiers were given any breaks during their shift. The excuse was that there were too many customers for us to take a break. The line for the cash registers wrapped three times around the perimeter of the entire store, and it was a huge store. All of the customers were in foul moods and snapping at us. Grocery store rage is as real as road rage.
I had a bad repetitive stress issue with my wrists from keying things into the cash register. I could barely grasp things, but not a single customer ever thought to pick up their own heavy items, like frozen turkeys, bags of dogfood, or flats of canned goods or bottled water. While I wasn’t on the clock, I wore a sling.
I didn’t make enough money at this job to wash my laundry and had to wash my clothes in the shower every day after work. I didn’t make enough money to eat decent food and had to buy whatever wasn’t too rotten in the discount section.
I have never worked so hard and been treated so poorly as I have at any minimum wage job.
It isn’t acceptable to treat people so poorly, but it is legal.
Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it is ethical. Break unethical laws. Do crime. And if you see someone steal food, no, you didn’t.
People who diminish the necessity of the massive effort and expense directed at the #Year2000 problem are no better than doomsday #preppers and #conspiracy theorists spreading pointless #disinformation.
Muito bom o documentário do #y2k. O que hoje pode não parecer grande coisa, na época foi uma ansiedade bastante real, quase como foi a emergência de saúde em 2019.
No fim, da mesma forma como as coisas funcionavam de modo transparente até quase ser tarde demais, a virada do milênio foi funcional e transparente na maior parte dos casos, pois um exército de pessoas trabalhou nos bastidores para ser assim, como sempre foi.
E a burrice que resultou nisso tudo, que foi escrever em pedra os dois primeiros dígitos do ano e mudar só os dois últimos como se o ano 2000 não fosse chegar, foi uma decisão com o bolso e não com o cérebro. Capitalismo sendo capitalismo.
No final o bug do milênio veio morder a bunda dos governos e empresários, que tiveram que investir altas somas de dinheiro para evitar o pior enquanto perdiam as calças.
E influenciou a vida e decisões de inúmeras pessoas e grupos.
Ein Ausdruck der mangelnden #IT#Bildung unserer Tage. 🤦♂️
Hätten aufgrund des Aufschreis im Vorfeld nicht alle Entscheider Ressourcen gewährt, dass hunderttausende Fachkräfte Software Y2k-reif gemacht haben, dann wäre weltweit vermutlich wirklich die Katastrophe passiert.
So haben wir unseren Job gemacht & es wird von journalistischen Nichtrecherchierern verharmlost.
Via @tychotithonus a novel idea: maybe it’s about time we started talking honestly about what had to be done to combat Y2K to diffuse the disinformation about it
Smart idea:
The hardest part about refuting Y2K disinfo is how many problems were fixed quietly, in part to mitigate risk of ligitation (negligence, etc.). People have stories they can’t tell.
At this point, I think enough years have passed that a formal amnesty – to encourage companies to disclose just how bad some of the problems were – would be in our historical best interest.
Happy New Year to everyone except for that guy who decided to start off 2024 by making fun of the averted #Y2K crisis. It's not that I don't want him to have a good year. It's that he's probably not having a good time so far. 😆
This #Y2K “hot take” is so glibly wrong, from someone who is apparently old enough to know better, that I have preemptively blocked them on every social network they list so that they never darken my feeds again. https://infosec.exchange/@robertatcara/111669313416685563
The Y2K bug is a great illustration that a well-handled potential disaster looks like “nothing happened” in retrospect. The fact that Y2K seemed to be a non-event is a testament to how seriously people took this emergency, and how everyone buckled down and averted a worldwide infrastructure disaster.
I started working at Honeywell Aerospace (AlliedSignal back then) in 1998, and by that time people were already working on Y2K issues. We were in the GPS navigation business, and there were real issues that would have caused aircraft navigation to go awry unless they were fixed.
People buckled down, found the bugs, ran simulations, got FAA sign-offs, and deployed the fixes to all affected aircraft well before Y2K. Thanks to the effort, “nothing happened”. But I assure you (bad) things would have happened if we did nothing. https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/111670219441506220
@drahardja I worked for a telco vendor in 1999. We did our #y2k testing. There were things that broke. One of them was that we were locked out of the building. No big deal, we called a locksmith. But imagine if that and a couple of the other things had all happened at once…
I just learned that people are denying the reality of Y2K. My aunt was involved in the programming effort.
I was working corporate retail at the time. One of our buyers loaded up on Y2K memorabilia and Y2K-proof electronics (think crank radios) spending 10s of $10000s on it. It was a flop! Afterwards, our stores had to mark everything down to pennies on the dollar. I picked up eight of these mugs for a dollar. I think we ended up throwing a bunch of other stuff away.
New Year’s Eve: Musings on Y2K
At 3pm PST on 31 December, 1999, I sat down at the computer in my home office in Yakima, Washington. I logged remotely into the network at HQ and started monitoring our systems. The most critical moment would come at 4pm local time. We were in Pacific Standard Time (PST), -0800 UTC. In other words, at 4pm in Yakima, it would be midnight in Greenwich, England, where the time zone aligns with Coordinated Universal Time. (Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated as UTC, not CUT, because there are actually other languages in the world besides English, and… never mind. Look it up if that story interests you).
Anyway.
The GPS satellites run on UTC, and our entire multi-state operation depended on GPS timing. My first hint of system failure because of a Y2K bug would occur at midnight, UTC.
Beginning at 3:55pm I began testing the major system once a minute. At 4:05pm I sent out the notice to corporate management that all was well.
I tested hourly, then, but the next critical moment wasn’t until 9pm PST, which was when midnight occurred on the US East Coast. Our equipment was all in MST and PST, but some of our many telecom providers might have systems with local time coordination in some other US time zone. (They’d all be using GPS now, but – this was 1999, and US telecommunications had plenty of legacy systems with other clocking methods).
In the end, nothing failed. Our entire system worked.
This wasn’t because Y2K was overblown.
It was because we replaced our billing system, which wasn’t able to generate an invoice after the date flip.
It was because we did software updates on several proprietary systems that would have failed.
It was because we did firmware updates, too.
Equipment inventories.
Application inventories.
Operating system inventories.
Software version inventories.
Firmware version inventories.
The reason January 1, 2000 seemed like such an ordinary day is because of the MASSIVE amount of work and money spent to make it ordinary. There are unsung heroes around the world who put in the work to update or replace systems that would’ve failed otherwise.
If you’re one of those people, I would love to hear your story.
@robertatcara As someone who personally discovered and fixed Y2K bugs that would have had significant real world impact, it is disturbing to hear someone propagate this myth [that it was a "big fuss about nothing"]. And it is a myth.
The testing methodology insured that these impacts were not hypothetical. At my company, the testing was performed by actually rolling the clock forward to test systems to see what would happen. For example, I discovered that every ATM in the state of Alaska operated by my company would have locked up until a PROM chip was swapped. Someone had to fly all over the state to proactively swap the chip beforehand, to avoid significant customer impact.
And that was just one story. I personally oversaw investigation and fixes for other hardware and software at that company that would have failed.
And that was just my company. I spoke with others in IT at that time with similar stories. And that was just the people I knew.
So no, it wasn't "a big fuss about nothing" - and saying so is both dangerously revisionist, and disrespectful of the work it took to prevent real impacts.
rn I'm doing a lot of research on early internet fandom for my bachelor thesis and since I was born after the turn of the millennium it's making me wonder how it must have been to be a fan on the internet when Usenet and ICQ/IRC/AIM and GeoCities were still a thing. It really feels like having some kind of lost nostalgia, I've only lived to see early facebook, msn and flipnote as my early internet interactions.
If you were a fan on the internet in the late 90's / early 00's, or know someone that was, please hit me up!! I'd love to have a chat about it!!
(please boost for coverage)
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Après plusieurs gentilles demandes, revoilà la liste de noël 2024 pour ceux qui la connaissent, maintenant et for ever sur mastodon.🎄 ❄️
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It's that time of year again when I share the links I've saved for gift ideas.
Nothing is sponsored, just a way to share gift ideas.🎄
(Sorry #admin for the incoming image flood; I will delete this thread in January) 🎄❄️
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💛 #6 - Thames & Hudson - A to Z of The Designers Republic
Finally a book available about the work of the English designer Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic.
Wrap Records, Aphex Twin, Wipeout, contribution to IDEA, Emigre... 1400 illustrations on 500 pages to showcase the work of one of the father of what we call now Y2K aesthetic.
Just learned about #DecRecs! To make up for yesterday, Day 1 of Dec Recs I'll recommend this Chinese short animated series "All Saints Street" with four seasons. An angel, vampire, mummy, zombie, and werewolf live together. What could go wrong? Really enjoy it for the combination of great art, slice of life, and the supernatural. There's also a comic. It's produced similar to "Hey your cat ears are showing" but more memes and skulls than wholesome uwu. https://anilist.co/anime/114555#anime
For Day 4 of #DecRecs I'm going to cheat a little by recommending 3 short audio docs (podcast format) folx interested in learning more about an underrated topic.
🔥"Chester is Rising" (5 eps): the 30+ year grassroots Environmental Justice movement in the city home to the USA's largest incinerator among other major polluters. https://rss.com/podcasts/chesterisrising/
✊"March On: The Fight for Pride" (5 eps): the complicated history behind Philadelphia's pride march, including internalized racism and transphobia, and the work to heal and create something new https://whyy.org/programs/march-on/
🪲"Headlong: Surviving Y2K" (6 eps): despite the 2000's millennium bug being an afterthought for many, we explore the stories of those who were impacted by it personally, even years later https://topicstudios.com/podcasts/headlong-surviving-y2k/ #podcasts#nonfiction#storytelling#environmentalJustice#lgbt#philadelphia#philly#y2k