------- Forwarded Message Date: Tue, 08 Sep 1998 18:38:07 -0500 To: believer@telepath.com From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Wired: "The Y2K Solution: Run for Your Life!!" Source: Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/6.08/y2k.html F E A T U R E|Issue 6.08 - August 1998 The Y2K Solution: Run for Your Life!! By Kevin Poulsen Scott Olmsted is dressed to do some serious debugging: comfortable khaki shorts, a T-shirt from a Visual Basic conference, and a visor from one of his Silicon Valley employers. But we're a long way from the land of cubicles and industrial parks. In fact, we're a long way from just about everything. Scott is debugging with a hammer, trying to remove a stubborn two-by-four from the wall of a mobile home plunked down in the high desert of Southern California. After banging away for a few minutes, he finally yanks the stud off the wall in a flurry of sawdust and splintered wood. It's a small victory, but it brings him one step closer to his own solution to the greatest computer glitch in history - the Year 2000 Bug. With more than 20 years of computer programming experience under his belt, Scott has decided that the only real fix for the Y2K problem may be to pack up and move to this patch of land 75 miles from his San Diego home. "In the next year or so," he predicts, "the most common cocktail party chatter will be, 'What are you doing to prepare for Y2K?' But by then, it will be too late." This is sagebrush country, the kind of place where you can hear your footsteps crunching in the gravel. But even here, 30 miles from the nearest interstate, a line of telephone poles runs along the dirt road and PacBell terminal boxes sprout from the ground alongside the cacti. While carpet installers work in the next room, Scott is planning for the day when it may all be useless. The property came with a freshwater well, and he'll soon have a solar panel for power. For protection against looters, he's about to purchase his first gun. "I've seen how fragile so many software systems are - - how one bug can bring them down," he worries. The idea of hundreds, thousands, millions of bugs cascading all at once keeps him awake at night. His Y2K retreat is easy to spot. In an area where high security means a few strands of barbed wire clinging to a rusty pole, Scott's chain-link fence is shiny and new. The alarm-company sign that hangs from the fence would be more at home in Brentwood, and on the roof there's a DirecTV satellite dish pointed toward the sky. The shed outside his back door will hold nonperishable food. But with a programmer's methodical logic, Scott didn't rush out to buy a year's worth of dehydrated grub. First he sampled the fare from several distributors. One company sold a textured vegetable protein that was a bit more expensive, but it came in a variety of flavors: chicken, beef, and taco. "It was pretty good," Scott says, in the halting measured tones of someone who doesn't want come across as a wacko. "We were pleasantly surprised." So he splurged. What the hell, doomsday comes along only once in a lifetime. Throughout history, prophets and visionaries have spent their lives preparing for the end of the world. But this time veteran software programmers are blazing the millennial trail. The geeks have read the future, not in the Book of Revelation, but in a few million lines of computer code. By now, the source of their anxiety is well known. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the computer world was young and memory was expensive, programmers developed a convention for marking the passage of time. It's the same system most people use to date their checks: two digits for the day, two for the month, and two for the year. Dropping the "19" from the year was convenient, and it saved two bytes of precious RAM every time it was used. Those were days of innocence and optimism. Everyone knew what would happen if this little shortcut was still in use in AD 2000 - the two-digit year would roll over like the odometer on an old Chevy, and the computers would think they'd jumped 100 years into the past. Programmers knew it, and they warned their managers. Not to worry, was the usual reply. When the millennium finally rolls around, all this code will be ancient history. But the code stuck around. The old software worked fine in the postmainframe world, so nobody felt compelled to replace it. Instead, like Roman architects, they just built on top of it. The two-digit year became a standard, wired right into the heart of Cobol - the Common Business Oriented Language that still serves as the digital workhorse of commerce and industry. It also crept into the embedded microchips found in everything from VCRs to nuclear power plants. For years the Y2K bug sat quietly, remembered largely as an amusing textbook example of poor software design. But as 2000 drew near, the screwup became less amusing. In November 1996, the comp.software.year-2000 newsgroup was launched, creating a forum that would soon become ground zero for the Y2K survivalist movement. But at first, the charter was clear: Discussions would be limited to Y2K bug fixes, remediation strategies, and reports. Over the course of the next year, information poured into the newsgroup, and most of it was bad: The FAA was hopelessly behind schedule in patching air-traffic-control systems; Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell Bank, laid odds that Y2K upheaval would trigger a recession; Ed Yourdon, a respected software guru and author of 25 computer books, predicted the collapse of the US government - not long after he packed up and moved to New Mexico. Optimism became a scarce commodity. Philosophical questions were raised: Do programmers have a moral duty to remain at their keyboards until the last moments of 1999, like captains on a sinking ship? Debates raged over social Darwinism and the ownership of wheat in grain elevators. The conversation moved on to the viability of dry dog food as emergency rations. Plans were made to begin converting equities into gold and buying land in remote parts of California, Arizona, and Oklahoma. January 1998 saw 250 cross-posts to misc.survivalism - up from an average of 30 a month in late 1997. Gradually, a new acronym entered the Internet lexicon: TEOTWAWKI, pronounced "tee-OH-tawa-kee." The End of the World as We Know It. The Internet's very own survival movement was born. Scott Olmsted has known about the Y2K bug since the 1980s, but he never gave it much thought until early 1997, when he received a snail-mail flyer from Gary North, a historian and early leader in the Y2K preparedness movement. After reading it, Scott remembers feeling a vague sense of dread. But as a rational guy and student of decision analysis - the science of logical decision making in the face of chronic uncertainty - he didn't jump to any conclusions. Instead, he went online to do some research. As he pored over Web sites and news clippings, Scott felt himself moving through the same psychological stages endured by people confronted with fatal illness: denial, fading into anger, leading to a deep depression that culminates in a sense of acceptance. "I'm still not 100 percent sure that the world's coming to an end," he admits. "But the idea that I may want to get out of town for a while is not such a long shot. It's enough to make me want to prepare." With the exception of his wife, most of the non-geeks closest to Scott think he's a little nuts. His half-brother, Clark Freeman, thought he was going overboard. But since then, Clark has come around a bit - he, too, is planning to stockpile some food in case things get rough. If his brother is taking Y2K so seriously, he figures there might well be something to it. "Scott has always been the level-headed one," Clark remembers. "The classic straightlaced nerd." "I've spoken with friends and relatives about this, and I've gotten nowhere," Scott sighs. Worse, some of the more intense Y2K survivalists also think he's crazy - or at least a bit naïve. After all, Scott plans to celebrate New Year's Eve at his home in the suburbs; the place in the desert will be there just in case things get rough. Then there's his fence - - it has no perimeter alarms, and he isn't even trying to camouflage his location. But worst of all, his hideaway is only a half tank of gas away from Los Angeles - close enough to the big city that he could wake up one postapocalyptic morning to find hordes of Los Angelinos parked outside his desert redoubt. The hardcores believe it will happen like this: On January 1 (or shortly thereafter), the electricity grid will go dead. Groceries in America's refrigerators will go bad. Food distribution systems will crash and store shelves will go bare within days. Businesses will fail, either because they aren't Y2K compliant or because they are dependent on noncompliant customers and suppliers. As losses mount and companies go under, the stock market will plummet. Banks will calculate interest for negative 100 years. The government will stop issuing entitlement checks to gray-haired senior citizens when their age suddenly clicks back to -35. Panic will set in. Police dispatch systems will be crippled, and the only law will be the law of the jungle. Desperate citizens will abandon the cities to hunt for resources in rural areas. They'll come looking for the mad prophets - the Y2K survivalists - ready to plunder their food, their heat, and their communications links. They'll zero in on Scott and his conspicuous retreat like a pack of wolves on the scent of a kill. But they'd better stay away from Steve Watson's place. Steve Watson, a 45-year-old systems analyst, is still kicking himself for not preparing sooner. He didn't get going until early this year, and he worries that he still has a lot of adjusting to do. As he puts it, "I didn't even know how to tan a hide until a couple of months ago." If all goes according to plan, Steve will ring in the new year at a secure compound somewhere in southern Oklahoma. While the Pollyannas of the world watch Times Square on the tube, he'll be listening to the radio for early news of Y2K disaster. When the power goes black - perhaps at the stroke of midnight - he'll be ready with a small arsenal of guns. A generator will power his bunker indefinitely, but no light will escape to the outside - none of Steve's neighbors will even know that there is a survivalist in their midst. Eight months ago, if you'd told Steve that Y2K survivalism would become his obsession, he would have laughed in your face. Last year, he was a happy-go-lucky Y2K project analysis manager for DMR Consulting, a Canada-based computer consulting firm, just finishing up a big remediation project for a major American phone company. The effort was grueling - 10 writers, programmers, and analysts cleaning up 10 million of lines of Cobol code. But in the end it all worked out, and the phone company's billing system was declared ready for 2000. In that heady moment of self-congratulation, Bill Finch, one of Steve's coworkers, approached him with a thought. "Steve," he said, "don't you realize that everything stops if the power grid goes down?" Anxiety set in. The telephone company had poured substantial resources into its Y2K effort. Even then, Steve's project had been an odyssey plagued with countless unexpected glitches and snags. If the power utilities - with their Byzantine grid of thousands of generators and substations around the continent - weren't already well along in their efforts, then all the systems he'd dragged into Y2K compliance would be dead as doornails when the lights went out. That afternoon, Steve hit the Net, where he learned that the situation is far worse than he had imagined. The power grid relies on a sophisticated feedback mechanism: Remote terminal units report their power needs up the communications chain that controls the output of electricity generators. The entire network is riddled with embedded chips. Nuclear plants supply nearly 20 percent of the power in the grid, and none of them have been certified as Y2K compliant. Charles Siebenthal, head of the Year 2000 embedded systems project at the Electric Power Research Institute, says the industry is just beginning to look for potential Y2K failure points. Anecdotes from industry consultants suggest that if the year 2000 came today, every utility in the country would crash. "No electric plant or facility of any kind has been Y2K tested without some kind of impact," says David Hall, a senior consultant with the Cara Corporation. "There isn't enough time to fix everything. There will be some disruption. How long? How deep? We just don't know." Then there are ripple effects to consider. "There's not a single railroad switch in the country that's manual anymore," Steve says. "They're all computer controlled, and railroads deliver coal and fuel to power plants." Exit Steve Watson, bright-eyed optimist; enter the new Steve Watson, Y2K survivalist, rugged pioneer, and Renaissance man in training. Steve began spending six hours a day on the Internet, studying alternative power, construction techniques, and emergency medical procedures. Anything he couldn't find online, he ordered from local bookstores or Amazon.com. He'd never kept a gun in the house, but soon he had three: a 30-30 for deer hunting, a .22 for small game, and a 9-mm handgun for personal protection. Of course, the 9-mm is practically a popgun against looting mobs, so four M-16 assault rifles are also on the way. Finally, he pooled his money with Bill Finch, his DMR coworker, to buy 500 remote acres in Oklahoma. (Bill holds the public deed to the property, so his name has been changed in this article to keep the location secret.) In choosing the hideaway site and its size, Steve overengineered to account for family and friends - few of whom subscribe to his Y2K scenario. "Most people think I'm nuts. Even my kids think, Dad's going off the deep end." Steve's wife, Teresa, has been more supportive. She's no computer expert, but her Baptist faith tells her that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could ride in with a global computer crash. Meanwhile, Steve is making plans for everyone else: close friends, family members, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law - and their children, mothers, and fathers. Forty people in all. In 2000, they'll work together to till the soil and patrol the fence line. Steve's doomsday vision is the same as that of most Y2K radicals, but radicals can pop up in some pretty mainstream places - like the US Central Intelligence Agency, which is advising its agents abroad to keep cash on hand and stockpile extra blankets in preparation for New Year's Day 2000. The agency worries that bugs in the power networks and communications backbones of developing nations could cause outages that would jeopardize the safety and well-being of its agents. Millions of Americans have already gotten a small taste of critical system failure. When the onboard control system of the Galaxy IV communications satellite failed on Tuesday, May 19, 1998, the outage temporarily crippled US pager networks, several broadcast news operations, and even credit card verifications systems. Most of the disruptions were brief - technicians were able to switch to backup communications paths - but doctors who use pagers as a lifeline with patients and colleagues were forced to set up camp in hospitals and offices. The failure of one satellite threw a wrench into the mechanisms of modern life, perhaps providing a peek at what life may be like at the dawn of the new millennium. Or sooner. While the full brunt of the Y2K bug is reserved for AD 2000, some early problems are already developing. In 1996, Visa and MasterCard temporarily stopped issuing credit cards with an expiration date of 2000 after credit card verification terminals began choking on the "00." The gaffe led to customer complaints and a lawsuit filed by a suburban Detroit grocery store against its computer supplier, TEC America Inc. Since then, most verification systems have been upgraded, but Y2K is making its presence known in other areas. The Information Technology Association of America released a survey last March showing 44 percent of the US companies they polled have already experienced Y2K failures. Ninety-four percent of the respondents termed Y2K a "crisis." The GartnerGroup estimates that 180 billion lines of code need to be examined and that 20 to 30 percent of all firms worldwide have not yet started preparing for Y2K. Many of these are expected to suffer significant failures. In a series of studies issued over the last year, Gartner surveyed 15,000 companies in 87 countries to assess their Y2K readiness. The results weren't encouraging. Small companies rated lowest - for most, winning over new customers has taken priority over the Y2K problem. But midsize and large companies are lagging, too. Gartner then rated the overall Y2K efforts of industrialized nations on a scale of zero to five, where five is total compliance on all systems. The highest scorers on the scale, including the US, Canada, and Australia, rated somewhere between two and three - a score that suggests they have completed an inventory of Y2K vulnerabilities, but not yet developed a comprehensive remediation plan. The US may be at the front of the pack in the Y2K race, but that's small comfort to some legislators. Last March, the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology warned that 37 percent of the critical systems used by federal agencies will not be ready in time. Then in June, California Republican Stephen Horn, who heads the subcommittee, issued a scathing report card on the Clinton administration's Y2K progress. He gave the government an F. John Koskinen, head of the president's Year 2000 Conversion Council, complains that Horn is just a tough grader. "As a government, we're in a C+ to B range," he argues. Koskinen keeps a digital desktop clock that runs backward - on the day we spoke, the clock showed 609 days, 8 hours, 39 minutes, 16 seconds, and counting - but he generally refrains from calling the situation a crisis. Instead, he describes it as a "critical management challenge." He fully expects the federal government's critical systems to be ready on time, or even early. "Many companies, financial institutions, and federal agencies are still working on the problem," he says. "But most major organizations plan to have their solutions in place by the first quarter of next year." If the council is successful, Koskinen believes, Americans will confront little more than a few minor inconveniences when the year 2000 finally rolls around. "There's not enough information right now to indicate that stocking up on Coleman stoves and Sterno is an appropriate response," he says. And in the end, he predicts, "a lot of people won't notice." Koskinen has earned the respect of some Y2Kers by emphasizing the need for high-level planning in the event that some systems fail. But Y2K survivalists feel more comfortable with their own personal contingency plans, and a commercial infrastructure is already forming to support them. Walton Feed, an Idaho food distributor that sells products over the Net, is doing a brisk business in long-term supplies; the company attributes this to Y2K. And in Sully County, South Dakota, developer Russ Voorhees has attracted national publicity and hundreds of potential clients for his "Heritage Farms 2000" project - a Y2K survival community that's been on hold since June, when a local planning commission refused to grant the necessary building permits. For those who want to go it alone, there's a sense of adventurous fun in their preparations - the pride of self-sufficiency and an excuse to get away from the keyboard to earn some merit badges. But Y2K preparedness is not just a Boy Scout fetish, and it isn't always about getting away from it all. "If everybody moves to rural areas, they'll just take their problems with them," explains Paloma O'Riley, a red-haired, forty-something mother, wife, and computer expert. Paloma lives in the small town of Louisville, Colorado, just east of Boulder, and when she looks around her community she doesn't see potential looters - she sees neighbors. Her suburban hamlet has become a major landmark on the Y2K map as the world headquarters of The Cassandra Project, a grassroots Y2K preparedness organization that can perhaps best be described as a kind of Millennial Neighborhood Watch. Until last year, Paloma was a Y2K project manager at the Rover Group, a UK-based auto manufacturer, where her first responsibility was to identify all of the company's vulnerable systems and target them for patching. But her search didn't end with a couple of corporate mainframes. Inadvertently, Paloma opened up the Pandora's Box of Y2K: embedded systems. Embedded systems draw the Y2K bug-fixing task out of cyberspace and into the real world. There are lots of pea-brained microchips out there, nestled in everything from microwave ovens and automobiles, to power plants and oil refineries. Most don't care what the date is, but a small percentage of them do, and that made Paloma nervous. "I became concerned about just how prevalent embedded systems are," she recalls. "Several members of my family have medical problems, so when I started investigating I became very concerned about medical devices like defibrillators, physiological monitoring equipment, and the entire medical services infrastructure." When her contract came up for renewal in 1997, Rover asked Paloma to stay on in London to 2000. She declined - the thought of family and friends surrounded by noncompliant systems that might leave them cold, hungry, and without medical services was too much to ignore. Back in the States she began networking with other people who shared her concerns, and that's when she realized "we needed to put together an organization to address the issues and get information out to the public." Thus The Cassandra Project was born. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a mortal woman courted by the god Apollo. To win her affections, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. Still, Cassandra rejected him, so the frustrated deity decreed that no one would ever believe her predictions. Paloma O'Riley gave a nod to Cassandra's fate when she chose the name for her Y2K preparedness group, but she is precisely the kind of mortal woman you'd want at your next PTA meeting - a firm believer in the notion that some good, old-fashioned community-building may keep the Y2K nightmare at bay. The Cassandra Project has helped spawn a dozen Y2K community preparedness groups around the country. It has a board of directors that includes several computer professionals and a Web site at millennia-bcs.com that lists a menu of articles discussing possible Y2K scenarios, ranging from minor annoyances to outright Y2Kaos. The site attracts more than 100,000 visitors a month. Between speaking engagements, Paloma spends her days organizing biweekly meetings with neighbors to discuss contingency plans, and lobbying the state government. "We've been working with the Cassandra group on a lot of their initiatives," says Steve McNally, staff director of the Colorado Information Management Commission. "They've talked to several legislators and the governor's office and brought some awareness of the issues to the table." For her part, Paloma and her family plan to stockpile a six-month supply of food. Her worst-case scenarios look much the same as those of the most hardcore, self-sufficient Y2K survivalists, but the bomb-shelter aspect is conspicuously missing. Paloma believes that people will pull together in times of turmoil. If calamity strikes and she is forced to draw the line, she's determined to do so in her own backyard. Even if Paloma's neighborly pragmatism sets her apart from the militia types and fundamentalist Christians who regularly contact The Cassandra Project, her efforts have brought her in contact with a thriving premillennial subculture. "People in other millennial movements, including Christian fundamentalism, point to Y2K as a sign of the times," says Philip Lamy, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Castleton College in Vermont. Lamy specializes in the study of secular millennialism, and he sees Y2K survivalism as a prime example of the genre. "Generally, millennial movements appear when a society or culture is going through a period of rapid cultural, economic, or technological change," he says. "The explosion of the Internet and the World Wide Web is fueling a lot of this now." Still, there are a few things that set the Y2Kers apart from the crowd. For one, the Y2K bug is not simply a matter of myth, superstition, or prophesy - it is a tangible problem hardwired into the fabric of our industrial society. In addition, the people who are taking Y2K most seriously are not laypeople or neophytes - they are specialized technicians who approach the situation with a sophisticated understanding of society's hidden machinery. But if heightened technical awareness alone could explain the apocalyptic conclusions drawn by the Y2K survivalists, then every well-informed computer geek would be moving to the desert - and that clearly isn't happening. With so many intertwined variables to consider, logic inevitably takes a back seat to subjective intuition - a personal sense of security that extends from the microcosm of a single computer program to the macrocosm of modern society. Ultimately it all comes down to faith. But this, too, sets the Y2K survivalists apart. True millennialism is rooted in faith - fundamentalist Christians may anticipate an apocalypse, but they optimistically expect it to be followed by 1,000 years of celestial rule. Y2K survivalism, on the other hand, doesn't concern itself with redemption. It is antimillennial - the polar opposite of techno-millennial movements like the Extropians who see technology as the stairway to a higher plane. (See "Meet the Extropians," Wired 2.10, page 102.) "All this suggests that you don't have to be a religious fanatic, a Christian fundamentalist, or a ufologist to believe that our world may be in trouble - that there's something serious afoot in our nation and our world," Lamy adds. "The Y2K problem is overlapping with other survivalist movements, and like them it shares a kind of a fatalistic vision of the future." Three weeks have passed since Scott Olmsted put the carpet installers to work in his retreat. The carpet is in now, and he's turned his attention to other details, like night-vision equipment - his property is on high ground, and with the right hardware he could scan most of the valley from his backyard. He's also thinking of getting laser eye surgery so that he won't be dependent on contact lenses after 2000. It never seems to end. "Once you take the first steps to prepare, you basically admit that this is big enough to do something about. And then you realize you should be doing more." Scott has turned his back on denial - the blind faith that allows people to live normal lives in the face of staggering complexity, risk, and uncertainty. Instead, he's chosen to acknowledge his own vulnerability. As he describes it, "I've always known that the economy is complex and that we live on the end of a long chain of ships, planes, and 18-wheelers." Scott sees how the Y2K bug could disrupt that chain, and like other resolute souls - environmental activists, antiabortion protesters, and corporate whistle-blowers to name a few - he, too, has been driven to act by the clarity and intensity of his vision. The rest of us may be content without quite so much awareness, but embracing the Bug has actually made Scott feel better. "I know one guy who started taking Prozac when his denial fell away," he says. "Taking action - doing something - really gets you out of that." Scott admits there isn't enough evidence to prove he's right. But, he insists, that's not the way to look at it. "There's not nearly enough evidence pointing the other way to make me abandon my preparations," he says. In a way, he's managed to optimize the Y2K problem - even if the new millennium dawns without incident, his efforts will have yielded a supply of inexpensive food, a new collection of practical skills, and a nice vacation home in the country. It's an eminently logical win-win, and Scott has taken comfort in that. "I'm not waiting until the ground is shaking to prepare for the Y2K earthquake," he muses. "I'm going to be ready for an 8.5. I may look foolish if it turns out to be minor, but that's OK. That's the nature of decisionmaking under uncertainty." Kevin Poulsen is a columnist for ZDTV.com . America Offline ( Inside the Great Blackout of '00 ) "Most of the nation's power systems must be compliant, or they all go down, region by region, in one gigantic, rolling blackout," warns Gary North, keeper of the oldest, most notorious Y2K doomsday site on the Web. If the lights go out at the dawn of the 21st century, North believes the failure will be permanent, because the computers that control the grid will be unfixable if there isn't power to run them. Thereafter, he argues, the blackout will trigger the collapse of civilization. The North American grid is vulnerable to simultaneous failures. Generating facilities in the US, Canada, and Mexico jointly move power through high-tension lines that distribute electricity through four regional interconnections. Within each region, if one facility goes offline, the others compensate to pick up the slack. But there's not much spare capacity built into the system; the North American Electric Reliability Council, a group that is drawing up a timetable of Y2K fixes for the Department of Energy, admits that if multiple generating facilities fail in one region, this "may result in stressing the electric system to the point of a cascading outage over a large area." This is how it could happen: A power station is equipped with safety systems that deactivate steam boilers if they aren't maintained frequently. Suppose maintenance was last performed in 1999, which an embedded chip recorded as "99." Now it's the year 2000, so the chip subtracts the old year, 99, from the new year, 00, and finds, amazingly, that maintenance was last performed -99 years ago. Clearly this is an error, so the chip shuts down all the boilers, just to be safe. Meanwhile, at another power station, a temperature sensor attached to a transformer averages its readings over time. On January 1, 2000, the sensor divides temperature by the year - which is expressed as "00" - and comes up with an infinite value, triggering another shutdown signal. If small faults like these knock out a half dozen facilities, the rest will go offline to protect generators from burning out in a hopeless effort to meet the growing demand. The distribution grid also has weak points. "We have at least 800 different types of embedded controls on the wires," explains Gary Steeves, director of a Y2K project at TransAlta Utilities, the largest investor-owned power company in Canada. "Some of the protective devices log dates of faults in activity and can automatically take a component out of service." If the same controller has been installed in thousands of remote locations, and the chips share the same Y2K bug, they'll all fail simultaneously. Most US power utilities refuse to comment on the likelihood of these disasters, fearing litigation if they offer reassurances that turn out to be wrong. Tim Wilson, publisher of Y2k News, worries about the nearly 9,000 small regional companies that pull power off the grid at the local level. "They're clueless as to what to do about Y2K," says Wilson. "They know they have embedded chips, but they don't know where they are. If there's a power shortage, rural areas may not be allowed to take power off the grid, because cities could have a higher priority." This suggests an ironic scenario: Remote areas may remain dark for weeks or months after January 1, 2000, leaving Y2K survivalists waiting in their isolated cabins for the lights to come back on - while complacent urban dwellers enjoy uninterrupted service. - Charles Platt Copyright © 1993-98 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Compilation Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. 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