At 12:57 PM -0700 11/11/97, Jim Burnes wrote:
I'm not sure that there is anything they can do about it anyway. The contract to fix the IRS's Y2K problem won't be awarded until October of 1998 (!!). That leaves them 8 months until software oblivion to fix the problem. They have an estimated 60 to 80 million lines of code to fix and test. (some of the code they don't have source code for, some of it is in assembler) .... The end result would be an interesting study in complexity and catastrophe theory.
For me, I will be on an extended fishing trip somewhere in the Rockies.
Yep, except I plan to be at home, in my compound, with a several-month supply of food. (I'm on a well, and I have a generator, so a loss of the grid in the ensuing chaos would not devastate me. Plus, central California has a pretty mild climate...) The dumbest thing to do is to pay big bucks, as many are, to be in some exotic location to celebrate the rollover of the digits (if not the century, as we all know). Imagine being stranded in Cairo or Machu Piccu during this meltdown.
If the system crashes then the joke will be on the megacorps that volunteered to fix the thing. All those US FRN electronic ledger entries won't be worth the diskspace that holds them.
Or so it would seem. As the programmers who work on the system realize that it will be impossible to fix the system, they will be buying hard assets and leaving the Y2K project like rats from a sinking ship.
The consensus in the survivalist community is that the Y2K problem will devastate the IRS system, exactly as Jim describes here (and as we discussed on the list a couple of months ago, mid-September, under the thread title, "Preparing the Remnant for the far side of the crisis"). Too many interdependencies, too much old code, not enough time or money to make the changes, and probably not even enough knowledge about how to go about it. All it will take are a few systems failing. Checks arriving late, systems crashing, a slowdown in an already slow system. (And of course the common workarounds, such as keeping the computer clock set at 1998 or 1999, will not work, as many benefits and IRS programs have dependencies on the clock year, on the ages of taxpayers, on previous year's payments, and on and on.) The loss of confidence in a highly-automated--but nevertheless creaky--system will be glorious to watch.
If any of the federal infrastructure protection specialists are listening in on cypherpunks (and we know you are), then maybe you ought to pay some real close attention to the things that are the most likely to bring about TEOCAWKI (the end of civilization as we know it). Y2K is much more of a threat that the four horseman of the infocalypse.
You need to see the _bright side_ of the problem! By undermining the system, the changes that are needed will come sooner. And I think the theory that tax protestors have been sabotaging the system for decades is probably on target. Obfuscating the code, destroying source code, inserting logic bombs.
Something tells me that if the IRS, the FED, Major Banks, US Army C&C, GPS Satellites and the Railroad shipments fail within months of each other we are not going to be browsing Barnes and Noble on the weekends.
Just remember three words: Lock and load. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."