[SC-L] 2010 bug hits millions of Germans | World news | The Guardian

[McCown, Christian M]

Anybody heard of Von Neumann probes?  Google it.  Then imagine what might happen if we (humans) employ the same (p*ss) poor programming discipline we do today into something like that.  Fun to ruminate on.


________
Chris McCown *
Intel Corp




-----Original Message-----
From: sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org [mailto:sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org] On Behalf Of Wall, Kevin
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:37 PM
To: 'ljknews'; Secure Coding
Subject: Re: [SC-L] 2010 bug hits millions of Germans | World news | The Guardian

Larry Kilgallen wrote...

> At 10:43 AM -0600 1/7/10, Stephen Craig Evans wrote:
>
> > I am VERY curious to learn how these happened... Only using the last
> > digit of the year? Hard for me to believe. Maybe it's in a
> single API
> > and somebody tried to be too clever with some bit-shifting.
>
> My wife says that in the lead-up to the year 2000 she caught
> some programmers "fixing" Y2K bugs by continuing to store
> year numbers in two digits and then just prefixing output
> with 19 if the value was greater than some two digit number
> and prefixing output with 20 if the value was less than or
> equal to that two digit number.
>
> Never underestimate programmer creativity.
>
> Never overestimate programmer precision.

While I never fixed any Y2K problems I worked next to someone
who did for about 6 months. What you refer to is pretty much what
I mentioned as the "fixed window" technique that was very common
to those developers who were addressing the problems at the time.

IIRC, it was a particularly popular approach for those who waited until
the last moment to address Y2K issues in there systems because it still
allowed for 2 digit year fields in all their forms and databases and output.

---
Kevin W. Wall           Qwest Information Technology, Inc.
Kevin.Wall at qwest.com    Phone: 614.215.4788
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
 that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
 they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration"
    - Edsger Dijkstra, How do we tell truths that matter?
      http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html

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