This may have been a subject line already. What will happen to this forum on the 31st or 1st of January ? Will this site be temporarily closed for safe measure ?

Also, I am curious Diane, as to whether there has been any malicious attempts to hack the site to this point ? It wouldn't suprise me in the least. If so, the sysops are doing a fantastic job of rebuffing them.

I am just curious because I would like to use this site for up to the minute news as we approach "ground zero". So far, with only a few "figs" posting here, it has been a great source of info. Would like to hear of the sites plans.

-- George (curious@george.com), December 15, 1999

Answers

I suspect that the hard-core forum visitors (lurkers and posters alike) will be here as long as there is something interesting to talk about. This presumes, of course, that MIT escapes serious problems and that our server is up and running.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), December 16, 1999.

I really hope this forum stays functional. IMHO, it is a vital source of information for concerned folks and a way to share updates on what is happening after the rollover. There are many good people here who will have a definite "need to know" come 1/1/2000. It is vital that there be some place we can make contact and share info. TB2000 is it!

I must (sadly) admit to a pair of caveats...this is contingent upon 1) the electricity staying on and, 2) the Feds allowing the Internet to remain up and running. The various Emergency E.O.'s allow the gov to shut down or otherwise control all methods of communication.

We'll see!

-- Irving (irvingf@myremarq.com), December 15, 1999.

I will myself unplug at about noon in the 31st and just see what's what thereafter--e.g., will the net be down, will there be lots of dangerous surges, etc.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 15, 1999.

I plan on being plugged in, tuned in, on-line, and watching from 6am pst the 31st until something or nothing happens. Have built-in safeguards and back-up systems, all personally verified Y2K "compliant", to help with the roll-over watch. Oh, will escape to watch football and have a few barley pops as required. If TB2K is alive and well I'll be here.

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), December 15, 1999.

I plan to continue to be in and out of this site for as long as it stays up...sharing information will be critical to avoiding undue panic (and panicing where warranted) come rollover. I'll try to monitor a number of sites off and on through the rollover period...and as long as we have power/phone/internet.

I've got lots of coffee (we grow it here!), so can last for a day or two.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), December 15, 1999.

In addition to several other professional duties, I am participating in a Y2K rollover watch group. Will post copies of the validated and verified results from that group's observations here as often as I am able.

Preliminary roll call for that group has been scheduled for noon EST on the 31st unless situations warrant a change.

Will keep all here posted as information develops.

Dr. Michael ThunderLight

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge. of no-where), December 16, 1999.

I suspect that the hard-core forum visitors (lurkers and posters alike) will be here as long as there is something interesting to talk about. I wonder if that means Ed will be here? :-)

-- (RUOK@yesiam.com), December 16, 1999.

Probably like the 7-11's...Burnt Toast. Hope not but expecting it to fail along with the whole world. If by chance it is up, I hope we all can share our ideas and experiences of what it is like in our part of the country to be living in the 1800's. Hope everyone will be able to share something about our new life...making butter, tanning hides, building a smoke house (if there is any meat left in the woods), farming, and a million other things. We will need each other then more than now (because for now we still have Winn Dixie, Publix, Walmart and Sams...and moms cooking...boy Ill miss that).

-- Rod (rspain@webcombo.net), December 16, 1999.

[Y2k Pro, find a new place to troll. You have been banned from this forum. Sysop]

-- Secret Agent [aka Y2k Pro] (secret@agent.man), December 16, 1999.

George,

We'll have a Global Watch going on here (and as Ed says, for as long as MIT is "up"). Working on how that will work this weekend.

We'll also provide a list of alternate places to go IF MIT goes down.

Diane

Keep this interesting snippet in mind... Koskinen speaks...

http://www.usia.gov/cgi-bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/ latest&f=99121502.glt&t=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml

[snip]

MR. LIPMAN: Which is the more significant date, midnight on December 31st or Monday morning, January 3rd? And tell us about 7 o'clock Friday, December 31st.

MR. KOSKINEN: Well, actually a lot thought 7 o'clock Friday was the time. It turns out it's 6 o'clock Friday morning, because New Zealand is on summer time. We are all discovering if we didn't really pay a lot of attention before that obviously the world turns and there are 24 time zones. And so we are going to watch the world turn, starting at 6 o'clock on Friday morning, December 31st, when New Zealand goes into the year 2000. Two hours later Australia will go. By noon you will have covered a lot of Asian countries and Japan. And then we'll watch Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the British all go into the year 2000 before we do.

So if you want to figure out what should you watch, you might as well join everybody else who is watching what goes on in the world. And in fact we view the rollover management as kind of three cycles. The first will be international, where everybody is looking at what happens on Friday, our Friday, as other countries go into the year 2000.

The next cycle will be starting at midnight Eastern Standard Time on New Year's night, and that is what happens in the U.S. as we move through four time zones here. And then if you move into Hawaii you obviously move a couple of more. And we'll monitor that, and people will be very anxious to see how all the testing that is going on on Saturday with all of these -- literally hundreds of thousands of Americans working that weekend in banks, insurance companies, state government agencies, federal agencies, all testing their systems. And we'll move through that second cycle.

Then the third cycle will be how do the systems work when they are actually up and running in normal circumstances when the world goes back to work. So the third cycle will start again at 4 or 5 o'clock Sunday afternoon when New Zealand and others start to open for business. And clearly a major issue will be how does the U.S. economy do on Monday, January 3rd, as all the normal systems are up and operating. And it's one thing to test systems before the year 2000; it's another to test them on Saturday to see if they are running. But the real test will be on Monday when thousands and hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions and events take place as they normally do in the economy.

As I noted, we think that some things will happen over time. And in fact the experts tell us it's unlikely that anybody's lights are going to go off immediately anyway -- or telephone -- that what's going to happen in developing countries, if they have difficulties, is they are going to lose the ability to monitor and manage their system. And so power and telecommunications challenges in those countries will occur and appear as a result of slow degradation of services that may take two or three days to appear. So we will monitor that through the middle of the week, although I continue to believe that by the end of the first week in January we will have a very good picture of what's going on in the world. That doesn't mean we will have solved it all, but we will at least have a pretty good idea of what the challenges are that are going to need to be faced. But again you should remember, as I noted, billing cycles and a lot of other issues will go on for the first time in the rest of January and through the first quarter of the year as people run their systems through the normal processes.

But from the standpoint of an aggregation of issues that will be a national event or a newsworthy event, I think we will have a pretty good idea about that by the end of the first week of January.

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 16, 1999.

Oh and to answer your question... "been any malicious attempts to hack the site to this point?"

Yes... major and repeated spamming and DOS "denial of service" attacks, along with intentional HTML disruptions.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 16, 1999.

ABSOLUELY NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN. THOUGH I MAY STILL TAN SOME HIDES AND CHURN SOME BUTTER.

-- BS (BS@BS.COM), December 16, 1999.