December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Currency Site Member Update
by updates＠olsen.ch 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear OANDA member, Updates in this edition: - Enhancement of Historical and Daily Table - Improved Personalization of the converters - Multilanguage Support for Historical and Interactive Table - OANDA co-brands Express by Infoseek *********************************************************** * This is our second edition of the Member Update. In * * the past we have received many suggestions for new * * products and services. We hope this newsletter helps * * keep you updated on the developments and new releases. * * If you do not wish to learn about additional services * * and news, please click on the following link * * mailto:updates@oanda.com?subject=nofurthernews and send * * the message without adding any text. Our goal is to * * fullfil your wishes and deliver the services you need. * *********************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------- Fast Enhanced Historical Currency Table - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_table Fast Enhanced Interactive Daily Table - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_quotes Due to the quickly increasing access to our two new products, we have adopted the fast cgi approach for both products. Furthermore the choice of output as HTML, ASCII and CSV facilitates the importing of data into spreadsheet solutions. If you do calculations with multiple currencies, you can now easily get the necessary rates into your spreadsheet. --------------------------------------------------------- Improved Personalization of converter services Description of manual editing for all converters: - http://www.oanda.com/site/personalize.shtml Interactive Interface: - http://www.oanda.com/converter/classic?do=pref Taken into consideration all the suggestions we have received, we now offer many personalization possibilities for all our converters including the customized versions. You can now select a personal list of currencies or, if you prefer, you keep the whole list, but your most needed currencies always appear on top of the menu. Therefore you can generate converters personalized to your needs of currency information. --------------------------------------------------------- Multilanguage support for the Historical Currency Table and the Interactive Daily Table: German - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_table?lang=de - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_quotes?lang=de French: - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_table?lang=fr - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_quotes?lang=fr Italian: - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_table?lang=it - http://www.oanda.com/converter/cc_quotes?lang=it To serve the needs of our international customers better, we are constantly expanding our language choices. We have just recently extended the support of French, Italian and German to our new products - the Historical Currency Table and the Interactive Daily Table. --------------------------------------------------------- OANDA co-brands Express by Infoseek http://express.infoseek.com/dve/download_express.phtml?dve_id=143 Announced on September 22,Express by Infoseek is a next-generation desktop search product which brings multiple search and information sources together in one place. With Express you can find, explore, and do anything on the Internet faster and easier. OANDA is among the first round co-distributors of this new product, along with USA Today, DejaNews, PC World, and others. To download the free co-branded Express by Infoseek, just click on the link above, or click on the Express logo at the top left of the OANDA home page. --------------------------------------------------------- OANDA Statistics Spotlight: Over 3000 sites are now using a customized version of our Classic Currency Converter or Cheat Sheet for Travelers. ---------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for using the OANDA services. Best regards, The OANDA team updates(a)oanda.com http://www.oanda.com

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Test - Ignore
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ping

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TODAY'S NEWS AND PICS PACKED STUFFED! - READ IT NOW!
by STUFFED NEWS DAILY 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

+ 30 FREE HOT JPEG PHOTOS + 5 SUPER SEXY STORIES + HOT AND SPICY FISH TACOS + SCENTUAL SCROTUMS + PORNO AIDE JOB AT HUSTLER FOR STARR + THE BEST OF EUREKA + PERVY GETS SKIRTY + 3-D PORN - SEEING IS BELIEVING + IT MIGHT BE A BOY + TINKERBELL PRIEST + COMMANDER IN QUEEF ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/26/ <---- Welcome to today's issue of Stuffed. To read it you should click on the URL above. If it is not made clickable by your email program you will need to use your mouse to highlight the URL, copy it and then paste it into your browser (then press Return). This email is never sent unsolicited. Stuffed is the supplement for the Eureka newsletter you subscribed to. Full instructions on unsubscribing are in every issue of Eureka! ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/26/ <----

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EuroParl Hits ECHELON
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Duncan Campbell has provided the September 14 European Parliament multi-lingual discussion on ECHELON and the related minutes: http://jya.com/ep091498-1.htm (minutes in English; 11K) http://jya.com/ep091498-2.htm (discussion in several languages, not English; 82K) English translations of the latter are welcomed by Duncan and JYA. EP official translations may be some time acoming. Duncan Campbell <duncan(a)gn.apc.org>

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Virus for UNIX
by Han Solo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello!!! Somebody can tell me about a site where I can find virus for UNIX systems. I need them please!!!!!!!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

4 3

Test [No Reply]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Test [No Reply] ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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test - ignore
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ping

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faggots
by CSapronett＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My only regret is that I wont get to watch you all burn in hell !!!

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The Year 2000 Problem: The Good News and the Bad
by nnburk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From THE FUTURIST (May 1998) The Year 2000 Problem: The Good News and the Bad The Year 2000 computer glitch has proved surprisingly troublesome. Opportunities as well as dangers lie ahead. By Cynthia G. Wagner Four years ago, an author named Peter de Jager submitted to THE FUTURIST a reprint of an article he had published in a computer magazine. Entitled "Doomsday," the article warned of what will happen to the world's computers when 2000 rolls around. We editors rejected the article because it had already been published in another magazine and because it had already found its proper audience_computer programmers. We also felt that the "Year 2000 Problem" was a minor technical glitch that would probably be fixed long before the year 2000. We were wrong: The Year 2000 Problem (or Y2K) was more serious than we thought. Very soon, what seemed like a minor technical problem to us_and to most other people at the time_had set off a furor and even created a new industry for consultants and programmers. Peter de Jager went on to co-write (with Richard Bergeon) a very useful book called Managing 00: Surviving the Year 2000 Computing Crisis [see box on page 19]. And as the year 2000 approaches, this book has been joined by multitudes of books, articles, reports, and Web sites addressing the problem. For our part, the editors of THE FUTURIST are doing penance by presenting this overview of the problem and its possible consequences. We also will summarize some ideas on how to prepare to cope with it. The Problem and What It Will Cost to Fix In the early days of computer programming, dates were entered as a six-digit configuration: two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and two digits for the year, or MMDDYY. Now, every date-relevant program in every computer needs to be Y2K compliant_that is, able to recognize eight-digit dates with four-digit years as opposed to two. Otherwise, the computer will not understand that life goes forward after the year "99" rather than magically skipping back in time to "00." Experts say that it's not exactly clear what problems non-compliant computers will create over the next few years. They may make lots of mistakes, such as paroling prisoners years early or sending Gen X'ers pension checks many decades too soon. Humans may catch many of the computers' mistakes, but most humans are too busy. That's why we have computers keeping track of things and telling us what to do, like taking expired foods and medicines off the shelf. Most sources say it is costing businesses between 50 and $2 a line to fix the codes. It may not sound like much, but all told, it will add up to many billions of dollars. Chase Manhattan Bank estimates that it will spend $200 million to $250 million to fix its Y2K problems, and commercial banking as an industry may spend $9 billion or more, according to the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. government will need to spend about $30 billion, says the Gartner Group, a market-research firm in Stamford, Connecticut. Some organizations will decide to replace the millennium-unready systems altogether, perhaps spending more at the outset but avoiding costly problems later. The University of Chicago Hospital System, for example, figured it would cost $1.5 million to fix the Y2K problem on a patient-accounting system that needed to be replaced anyhow, so it decided to buy a new software system for $3 million to $7 million. Bottom line: We're looking at a repair/replacement bill of up to $600 billion worldwide by the end of 1999, according to the Gartner Group. That's more than the gross national product of Canada. Interconnectivity: Passing the Bug The Year 2000 Problem affects not only computers (mainframes, minis, and micros), but the myriad of microchips embedded in many of our products, including airplanes, cars, microwave ovens, etc., points out Y2K authority John Whitehouse, president of ChangeWise, Inc., in Jacksonville, Florida. Furthermore, as he notes in his recent audiobook The Year 2000 Is Coming: What Do I Do?, the year 2000 is a leap year, a circumstance that also will have at least some consequences: Banks, for example, would fail to calculate one day's worth of interest (February 29), which is significant when you are dealing with billions of dollars. Y2K problems are sometimes deeply embedded in "legacy" programs, which are the products of the old programming days. Some such programs will begin automatically deleting data that is more than two years old, warns Whitehouse. The work you do on programs such as Excel may be at risk unless you get upgraded software. Even if you don't think you have a big problem with your own computers, or if you solve your own Y2K problems, you will still have to deal with countless other individuals, businesses, agencies, and governments who may not have solved the problem in their systems. Computers, businesses, and governments are highly interconnected today: A problem anywhere has the potential for global consequences, and there may be many, many problems emerging as 2000 arrives. Still, there is a potential bright side: "For those who come to understand and accept the issues, for those who take decisive action, this can be the opportunity of a lifetime," says Whitehouse. "As we approach the most catastrophic event the modern world has yet faced, proactive companies can gain a significant strategic advantage while others fail. And knowledgeable investors can post monumental gains while others lose." Getting Rich from the Glitch A disaster almost always presents profitable opportunities. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on fixing the Y2K Problem will wind up in somebody's pocket. One pocket could be yours. Expected Y2K winners include: Programmers and consultants. Anyone with the technical skills to solve the problem is now in high demand. Y2K guru Peter de Jager identifies a wide variety of consultants ready to provide services, including planning consultants for tools assessment, testing consultants, contract service consultants to estimate the costs and plan and implement the code redesign, legal consultants, and recovery consultants. Information providers, including publishers and Web site developers. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently sold eight pages of advertising in a special section devoted to companies offering "Year 2000 Solutions" (February 19, 1998). A variety of consultants and subscription-based Y2K assistance can be found on de Jager's Year 2000 Web site (www.year2000.com) Investors. Wherever new businesses bloom, investors are sure to see prospects for fast growth. Unfortunately, it's already late in the game to invest in Y2K companies: You'd be "buying high," and it's always risky to chase headlines for ideas on short-term speculation. As Wall Street Journal writer John R. Dorfman warns about these so-called story stocks, "That's an investment method that has often led investors to grief in the past." Lawyers and litigators. Individuals and businesses stand to lose a lot of money and time because of the Y2K Problem; therefore, they will want to sue anybody they consider responsible for creating the problem. If, for example, your life insurance policy is canceled because a computer thinks you're too old, you'll probably want to sue someone. Worst-Case Scenarios: Chaos and Crashes Pundits have warned of potential disasters IF the Year 2000 Problem is not fixed in time. It's not clear how seriously to take them, but these possibilities have been mentioned: Food shortages may occur because stores will discard all products that have passed their freshness expiration dates. Some patients may die because medicines and lifesaving devices are unavailable. Drugs, like foods, have expiration dates and may be discarded upon the command of non-Y2K-compliant computers. Medical devices such as heart defibrillators are programmed to cease functioning if the date for maintenance checks has passed. Borrowers could default on loans and mortgages as computers add on a century's worth of interest rates. Consumers may find they can't make purchases because credit-card verification systems misinterpret expiration dates. Similarly, there may be a cash crisis as automatic teller machines freeze up. Stock markets could crash because investors fearing Y2K fiscal chaos may take their money out of the markets_perhaps in November or December 1999_as Y2K impends. On the other hand, the crash might create a golden opportunity for investors ready to jump into the market when others run for the hills. Crime waves may occur as a general financial crisis creates economic hardship and jailed criminals are mistakenly released. One prison has already reportedly released criminals prematurely because parole dates were misinterpreted by computers. Other problems and inconveniences could include elevators getting stuck and airplanes being grounded, as the dates for maintenance checks appear to be missed and computers shut the systems down entirely. Date-sensitive computer-controlled security systems may fail, causing factories to shut and bank vaults to lock up. Drivers' licenses could seem to have expired, making it hard for people to rent cars. Voter registration records may be disrupted, creating havoc for the 2000 U.S. presidential and congressional elections. What Should We Do? To get started in solving your Y2K problems, John Whitehouse of ChangeWise recommends building a "systems inventory." Analyze your computer dependency_what do you use to get through the day, what outside systems do you depend on? What alternative sources of goods and services are there? Similar procedures need to be done at home and at work; specifically, Whitehouse suggests: Individuals and family heads should check out personal items that contain computer chips. Examples include heating and air conditioning systems, home-security systems, telephone-answering machines, TVs, VCRs, cell phones, cars. And of course, your home PC: The operating system itself may not work. Now test the devices. Enter 2000 in your VCR, or change the system date on your PC (after backing up the data). Send letters to manufacturers to see if their systems are Y2K compliant. Record on inventories where you still have risks, and develop a course of action, such as identifying alternative providers. You should also check software such as Access 95, Excel, personal schedulers, financial programs like Quicken or Money, communications software, etc. And remember that you could experience problems with outside services you use: the phone company, utilities, supermarkets, banks, gas stations, airports. "Forget flying to see Grandma on January 1, 2000," warns Whitehouse. "Two major airlines have already said they won't be flying." And the Federal Aviation Administration has admitted it will be late in meeting Y2K compliance. If you are an investor, your money is in places you can't control, so you should inventory all your assets (equity, debt, and fixed tangible). Check with the companies to find out their Y2K status and record the results. Perhaps less than half of U.S. companies have begun addressing the problem, and movement is lagging even farther in other countries, particularly Third World companies. One worry is that there may be runs on banks when people fear the Y2K impacts. Whitehouse goes so far as to suggest that investors begin hedging with fixed tangible assets: "Buy some gold and silver." Businesses should set up an organizational task force to address the issue, including managers from each area of the enterprise. "Problem ownership" should lie with the chief financial officer because of the many financial and legal implications. The task force should consider questions like cost, impacts on daily activities, competitors' actions, opportunities, effects on stock prices, etc. The CFO might ask how the company will be affected, where the money will come from to fix it, how cash flow will be impacted, and how customers will be impacted. Sales managers might ask what new products can be offered. Human-resources directors might ask whether new skills will be needed and whether the firm's best people will leave. The U.S. government, for example, is already concerned about a "brain drain" of technology experts leaving the Internal Revenue Service and the Pentagon. Each division must then do a systems inventory, find alternatives to systems and programs that are not compliant, test those alternatives, and affirm that all trading partners are compliant. "This will enable you to succeed where your competitors will fail," reassures Whitehouse. De Jager and Bergeon, authors of Managing 00, emphasize the need to test applications for their ability to handle the year 2000, but recognize that time is running short and that workloads for the reprogrammers are already overwhelming. They recommend giving priority to the applications that are most required for your survival, followed by those that give you a competitive edge. "Only you can determine whether you will allow yourself to be 'forced' not to test," write de Jager and Bergeon. "Forgoing testing is never acceptable, but in the real world, it happens." Learning from Y2K The lesson of the Year 2000 Problem is obvious: Most of the problems we face in the present are the result of someone (or everyone) in the past failing to think about the future. Y2K is a problem basically because mainframe computer programmers paid little attention to the long-term future. While saving money by using two-digit codes to enter years instead of four (computer memory was expensive in those days), either they never thought their programs would still be in use by the year 2000 or they never realized that computers, unlike fuzzy-thinking humans, would literally interpret years as having only two digits. We can smugly congratulate ourselves for being smarter than our technologies, but meanwhile, technology is biting us back. About the Author Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST. © 1998 World Future Society <http://www.wfs.org/y2kwag.htm>

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The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?
by nnburk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? by John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers version in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) Download Acrobat Editor's Note: This is a draft of an article scheduled for publication in the October 1998 issue of THE FUTURIST. Due to the time-sensitive nature of the material, it was posted here to create greater awareness of the issue as well as elicit comments and questions before final publication. Please send your comments and questions to the authors at johnp(a)arlinst.org and the editors at cwagner(a)wfs.org . The Millenial sun will first rise over human civilization in the independent republic of Kiribati, a group of some thirty low lying coral islands in the Pacific Ocean that straddle the equator and the International Date Line, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. This long awaited sunrise marks the dawn of the year 2000, and quite possibly, the onset of unheralded disruptions in life as we know it in many parts of the globe. Kiribati's 81,000 Micronesians may observe nothing different about this dawn; they only received TV in 1989. However, for those who live in a world that relies on satellites, air, rail and ground transportation, manufacturing plants, electricity, heat, telephones, or TV, when the calendar clicks from '99 to '00, we will experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on January 1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions of computerized systems, we will begin to experience our computer-dependent world in an entirely new way. We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millenium heralds the greatest challenge to modern society we have yet to face as a planetary community. Whether we experience this as chaos or social transformation will be influenced by what we do immediately. We are describing the year 2000 problem, known as Y2K (K signifying 1000.) Nicknamed at first "The Millennial Bug," increasing sensitivity to the magnitude of the impending crisis has escalated it to "The Millennial Bomb." The problem begins as a simple technical error. Large mainframe computers more than ten years old were not programmed to handle a four digit year. Sitting here now, on the threshold of the year 2000, it seems incomprehensible that computer programmers and microchip designers didn't plan for it. But when these billions of lines of computer code were being written, computer memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16 kilobytes of RAM? To save storage space, most programmers allocated only two digits to a year. 1993 is '93' in data files, 1917 is '17.' These two-digit dates exist on millions of files used as input to millions of applications. (The era in which this code was written was described by one programming veteran as "the Wild West." Programmers did whatever was required to get a product up and working; no one even thought about standards.) The same thing happened in the production of microchips as recently as three years ago. Microprocessors and other integrated circuits are often just sophisticated calculators that count and do math. They count many things: fractions of seconds, days, inches, pounds, degrees, lumens, etc. Many chips that had a time function designed into them were only structured for this century. And when the date goes from '99 to '00 both they and the legacy software that has not been fixed will think it is still the 20th century -- not 2000, but 1900. Peter de Jager, who has been actively studying the problem and its implications since 1991, explains the computer math calculation: "I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 98 and announces that I'm 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55 years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses time spans. . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage."1 The calculation problem explains why the computer system at Marks & Spencer department store in London recently destroyed tons of food during the process of doing a long term forecast. The computer read 2002 as 1902. Instead of four more years of shelf life, the computer calculated that this food was ninety-six years old. It ordered it thrown out.2 A similar problem happened recently in the U.S. at the warehouse of a freeze dried food manufacturer. But Y2K is not about wasting good food. Date calculations affect millions more systems than those that deal with inventories, interest rates, or insurance policies. Every major aspect of our modern infrastructure has systems and equipment that rely on such calculations to perform their functions. We are dependent on computerized systems that contain date functions to effectively manage defense, transportation, power generation, manufacturing, telecommunications, finance, government, education, healthcare. The list is longer, but the picture is clear. We have created a world whose efficient functioning in all but the poorest and remotest areas is dependent on computers. It doesn't matter whether you personally use a computer, or that most people around the world don't even have telephones. The world's economic and political infrastructures rely on computers. And not isolated computers. We have created dense networks of reliance around the globe. We are networked together for economic and political purposes. Whatever happens in one part of the network has an impact on other parts of the network. We have created not only a computer-dependent society, but an interdependent planet. We already have frequent experiences with how fragile these systems are, and how failure cascades through a networked system. While each of these systems relies on millions of lines of code that detail the required processing, they handle their routines in serial fashion. Any next step depends on the preceding step. This serial nature makes systems, no matter their size, vulnerable to even the slightest problem anywhere in the system. In 1990, ATT's long distance system experienced repeated failures. At that time, it took two million lines of computer code to keep the system operational. But these millions of lines of code were brought down by just three lines of faulty code. And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name of efficiency. This leanness also makes the system highly vulnerable. In May of this year, 90% of all pagers in the U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the failure of one satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email to the appropriate addresses because bad information from their one and only central source corrupted their servers. Compounding the fragility of these systems is the fact that we can't see the extent of our interconnectedness. The networks that make modern life possible are masked by the technology. We only see the interdependencies when the relationships are disrupted -- when a problem develops elsewhere and we notice that we too are having problems. When Asian markets failed last year, most U.S. businesses denied it would have much of an impact on our economy. Only recently have we felt the extent to which Asian economic woes affect us directly. Failure in one part of a system always exposes the levels of interconnectedness that otherwise go unnoticedwe suddenly see how our fates are linked together. We see how much we are participating with one another, sustaining one another. Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have vendors, suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of course, managed by computerized data bases.) For Y2K, these highly networked ways of doing business create a terrifying scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect itself from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal systems. General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary focus and diligence to bring their manufacturing plants up to Year 2000 compliance, (based on their assessment that they were facing catastrophe,) has 100,000 suppliers worldwide. Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly impossible, but what then do they do with all those vendors who supply parts? GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key supplier goes on strike. What is the potential number of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000 suppliers? The nature of systems and our history with them paints a chilling picture of the Year 2000. We do not know the extent of the failures, or how we will be affected by them. But we do know with great certainty that as computers around the globe respond or fail when their calendars record 2000, we will see clearly the extent of our interdependence. We will see the ways in which we have woven the modern world together through our technology. What, me worry? Until quite recently, it's been difficult to interest most people in the Year 2000 problem. Those who are publicizing the problem (the Worldwide Web is the source of the most extensive information on Y2K,) exclaim about the general lack of awareness, or even the deliberate blindness that greets them. In our own investigation among many varieties of organizations and citizens, we've noted two general categories of response. In the first category, people acknowledge the problem but view it as restricted to a small number of businesses, or a limited number of consequences. People believe that Y2K affects only a few industriesprimarily finance and insuranceseemingly because they deal with dates on policies and accounts. Others note that their organization is affected by Y2K, but still view it as a well-circumscribed issue that is being addressed by their information technology department. What's common to these comments is that people hold Y2K as a narrowly-focused, bounded problem. They seem oblivious to the networks in which they participate, or to the systems and interconnections of modern life. The second category of reactions reveals the great collective faith in technology and science. People describe Y2K as a technical problem, and then enthusiastically state that human ingenuity and genius always finds a way to solve these type of problems. Ecologist David Orr has noted that one of the fundamental beliefs of our time is that technology can be trusted to solve any problem it creates.3 If a software engineer goes on TV claiming to have created a program that can correct all systems, he is believed. After all, he's just what we've been expecting. And then there is the uniqueness of the Year 2000 problem. At no other time in history have we been forced to deal with a deadline that is absolutely non-negotiable. In the past, we could always hope for a last minute deal, or rely on round-the-clock bargaining, or pray for an eleventh hour savior. We have never had to stare into the future knowing the precise date when the crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of this confrontation seems to add to people's denial of it. They know the date when the extent of the problem will surface, and choose not to worry about it until then. However, this denial is quickly dissipating. Information on Y2K is expanding exponentially, matched by an escalation in adjectives used to describe it. More public figures are speaking out. This is critically important. With each calendar tick of this time, alternatives diminish and potential problems grow. We must develop strategies for preparing ourselves at all levels to deal with whatever Y2K presents to us with the millennium dawn. What we know about Y2K a technological problem that cannot be solved by technology the first-ever, non-negotiable deadline a systemic crisis that no one can solve alone a crisis that transcends boundaries and hierarchies an opportunity to evoke greater capacity from individuals and organizations an opportunity to simplify and redesign major systems Figure 1 The Y2K problem, really We'd like to describe in greater detail the extent of Y2K. As a global network of interrelated consequences, it begins at the center with the technical problem, legacy computer codes and embedded microchips. (see Figure One) For the last thirty years thousands of programmers have been writing billions of lines of software code for the computers on which the world's economy and society now depend. Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes "old, undocumented code written in over 2500 different computer languages and executed on thousands of different hardware platforms being controlled by hundreds of different operating systems . . . [that generate] further complexity in the form of billions of six character date fields stored in millions of databases that are used in calculations."4 The Gartner Group, a computer-industry research group, estimates that globally, 180 billion lines of software code will have to be screened.5 Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for a company to have more than 100,000,000 lines of code--the IRS, for instance, has at least eighty million lines. The Social Security Administration began working on its thirty million lines of code in 1991. After five years of work, in June, 1996, four hundred programmers had fixed only six million lines. The IRS has 88,000 programs on 80 mainframe computers to debug. By the end of last year they had cleaned up 2,000 programs.6 Capers Jones, head of Software Productivity Research, a firm that tracks programmer productivity, estimates that finding, fixing and testing all Y2K-affected software would require over 700,000 person-years.7 Programmers have been brought out of retirement and are receiving extraordinary wages and benefits to stick with this problem, but we are out of time. There aren't nearly enough programmers nor hours remaining before January 1, 2000. Also at the center of this technical time bomb are the embedded microprocessors. There are somewhat over a billion of these hardware chips located in systems worldwide. They sustain the world's manufacturing and engineering base. They exist in traffic lights, elevators, water, gas, and electricity control systems. They're in medical equipment and military and navigation systems. America's air traffic control system is dependent upon them. They're located in the track beds of railroad systems and in the satellites that circle the earth. Global telecommunications are heavily dependent on them. Modern cars contain about two dozen microprocessors. The average American comes in contact with seventy microprocessors before noon every day. Many of these chips aren't date sensitive, but a great number are, and engineers looking at long ago installed systems don't know for sure which is which. To complicate things further, not all chips behave the same. Recent tests have shown that two chips of the same model installed in two different computers but performing the same function are not equally sensitive to the year-end problem. One shuts down and the other doesn't. It is impossible to locate all of these chips in the remaining months, nor can we replace all those that are identified. Those more than three years old are obsolete and are probably not available in the marketplace. The solution in those cases is to redesign and remanufacture that part of the system -- which often makes starting over with new equipment the best option. That is why some companies are junking their computer systems and spending millions, even hundreds of millions, to replace everything. It at least ensures that their internal systems work. At issue is time, people, money, and the nature of systems. These technical problems are exacerbated by government and business leaders who haven't yet fully understood the potential significance of this issue for their own companies, to say nothing of the greater economic implications. The U.S. leads all other developed nations in addressing this issue, minimally by six to nine months. Yet in a recent survey of American corporate chief information officers, 70% of them expressed the belief that even their companies would not be completely prepared for Y2K. Additionally, 50% of them acknowledged that they would not fly during January 2000. If America is the global leader in Y2K efforts, these CIO comments are indeed sobering. The economic impacts for the global economy are enormous and unknown. The Gartner Group projects that the total cost of dealing with Y2K worldwide will be somewhere between $300 billion to $600 billion -- and these are only direct costs associated with trying to remedy the problem. (These estimates keep rising every quarter now.) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in a recently released Quarterly Report, estimated total government Y2K expense at $3.9 billion. This figure was based only on federal agency estimates; the OMB warned that this estimate might be as much as 90% too low considering the increasing labor shortage and expected growing remediation costs as January 1, 2000 looms nearer. And in June of this year, it was announced that federal agencies had already spent five billion dollars. Of twenty-four agencies, fifteen reported being behind schedule. These numbers don't consider the loss of output caused by diverting resources to forestall this crisis. In more and more businesses, expenditures for R&D and modernization are being diverted to Y2K budgets. Business Week in March of 1998 estimated that the Year 2000 economic damage alone would be $119 billion. When potential lawsuits and secondary effects are added to this -- people suing over everything from stalled elevators to malfunctioning nuclear power plants -- the cost easily could be over $1 trillion. But these problems and estimates don't begin to account for the potential impact of Y2K. The larger significance of this bomb becomes apparent when we consider the next circle of the global network-- the organizational relationships that technology makes possible. Who works with whom? The global economy is dependent upon computers both directly and indirectly. Whether it's your PC at home, the workstation on a local area network, or the GPS or mobile telephone that you carry, all are integral parts of larger networks where computers are directly connected together. As we've learned, failure in a single component can crash the whole system; that system could be an automobile, a train, an aircraft, an electric power plant, a bank, a government agency, a stock exchange, an international telephone system, the air traffic control system. If every possible date-sensitive hardware and software bug hasn't been fixed in a larger system, just one programming glitch or one isolated chip potentially can bring down the whole thing. While there isn't enough time or technical people to solve the Y2K problem before the end of next year, we might hope that critical aspects of our infrastructure are tackling this problem with extreme diligence. But this isn't true. America's electric power industry is in danger of massive failures, as described in Business Week's February '98 cover story on Y2K. They report that "electric utilities are only now becoming aware that programmable controllers -- which have replaced mechanical relays in virtually all electricity-generating plants and control rooms -- may behave badly or even freeze up when 2000 arrives. Many utilities are just getting a handle on the problem." It's not only nuclear power plants that are the source of concern, although problems there are scary enough. In one Year 2000 test, notes Jared S.Wermiel, leader of the Y2K effort at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the security computer at a nuclear power plant failed by opening vital areas that are normally locked. Given the complexity and the need to test, "it wouldn't surprise me if certain plants find that they are not Year 2000-ready and have to shut down."8 Other electric utility analysts paint a bleaker picture. Rick Cowles, who reports on the electric utility industry, said at the end of February: "Not one electric company [that he had talked to] has started a serious remediation effort on its embedded controls. Not one. Yes, there's been some testing going on, and a few pilot projects here and there, but for the most part it is still business-as-usual, as if there were 97 months to go, not 97 weeks.9 After attending one industry trade show, Cowle stated that, "Based on what I learned at DistribuTECH '98, I am convinced there is a 100% chance that a major portion of the domestic electrical infrastructure will be lost as a result of the Year 2000 computer and embedded systems problem. The industry is fiddling whilst the infrastructure burns." 10 The Federal Aviation Administration is also very vulnerable but quite optimistic. "We're on one hand working to get those computers Year 2000 compliant, but at the same time we're working on replacing those computers," said Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the FAA in early '98. At the twenty Air Route Traffic Control Centers, there is a host computer and a backup system. All forty of these machines --mid-'80s vintage IBM 3083 mainframes--are affected. And then there are the satellites with embedded chips, individual systems in each airplane, and air traffic control systems around the globe. Lufthansa already has announced it will not fly its aircraft during the first days of 2000. Who else is affected? But the interdependency problem extends far beyond single businesses, or even entire industries. Indirect relationships extend like tentacles into many other networks, creating the potential for massive disruptions of service. Let's hope that your work organization spends a great deal of money and time to get its entire information system compliant. You know yours is going to function. But on the second of January 2000 the phone calls start. It's your banker. "There's been a problem," he says. They've lost access to your account information and until they solve the problem and get the backup loaded on the new system, they are unable to process your payroll. "We don't have any idea how long it will take," the president says. Then someone tells you that on the news there's a story that that the whole IRS is down and that they can neither accept nor process tax information. Social Security, Federal Housing, Welfarenone of these agencies are capable of issuing checks for the foreseeable future. Major airlines aren't flying, waiting to see if there is still integrity in the air traffic control system. And manufacturing across the country is screeching to a halt because of failures in their supply chain. (After years of developing just in time (JIT) systems, there is no inventory on handsuppliers have been required to deliver parts as needed. There is no slack in these systems to tolerate even minor delivery problems.) Ground and rail transport have been disrupted, and food shortages appear within three to six days in major metropolises. Hospitals, dealing with the failure of medical equipment, and the loss of shipments of medicine, are forced to deny non-essential treatment, and in some cases are providing essential care in pre-technical ways. It's a rolling wave of interdependent failures. And it reaches across the country and the world to touch people who, in most cases, didn't know they were linked to others. Depending on what systems fail, very few but strategically placed failures would initiate a major economic cascade. Just problems with power companies and phone systems alone would cause real havoc. (This spring, a problem in ATT rendered all credit card machines useless for a day. How much revenue was lost by businesses?) If only twenty percent of businesses and government agencies crash at the same time, major failures would ensue. In an interdependent system, solving most of the problem is no solution. As Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes: It is not enough to solve simply "most of these problems." The integration of these systems requires that we solve virtually all of them. Our ability as an economy and as a society to deal with disruptions and breakdowns in our critical systems is minuscule. Our worst case scenarios have never envisioned multiple, parallel systemic failures. Just in time inventory has led to just in time provisioning. Costs have been squeezed out of all of our critical infrastructure systems repeatedly over time based on the ubiquity and reliability of these integrated systems. The human factor, found costly, slow, and less reliable has been purged over time from our systems. Single, simple failures can be dealt with; complex, multiple failures have been considered too remote a possibility and therefore too expensive to plan for. 11 The city of New York began to understand this last September. The governor of New York State banned all nonessential IT projects to minimize the disruption caused by the year 2000 bomb after reading a detailed report that forecasts the millennium will throw New York City into chaos, with power supplies, schools, hospitals, transport, and the finance sector likely to suffer severe disruption. Compounding the city's Y2K risks is the recent departure of the head of its year 2000 project to a job in the private sector.12 But of course the anticipated problems extend far beyond U.S. shores. In February, the Bangkok Post reported that Phillip Dodd, a Unysis Y2K expert, expects that upward of 70% of the businesses in Asia will fail outright or experience severe hardship because of Y2K. The Central Intelligence Agency supports this with their own analysis: "We're concerned about the potential disruption of power grids, telecommunications and banking services, among other possible fallout, especially in countries already torn by political tensions."13 A growing number of assessments of this kind have led Dr. Edward Yardeni, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, to keep raising the probability of a deep global recession in 2000-2001 as the result of Y2K. His present estimate of the potential for such a recession now hovers at about 70%, up from 40% at the end of 1997.14 How might we respond? (To be continued...) <http://www.wfs.org/year2k.htm>

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