http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/GaryMurphy/GaryMurphy3.html

Authored by: Gary Lawrence Murphy

WHAT HAPPENS ON Y2K? The big ball falls in Times Square, the corks pop, the confetti rains down ... so what happens next? Ok, this is a simple enough question with a complex enough answer to fill all the world's pubs for an entire month of conversation, but what goes boom and what does not is not what I mean. What I mean is, as trouble occurs, what happens next?

Last weekend, as I imagine many others did, I watched that very cute and entertaining "Y2K: The Movie". It opened with impossible scenarios and followed by heaping on more, but after the show, I was left with one burning question with no answer. The show portrays "our hero" as sitting in a central command room to track incidents of Y2K problems as the midnight mark sweeps from the Marshall Islands around the globe --- with less than 40 days and 40 nights to go in our countdown, I thought, "if such a clearing house of reports _does_ exist, it is high time someone announced the address!"

In Y2K-school, we are taught to catalog all our systems, listing all applications, which run on a particular box, to draw relation charts of all people, or systems that depend on each cataloged system. The theory is that, as Midnight sweeps by, if a system fails, it will be easier to alert all 'downstream' stakeholders if we have a map. This seems a very good idea in principle; in practice, it probably proved way beyond the budgets of most organizations to implement.

Back to the movie. Since there are likely very few stakeholder diagrams in the real world, the need for central registries of Y2K reports is a Darn Good Idea: When systems fail, the cause may be Y2K, or due to other accidents and rather than investigate all possible variables by hand, people will be keen to check for prior reports (assuming our dear Internet and/or the telephone system is working ;)

Right now, so far as I know, no one has announced any 'checklist' of what to do when systems fail. Companies may have policies and protocols (I do so hope) but what about extra-corporate systems failures? Pundits tell us to take extra money out of the bank, stockpile canned food and insulin, but no one says what you should do if you notice the software you share with others, open source or proprietary, is acting quirky. Who do we call?

They may turn to each manufacturer's website, but they may also suspect that information since, by definition, the vendor did not warn them accurately before Jan 1. Besides, a "current corporate website" is almost a contradiction in terms.

When we need unbiased (or omni-biased) information, we will turn to the Internet. This is traditionally our lifeline to others in the same predicament. I predict an explosion in USENET traffic as each independent newsgroup will try to cope with Y2K fires, and an explosion in Deja.Com for those few who know about the service and how to use it, but both methods still fail to cross niche interest boundaries. Should I report a failure in a MIDI system to a computer music newsgroup? Isn't it a much more general-interest story?

Do we call CERT? Even if CERT considered only large-scale failures to be within their domain, could they handle the traffic? Which failures should they report? Only those which affect system security? Who at CERT is going to sift through and decide which is which?

Tracking and relaying Y2K failure reports will be a global problem and while it may see a sudden surge Saturday morning, this will be a long-term problem: Subtle failures will go undetected, incoming reports and queries will smear out over perhaps many months or even years (due to 'windowing' techniques)

Is it just me, or do I smell opportunities in this?

One central clearing house may not be practical to construct or to manage. In practice, we may see a plethora of special, vertical-market and special-interest Y2K failure report portals sprout up everywhere, each driven by ad-revenue and other traffic-based models, each vying for market share of some domain, then amassing other domains of Y2K report information to own more and more of the report/query traffic. I also see many which spread dis-information ... hey, we see it now and we've still than a month to go! Whoever steps up to this challenge will need to work twice as hard as any e-commerce site to ensure credibility.

So, just when you thought it was safe to rest on your Y2K patches and get on with your life, with the clock still ticking, I'm sorry but I have to ask:

When the time comes, what do we do? Who do we call? Anyone?

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@Tminus36&counting.down), November 25, 1999

Answers

I will say again the real monitoring of y2k around the world will be going on at the NAS. They have the equipment, the resources and all the intellegence feeds go to them already. The one-room school house bunker is for the TV audience. Nothing important will happen here, all the real information and real decisions will behind closed doors by TPTB. Heck wave (I'm waving, me friend) monitoring the internet with scan programs (reported) that draw in key words and tricky phrases.

Of course you and I aren't privy to their phone number's but the information that controls our reactive government starts in that building that didn't exist for many years.

-- squid (Itsdark@down.here), November 25, 1999.

The power won't go out on January 1st.

That doesn't come until a few weeks later. :)

-- Germanus

-- Germanus (germanus@fakeemail.net), November 25, 1999.

As if.

Sincerely,
Stan Faryna

Ready for Y2K? Got 14 days of water, food, way to keep warm and cook?
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Gas masks, potassium iodide, solar ovens, etc
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-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), November 25, 1999.

200,000 viruses(viri?) according to the FBI. How many companies will isolate their systems? How many PCs will crash or become corrupted and non-functional?

How easy will it be to correct problems if there is enough fear to limit the use of interconnecting computers?

This virus problem could explode exponentially with resulting major delays in system fixes.

Can internet be brought down or severely crippled?

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), November 25, 1999.

Very little will happen on the rollover, if that's what "y2k" means to you. But lots of stuff may unravel during the year 2000. Pollies will watch the rollover and crow over whatever happens, claiming that doomers said it would be worse. Don't waste your time with that, just stay alert and watch the economy for the next year.

Food is the key. If you have that, and/or a way to grow it, and not lose it to others, you'll be ok.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), November 26, 1999.