Friday, Sep 5, 2008
What if I choose to spend the New Year's holiday engaging in my favorite pastime? Hacking, that is.
John Koskinen, chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, asks that you kindly refrain. "Hopefully [hackers] will recognize we're going to have enough things going on that weekend, that this will not be a particularly good weekend to demonstrate the need for more information security," he told a group of reporters earlier this month. Instead, Koskinen suggested that hackers seeking to make a point about the need for increased security should make it the following weekend, when the Y2K frenzy will presumably have waned.
Koskinen also beseeched anyone planning to hack into Hotmail's servers to please retrieve his password, which he had written down on a scrap of paper that has apparently disappeared from his wallet.
Who will be keeping an eye on the world's important systems on New Year's Eve?
Well, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, Hewlett-Packard president Carly Fiorina and Microsoft president Steve Ballmer are among the execs who will be manning their desks. They'll be joined by thousands of programmers 'round the world -- the real heroes of this whole global Y2K effort. If not for their selfless toil, et cetera. Raise a toast to them. Then polish off the last cocktail knish.
Will Y2K have any negative effect on the stock market?
The Asian financial crisis, the impeachment of a president, the shambles in the former Soviet Union, the resignation of Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the radio dominance of the Backstreet Boys and repeated dour comments by Alan Greenspan haven't managed to put the reins on this bull market. I'm guessing two missing digits won't do it, either.
What if my plans for welcoming in the new millennium involve love in an elevator?
You may be out of luck, Sparky. Many high-rise buildings will take elevators out of service during the transition. In New York, one building management company reports that at about 11:50 p.m. on New Year's Eve, its elevators will all descend to the ground floors and remain there for 20 or 30 minutes with their doors open. "We're not trying to be alarmist," the company's president told the New York Post, "but we don't want anyone ringing in the New Year stuck in an elevator." Stuck?
What about Y2K problems in countries outside the U.S.?
Many nations were late to start identifying and eliminating Y2K bugs. In a statement released in July, the State Department cautioned, "All U.S. citizens planning to be abroad in late 1999 or early 2000 should take the potential for temporary disruptions related to Y2K into account when making their travel plans."
As an example, half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa have done little or nothing to get ready for the new millennium, according to the International Y2K Cooperation Center, an agency of the World Bank. The other half, reassuringly, have already gone straight to their local Kia dealer for great deals on the 2000 Sportage and Sephia.
How can I differentiate everyday glitches from serious Y2K problems?
"If we watched the world tomorrow as closely as we will watch Jan. 1, we'd see a whole set of things not working," Koskinen told the New York Times. To illustrate that, his Council on Year 2000 Conversion collected some data on typical, everyday failure rates of common systems. Between 1 and 2 percent of the nation's 227,000 automatic tellers are inoperable or out of cash at any given moment, for example. And just about every week, somewhere in the U.S., public connections to a local 911 center fail.
So, here are some clues to help you distinguish Y2K-induced traumas from the ordinary variety: Pieces of airplane fuselage plummeting into your living room may be an indicator of a Y2K problem. Being unable to find the remote during a crucial bowl game is, in most cases, not an indicator of a Y2K problem.
What about Feb. 29, 2000?
Even after the Y2K crisis recedes from memory like a bad pickup attempt at the punchbowl, we may be in for one more inconvenience. Conventional wisdom says that years that end in double-zero are never leap years. But in fact, there are two every millennium, and next year is one of them. As a result, some computer programs may ignore the fact that Feb. 29 exists in 2000. My advice: You should, too.
Sleep through it.
Get Salon in your mailbox!