Experts say wide-scale effects of y2k unlikely on Internet

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8/16/99 -- 6:10 PM

Experts say wide-scale effects of Y2K unlikely on Internet

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Some Web sites may be unavailable and some consumers might be unable to send e-mail because of the Year 2000 technology problem, but the global network itself will largely be unaffected, some of the Internet's top experts predict.

The architecture of the Internet - a collection of interconnected but independent computer networks - means its data traffic will be able to bypass any few local Y2K failures, such as those caused by power outages.

``We're not likely to see major global outages at all,'' said Vint Cerf, an executive at MCI WorldCom Inc. who co-invented the common ``TCP/IP'' language of the Internet.

But the decentralized nature of the Internet also makes it nearly impossible to predict exactly how the January date rollover will affect it. The Web and its kin technologies rely on computers and software owned by people and companies worldwide mostly without any supervision.

``The Internet is about a million autonomous networks and about 50 million autonomous computers,'' said Tony Rutkowski, an early Internet pioneer. ``... The question becomes which of those many millions of networks and computers will have problems.''

The White House planned to meet Tuesday with experts from the Internet community - including a trade group for Internet providers - to discuss the impact of Y2K on consumers using the Net.

``The core structures of the Internet are expected to be in good shape,'' said Jack Gribben, a spokesman for the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, which organized the meeting. But he cautioned: ``The Internet is a vast enterprise with a large number of service providers and interconnected networks.''

Cerf, MCI's senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology, predicted ``a series of little annoying problems that will bug us for most of January.''

Part of the problem has been gathering information about the Internet's preparations: Unlike some industries, there is no single organization in charge and little regulatory oversight by governments.

Don Heath, president of the Virginia-based Internet Society, predicted that the chance the Internet will have serious problems ``is nuts.''

``It's just not going to happen,'' said Heath, who planned to participate in Tuesday's meeting. ``The whole Y2K thing is an absolute yawn. I am so unconcerned about it that it's hard to build a fire under me at all.''

But some of the Internet's biggest companies are issuing dire-sounding warnings to shareholders. Network Solutions Inc., which controls two of the 13 central computers that coordinate the world's Web addresses, cautioned against ``a failure of or interruption to normal business'' if it doesn't prepare adequately.

The other 11 computers, called ``root servers,'' are largely run by volunteers at universities and other organizations worldwide.

``We have no responsibility for, nor control over, other Internet domain name server operators that are critical to the efficient operation of the Internet,'' the company said in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ``We do not know whether such domain name server operators have hardware, software or firmware that is Year 2000 compliant.''

Cert predicted those root servers will be fine: ``The people who run those root servers have been very responsible in regards to upgrades to the software,'' he said.

America Online, the world's largest Internet provider with more than 17 million customers, also warned in a recent SEC filing that Y2K problems ``could result in interruptions in the work of its employees, the inability of members and customers to access the company's online services and Web sites or errors and defects in the Netscape products.''

AOL said it already spent $7 million on repair efforts through March and expects to spend a total of $20 million.

========================================= End

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), August 16, 1999

Answers

``We're not likely to see major global outages at all,'' said Vint Cerf, an executive at MCI WorldCom Inc. who co-invented the common ``TCP/IP'' language of the Internet.

I feel much better now.

Mike

==================================================================

-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), August 16, 1999.


ROTF(with my pager OUT)LMFAO Go MCI !

-- FLAME AWAY (BLehman202@aol.com), August 16, 1999.

I guess they didn't see this: (Yes, I realize this has nothing to do with TCP/IP. The writer sent me this last Friday.)

Y2K infests Web pages

"The Web may be a new medium, but it's riddled with non-compliant code, both in-use online and for incorporation into new programs.

By Jocelyn Amon

On June 24, 1999, with barely six months to go to 2000, I spent six hours searching Internet Web pages for Y2K errors and was easily able to find over 300 (editor's note: One of the examples given is drawn from a site owned by EarthWeb, the publisher of Y2K Info, so nobody is immune). The majority of these errors occurred in code published on the Web for programmers to copy and incorporate into their programs, others were given as examples of how to program. Many were included in programming language tutorials. Others were detected in the Web page HTML code and were viewable only by viewing the source.

The incentive to do this exercise came a few days earlier when an article was published in the Christchurch Press (New Zealand) newspaper stating that the Y2K issue was all over and that the scaremongers, with a reference to myself, had been silenced..."

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), August 16, 1999.


Yeah, I can remember writing lots of programs in the "TCP/IP language". Compilers were a little hard to find, though...

Vinton Cerf is obviously an extremely bright guy. Sure hope he didn't have anything to do with the recent screw-up on the MCI/Lucent network upgrade...

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), August 16, 1999.


Hey I got some swamp land in Florida - real cheap

-- R (riversoma@aol.com), August 16, 1999.


I went over 30 years without the Internet. I will undoubtedly have to do without it again, but hopefully not quite that long. Five years of no Internet to access wouldn't surprise me, though.

www.y2ksafeminnesota.com

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), August 16, 1999.


Actually, if you look at RFC 822, the original specification for Email, it uses 2-digit years:
 5.  DATE AND TIME SPECIFICATION
      5.1.  SYNTAX
      date-time   =  [ day "," ] date time        ; dd mm yy
                                                  ; hh:mm:ss zzz

The original HTTP 1.0 document, RFC 1945 references 822:

HTTP/1.0 applications have historically allowed three different formats for the representation of date/time stamps:

  • Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT ; RFC 822, updated by RFC 1123
  • Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT ; RFC 850, obsoleted by RFC 1036
  • Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 ; ANSI C's asctime() format

    The first format is preferred as an Internet standard and represents a fixed-length subset of that defined by RFC 1123 [6] (an update to RFC 822 [7]). The second format is in common use, but is based on the obsolete RFC 850 [10] date format and lacks a four-digit year. HTTP/1.0 clients and servers that parse the date value should accept all three formats, though they must never generate the third (asctime) format.

    You would have to spot-check the various servers and browsers on the net to make sure they are not using a 2-digit year, since it is allowed. Not sure what they will do next year. Probably, there would be caching problems. However, there's always the possibility that a piece of code will try to read 1900, which cannot be represented by a time_t (since its pre-1970). That just might crash a piece of code.

    -- Michael Goodfellow (mgoodfel@best.com), August 16, 1999.


  • The original internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Only time will tell if today's internet survives Y2K.

    Tick... Tock... <:00=

    -- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), August 16, 1999.


    It's been some time since I was up on the technical side of the web, but my primary questions about the survivability of the web as we know it would concern the domain name addressing system (software and hardware). Anyone know the Y2K story on these systems?

    Sincerely, Stan Faryna

    -- Stan Faryna (info@giglobal.com), August 16, 1999.


    "Some web sites may be unavailable and some consumers might be unable to send e-mail..."

    Personally, I'm not counting on having the web up for the first couple of months into the new year...if then. It does rely on services from telecommunications carriers (including local phone service for many of us). If it is up, Yeah! If not, I plan on alternate communications methods...ham radio, postcards, letters, etc. Snail mail may be slow, but it should eventually get there.

    -- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), August 16, 1999.


    Waaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

    -- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), August 17, 1999.

    From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr near Monterey, California

    Mad Monk says:http://www.y2kinfo.com/journal/features/0599_amon.html

    ... pony express ...

    -- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage.neener.autospammers--regrets.greenspun), August 17, 1999.


    From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr near Monterey, California oops... I mean:

    Mad Monk says:If not, I plan on alternate communications methods...ham radio, postcards, letters, etc.

    ... pony express ...

    -- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage.neener.autospammers--regrets.greenspun), August 17, 1999.


    More experts:

    [Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

    http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/TUE/FPAGE/netbug.2.html

    Paris, Tuesday, August 17, 1999

    The Internet May Be the Biggest Question Mark of Them All

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

    By Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

    As companies and governments rush to make sure their computers will not suffer meltdowns when the year 2000 arrives, experts say there is a large unanswered question in the battle against the so-called millennium bug: the effects on the world's largest and most complex computer network, the Internet.

    Partly because the global network is so diffuse - no one is in charge of it - Internet specialists say it is practically impossible to know or to test whether certain parts of the system will crash, whether electronic mail that crosses the globe will be lost or suffer long delays or whether users will be able to reach World Wide Web sites that offer on-line trading and shopping in the first days of the New Year.

    One thing is clear: Many of the basic elements of the Internet - components that go by names such as routers and switches - have been identified as ''noncompliant '' and thus could malfunction if they are not fixed or replaced before the new year arrives.

    Cisco Systems Inc., the world's leading Internet component supplier, lists 25 products on its Web site www.cisco.com that are not compliant and a further 31 that the company does not plan on testing because it regards them as too old to be serviced. Some of these products were sold as recently as three years ago. Many are still in use.

    Experts who met in Washington last month to discuss the problem say the network's key ''backbone'' components have been tested and will function but that large parts of the Internet are beyond the purview of U.S. regulators.

    The state of preparedness in the United States is crucial for Internet users around the globe because an overwhelming majority of Internet traffic passes through the United States. Even e-mail sent from two neighboring countries in Asia, for instance, is often routed through the United States.

    But the bottom line for Internet users outside the United States is that even if the U.S. portion of the network is running, if the machinery that links them to the network - their local ''service provider'' - goes down, they lose their access.

    White House officials, who were the hosts of the Internet conference last month, are scheduled to announce their findings and recommendations Tuesday. Those who attended the meetings in Washington say the most vulnerable points of the global network are:

    -

    The large ''servers'' managed by each country that assign Internet addresses such as ''my'' for Malaysia and ''it'' for Italy. There are 252 such servers in the world, including ones that manage addresses that end in ''edu'' or ''com.''

    Bill Manning, a researcher at the University of Southern California who was charged at the White House conference with tracking the readiness of these servers, said ''a good chunk'' of them were Y2K compliant but ''a good chunk of them are not.'' He declined to be more specific.

    -

    International telephone links. A recent survey by the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council, a group made up of top executives from U.S. telephone companies, found that 62 percent of countries with large volumes of telephone traffic were perceived as ''high risk'' in terms of Y2K problems. Only 18 percent were considered low risk. These are just perceptions of people in the industry - and thus not based on hard data. Nonetheless, any failure between international phone links could impair Internet service as well as the reliability of an old-fashioned telephone call.

    -

    Accounting software used by Internet service providers to monitor the usage of their customers. Noncompliant software might not affect access to the Internet but could foul up billing.

    -

    Software used to distribute passwords. Accounts could automatically expire if the computer reads the date incorrectly.

    -

    The threat of ''millennium'' computer viruses spread through the network.

    -

    Strain on the system posed by increased usage: New Year's greetings sent by e-mail and multimedia events related to the New Year on the World Wide Web could clog the network.

    Vinton Cerf, senior vice president at MCI WorldCom Inc., who is known as the father of the Internet for his pioneering work on the network, said he did not anticipate ''major problems'' in the United States related to the millennium bug but that outside North America ''the risk seems higher.'' There is ''anecdotal evidence,'' he said, that some countries ''have been somewhat less attentive and concerned about Y2K preparedness.''

    Y2K is a commonly used abbreviation for the Year 2000 bug. The glitch arises when computers fail to process dates beyond Dec. 31, 1999, because of the way they were programmed.

    Experts say Internet-related Y2K issues have until now been overshadowed by more pressing concerns such as potential blackouts and failures of computers aboard aircraft.

    ''If the power grid goes out, you're going to be worried about other things than, 'Can I get my Internet connection?''' Mr. Manning said. ''People generally don't depend on the Internet for life-and-death situations. It'll be like the television going out for a while.''

    Although not life-threatening, any large-scale failure of the Internet could affect the lives of millions of people, especially those doing business on the Net and those living away from their home countries.

    In the event of Y2K-related failures, people who use the network to communicate with families or colleagues might not be able to do so for several days.

    The same applies to overseas company offices that use the Internet to send messages and data to their headquarters.

    Experts say the degree of risk for an Internet user depends in large part on the individual's Internet ''service provider,'' the company that offers access to the network, known as an ISP.

    The worry is that some smaller service providers - especially those in developing countries - might not have the financial resources or technical knowledge to properly check their systems for millennium bugs.

    ''To my own knowledge and expectations, the packets will make it,'' said Geoff Huston, the technical manager at Australia's Telstra Internet service, referring to the bundles of data that circulate around the world delivering things such as e-mail. ''But whether the machine on the other end is doing the right thing is something I can't answer with as much surety.''

    The worst-case scenario for Internet users around the world? ''We just don't know,'' said Izumi Aizu, head of Asia Network Research in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who represented Asia at the Washington meeting. ''There are too many elements that make up the Internet.''

    ''What will the impact be? I have no idea in the world,'' said Dave Farber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world's leading experts on the Internet. ''There are going to be some really strange events. There will be some places that will be cut off. They may disconnect certain countries until those countries get their act together. How long that will last I don't know. I don't think anyone does.''

    Internet users may get a foretaste of Y2K confusion on Aug. 24, when, for reasons not directly related to the millennium bug, the clocks in some satellites that carry Internet traffic will reset themselves to zero. That could affect the way computers linked to the Internet register such things as financial transactions.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------



    -- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), August 17, 1999.


    Although not life-threatening, any large-scale failure of the Internet could affect the lives of millions of people, especially those doing business on the Net and those living away from their home countries.

    Also those employed by Amazon.com, Ebay, and [your favorite utterly Net-dependent company here]

    One has to admire their use of the word "affect". Such a nice, neutral term. Looking at the initial cost estimates of the way companies were "affected" by that lil' ol' 10-day MCI network failure, one might conclude that something with a bit more weight would be more accurate, such as "impact" or at least "adversely affect".

    No bad news... no bad news...

    -- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), August 17, 1999.



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