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Audi Pulls Website Because Of Y2K 139

Posted by emmett from the let's-take-it-down-in-case-it-doesn't-work dept.
pinhead writes "Audi (USA) has voluntarily pulled their site because of the Y2K scare." What, are they afraid that the website will suddenly start displaying pictures of Volvos? The funniest notice we've seen today is this memo from the Auckland Airport issued 1900 years ago. Y2K has appeared mostly harmless thus far, but we may die of laughter. Update: 12/31 04:30 by E : The Auckland Airport page has been fixed.
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Audi Pulls Website Because Of Y2K More

Audi Pulls Website Because Of Y2K

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  • Hey, I said talking about. I'm not planning on doing anything.


    ...phil
  • Is this standard procedure on every new year? Seems like pretty fragile software.
  • This is on eBays site today. The eBay site will be unavailable for Y2K verification from 15:30 PST to 18:00 PST on Friday, December 31 and from 23:00 PST, Friday, December 31 to 03:00 PST, Saturday, January 1. If you try to connect to eBay during these times, you may receive a "Failed to connect" error message.

    What's the point of Y2K verification if you aren't going to be around on Y2K?

  • interstingly, http://www.vw.dk/ [www.vw.dk] is up.
  • They just fixed it...it's now reading the correct year of 2000. Maybe they realized all the traffic must be for some reason, and took a look at it. Oh well, at least I got to see it while it was still 100.

  • Re:its the same as any other time! (Score:4)

    by treat ( 84622 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @10:07AM (#1427908)
    Who's to say they didn't just pop another box in here right now on that IP so that if there is any exploits, they won't harm their real content?

    Are the people who took down their website because it's a new year -really- going to be intelligent enough to even think of that?

    Besides, www.audiusa.com/anything gives you a very nice not found page, with links to their entire site. It's still up [audiusa.com]. They just changed the main page.

  • the auckland airport notice [auckland-airport.co.nz] that all has dandy has since been updated. it no longer has the year 100, but year 2000, in the date.
  • >>Sorry, we have temporarily disabled this module. While Audiusa.com is fully prepared for Y2K and beyond, we wanted to keep our databases clear of the millennium madness everyone seems to be talking about. Full service will be restored on January 1st.

    Or, translated into plain English:

    Sorry, we have temporarily disabled this module. We at Audi don't know how to run a secure web site. We keep our database records on our web server. Full service will be restored on January 1st, 1900.


  • The polaroid site has been stripped to the homepage [polaroid.com], which has a notice that is is being "upgraded" and will be available again on New Year's day.

    I would suppose this to be an example of hacker fears - I would assume that they figured without server scripts they'd be that much less hackable...

  • I agree, and they are still "nifty." I own a 1968 VW Type III fastback, which is a rare beast here in Philadelphia, PA. How I long for the days when I didn't live on a steep incline, when I could get underneath it and work without the fear that the crummy emergency brake would give out, killing me. Ferdinand Porsche was a brilliant man. "Volkswagens don't leak oil, they MARK THEIR TERRITORY."

  • Shutting down the site (Score:3)

    by phil reed ( 626 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @09:24AM (#1427914) Homepage
    We're talking about shutting down our site, but more because of script kiddies taking the opportunity to mess with sites than because of a Y2K problem.


    ...phil
  • Any Y2K problems are not going to make ANYTHING think it's 100AD. More likely 1900AD. It's funny, but I guess I'm just picky.
  • No, I don't agree, from the localtime manpage:

    tm_year
    The number of years since 1900.

    which starting 1/1/2000, is going to be in fact 100
  • Any Y2K problems are not going to make ANYTHING think it's 100AD. More likely 1900AD. It's funny, but I guess I'm just picky.

    actually, this is a perl-ism. Perl returns the year as the actual year -1900. Therefore, a lot of perl scripts will show 100 for the date if the programmer doesn't add the 1900 back to it.
  • I got a look at the page source on the Aukland Airport site... Looked to me like the year was hardcoded. Is that necessarily the case? I don't know enough about DHTML or CGI to tell if the page source had been automatically generated or not.

    Anyways, if it was hardcoded, then it isn't a Y2K issue... Sorry to spoil the fun, guys.


    --Fesh

  • I went to the site, hit Print. It seemed to get stuck in the print queue, so I refreshed and hit Print again. I walked over to the printer and found two copies - one that said 1 Jan 100 and another that said 1 Jan 2000. I must have refreshed just as they were fixing it. Wheeheee! :)

  • Re:I have an idea! (Score:3)

    by aqua ( 3874 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @10:22AM (#1427923)
    Anyone thinking about Y10k? -- Me Dan Bernstein. He was the one that lobbied the Usenet committees to make date formats survive y10k, and proposed the TAI64 time format, which helpfully lasts from the big bang to the big crunch. Add another 64 bits and you can individually address every attosecond in the whole span.
  • One of the funnies quotes so far has to be on the BBC news site [bbc.co.uk] where is says
    The US-Russian effort to ensure no nuclear missiles are launched in error because of the bug reported a good start to the rollover.

    "There's been no glitches, everything is working smoothly," said US Air Force Col Mike Therrien at the Center for Year 2000 Strategic Stability at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

    I just hope the "good start" continues!
  • Most likely it was a little inside joke. Which unfortunatly got seen by too many people who thought it was real and it had to be removed (if you look now it says 2000).
  • I can understand why they pulled the site...I mean, "What, are they afraid that the website will suddenly start displaying pictures of Volvos?" might sound trivial for most people, but not if you're stuck driving one. 240DL stationwagon, 10 years old, 200,000 miles, beat up to hell (many small pieces are broken off, in various parking lots and highway shoulder rails).
  • Then why mention it? It added absolutely nothing to the discussions. Same as this post, save that perhaps it'll clue a few people in that "speech is silver, silence is gold."
  • What reasonably likely to occur power problem could cause hardware damage to your Starfire?
  • Ford Festiva, here. Unfortunately, no more made, so you'll all just have to wait until I die and mine goes back on the market. >:)

  • The page is more than likely a bad Perl program. The localtime function (what most people use to get the date), returns a list with the hour, minute, day, month, etc. It returns the year as the number of years since 1900, hence in 1999 it would have returned 99 and now it would 100.

    Erm, localtime in Perl is based on the C library function of the same name and behaviour. So I don't see why Perl programmes are more likely to be b0rked than C programmes.

  • Indeed, this could be the root of a y2k bug in many Perl scripts. I'm self-taught in Perl, and discovered many things (the hard way) on my own. This was one of them. But you gotta admit, returning "the number of years since 1900" seems pretty lame.

    You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format. Aside from messing up scripts that do $year+=1900, why not?

    For those out there more knowledgeable than I, why hasn't this been done?


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • Okay, I can follow that. Except for the whole idiotic notion that the power is going to go out. What have you done to prepare for the unicorn stampede that I've predicted for Jan 2? (Hint, nothing, nothing nothing.) Most of these y2K "preparations" are nothing more than some sort of odd hedging your bets against an apocalypse that isn't coming. Don's bottom line if you're afraid of the end of the world, then turning off the web server doesn't matter.
  • I saved a postscript copy for use at work on monday. I'd put it up somewhere on the web if I could, but I don't have a suitable place to do so.

    --

  • i think i speak for most of the windows users on slashdot as i say:

    huh?

    Yeah, Windows users seem to say that a lot..

    :-)

  • Well, it doesn't matter who is at fault, it's a Y2K bug anyway. Having said that: it's actually always a coder. If not the one of the application, it's the one of the library, the compiler, the OS, the cpu (yes), ...

    --

  • Re:*sigh*... Stupid Perl Programmers Strike Again (Score:3)

    by mce ( 509 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @11:08AM (#1427943) Homepage Journal
    Speaking of being lame, in JavaScript, things are even lamer. In versions prior to 1.2, if the year is less than 2000, you get the number of years since 1900, but after that you get the full year. To make matters worse, this has been changed in later versions. See http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Ken_North /y2k_web.htm [compuserve.com] for more details.

    I really wonder who came up with all these wonderful ideas and what stuff they have been smoking at the time.

    --

  • Am I the only one to notice that the first plane to take off in the new millenium was headed from NZ to California?

    Hmmm, they take off at 1/1/2000 00:04, go east, cross the date line, where it is still 12/31/1999 and about 16-18 hours later, experience the millenium rollover AGAIN?

    Three cheers for getting back to work!

    Tim

    LinuxLocal.com for full-time 100% Linux Consultants [linuxlocal.com]

  • As is audi.com [audi.com]. (Not the USA site.)
  • You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format.

    Besides breaking existing software, as you said, it would also add needless confusion. Right now Perl's localtime function is identical to C's. C's can't be changed because it would also break a lot of existing software. It would just be a huge, huge mess, for no real benefit.

  • Anyone out there want a 1992 Audi 100S?

    While I've been a loyal Audi fan/owner for over 15 years, I'm affraid that when my co-workers hear about Audi's "millennium madness" over Y2k, I'm toast. So much for my plans to buy an A8 and TT this year.

  • Can someone put up a mirror of the Auckland Airport page before it got fixed. Picturing the "100" there is almost funny enough.

  • West Virginia's educational system relies on a computer network called wvnet [wvnet.edu]. When my sister tried to check her mail on West Virginia U's pop account, no dice. It appears wvnet has taken down all sites (universities, colleges) but their main portal. I'm not sure if this caution is so prudent. Unless all the techies stuck at work want the bandwidth for themselves to play massive quake areans...

    ---
  • Sorry about getting the comparison wrong. Does the time of year count as an excuse? :-)

    Having said that, in 1999, it displayed 99. This is generally correct in a human-computer interface context, since leaving out the century is a well accepted convention (and has been for much longer then we've had computers). It may be a silly or in some contexts even dangerous convention and all that, but that in itself doesn't make it incorrect.

    In 2000 it displays 100, which is incorrect except if the spec says something like "display tm_year". So, the question then becomes: does anyone have the spec for this thing written down and approved by management? :-)

    --

  • Re:Any mirrors? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://go.to/y2kmistakes [go.to]

  • What's the point of Y2K verification if you aren't going to be around on Y2K?

    Well I would guess they want to check that nothing they control failed when the time came and then go on-line with confidence. I don't think all this effort was spent to make sure everything in the world was working precisely at midnight, more that things are all back to normal as soon as possible afterwards.


    Chris Morgan


    They made me turn my Ultra10 workstation off as a precaution. Pah!

  • Grr...If you didn't prepare for y2k by checking your code, and that of your vendors, then have the guts to leave it up and watch what happens! Putting your head in the sand, then saying "just in case, we're taking our site down..." is worthless, and does nothing to inspire consumer confidence.

    Now, if you _did_ prepare, then you should KNOW that you're fine, and again...there is no reason to take your site down.

    Personally, the malfunctions that we're going to see are going to be few and far between, and probably 90+% of them are not going to show up on the roll over anyways!

    People are sad. I'm glad I'm only going to see one of these stupid things.

    -Buffy
  • While I am not a Sub. hater, and am not a loyal Audi owner, I tend to think you are way off base claiming "eat for lunch". One is four door, one is two door. There's a price difference. Not leather in onw, leather in the other; and ofcourse Coilovers, chips, and brake upgrades make them about equal for the same upgrade cost. From Edmunds.com new car guide. Keep in mind, I am not bashing/hailing either of these; just being objective.

    Impreza Coupe 2.5 RS 2-Dr 5-Speed
    Invoice = $17,686
    Performance Data
    Acceleration (0-60 mph): 8.2 sec.
    Braking Distance (60-0 mph): 128 ft.
    Roadholding Index: 0.80
    Base Number of Cylinders: 4
    Base Engine Size: 2.5 liters
    Horsepower: 165 hp @ 5600 rpm
    Torque: 166 ft-lbs. @ 4000 rpm

    A4 Sedan 1.8T 4-Dr 5-Speed
    Invoice = $21,356
    Performance Data
    Acceleration (0-60 mph): 8.0 sec.
    Braking Distance (60-0 mph): 139 ft.
    Roadholding Index: 0.79
    Base Number of Cylinders: 4
    Base Engine Size: 1.8 liters
    Horsepower: 150 hp @ 5700 rpm
    Torque: 155 ft-lbs. @ 1750 rpm

  • Ah -- if it's identical to C's, then I understand why it would cause such a ruckus to change it. I agree that it would cause more mess than benefit. Still makes me wonder why it wasn't 4-digit year from the start. ;)

    Thanks!


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • Yeah, I've been affected by this stuff too. My school (www.mc.maricopa.edu [maricopa.edu]) decided to shut down THE ENTIRE NETWORK from Noon (our time) today until Jan 2. Huh?

    No e-mail, no Netscape roaming access, no web pages, no FTP, no Telnet.

    Do they really want me to get drunk and party? Cuz that's the only thing left. =)


    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
  • How did you teach yourself Perl without reading the documentation?

    By reading lots of FAQ's, tutorials, etc on multitudes of webpages... and reading other people's code. It was certainly a messy way to go about it, I'll give you that!
    I wouldn't encourage anybody else to learn it the way I did. Certainly my investments in Perl books have been completely worth it!


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • Because, your opinion to the contrary, I believe it does contribute, if only to show a certain position. Your mileage may vary.


    ...phil
  • Sorry, the flight, like 99.999% of aviation (this excludes John Denver-type flyers) are on UTC time. Every critical service runs on UTC (military, etc.) and so far as I've heard there have been no problems (UTC 00:00 was 1.38 hours ago).

    So the plane only experienced rollover once. (Facts mess up fun...)

    :-only kona in my cup-:

    :-robert taylor-:

    :-only kona in my cup-:

    :-robert taylor-:
  • and more data... (from other post) Impreza Coupe 2.5 RS 2-Dr 5-Speed Invoice = $17,686 Performance Data Acceleration (0-60 mph): 8.2 sec. Braking Distance (60-0 mph): 128 ft. Roadholding Index: 0.80 Base Number of Cylinders: 4 Base Engine Size: 2.5 liters Horsepower: 165 hp @ 5600 rpm Torque: 166 ft-lbs. @ 4000 rpm S4-Same specs as A4 2.8T, however, add a biturbo (that's 2 turbos) 250 bhp engine with about the same ft-lbs of torque, knock a few seconds off the 0-60 time and add quattro standard. (therego matching the 4wd of the sub) M3-Dream on, 250 bhp, handling superior to every car i've driven, and from its reviews, most ever car but another german, porsche. OK, no 4wd, and the impending nuclear winter impending with the *y2k crisis* it may not be the best. But the audi will still clean up, reguardless of subaru leaving their site up while audi erred on the side of caution and did not.
  • The high school I graduated from in West Virginia rolled back everything to 1997. Those of us that live here, however, realize that once you cross the border it's really 1946.
  • Subaru Impreza RS toasting an A4? Laughable. The build quality differences alone make an Audi customer != a Subaru customer.

    For starters, they aren't even in the same class. The Audi, at best, is a competitor with the Legacy.

    With the 1.8T, the A4 is barely behind the 2.5 in the RS. With the 2.8 (what most quattro drivers choose), all the Impreza driver will see is taillights. And the A4 1.8T is only $2500 more, btw.
  • Eek..you're right. I actually thought about localtime before I made that post but I think I was in a bit of a hurry. I guess since I've always preferred that the full date be displayed the thought never crossed my mind.

    Why was the standard this way? Seems counter-intuitive. Is it just another throwback from when everyone had to conserve as much memory as possible?

  • Haven't driven that model of subaru, but i have an A4 1.8t and other subaru's. All i can say is build/ride quality. There's a reason for paying higher prices, it's not always performance oriented. In this price range, it wouldn't even be a 1.8, it'd be the S4 with a 250bhp biturbo 2.8l v-6. Still not as fast as the one you quoted above, but...

    1: (opinion, so don't scream) the audi is styled classier. it flows better. it's also what might be called a sleeper. you wouldn't expect it to have a twin turbo engine...but...
    2: saftey. i remember that sub mention in c&d. the audi has head and side airbags. sub doesn't. (of course it is made to rally race, but i hate racing harnesses when i'm dressed for a night out)
    3: that's a special subaru. the S4 isn't. audi dealers have them in stock.

    All opinion of course. Some like German, some like Japan. I prefer the bavarian. Now, back to preparing for doomsday, EST. Let's save the car talk for a non-tech news/forum site.
  • Trying to store the date as a byte doesn't save memory.

    If you use the word alignment option in your compiler, it still takes up 2 or 4 bytes depending on the definition of a word.

    If you don't use alignment, you pay a severe penalty in accessing variables.

  • its the same as any other time! (Score:3)

    by Mo B. Dick ( 100537 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @09:33AM (#1427982) Homepage
    Do they not realize that their security problems will be the same during Jan. 1 as any other time! Do backdoors and exploits magically show up on Jan. 1 2000? wow thats news to me if they do!
  • It's not a perl-ism, but a simple *nix-ism, check the ctime(3) manpage (or, if you have it, the localtime one)
  • If you're seriously afraid of a group of script kiddies wouldn't it be much more prudent (and look better in the eyes of the public) If you secured your site rather than just take it down? Seriously here... script kiddies are just that: script kiddies. They shouldn't pose a serious threat no matter how many of them there are. The only realistic "damage" they could do would be to run a DoS attack; rendering the site inoperable. Apparently however you've done that that much for them :)

  • They may have a good reason?? (Score:3)

    by vanguard ( 102038 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @09:41AM (#1427988)
    We turned off an application or two for 24 hours on our website. I guess they/we didn't want any change orders created while it was 2000 in some parts of the world and 1999 in others.
  • So does that mean that you're running an insecure site?

  • Here's an excerpt from the email...

    Y2K is nearly here! That means we can finally stop guessing about what Y2K is going to do to the world's computers - and get on with our lives. As a precautionary measure, AllAdvantage.com is going to disconnect its servers from the Internet and watch the millennial date change from the sidelines.

    We will be disconnected from 23:59 PST (GMT -0800) on December 30 through 12:00 PST (GMT -0800) on January 1.

    You will be UNABLE TO ACCRUE PAID SURFING TIME DURING THIS 36-HOUR PERIOD.

    We value your privacy and the security of your data, and this temporary suspension of service is designed to protect our community from any unanticipated effects from the date changeover.

    I don't think any comments are needed from my end...

    --

  • From Audi's site:

    Sorry, we have temporarily disabled this module.

    Clearly, they're not telling the truth. If they HAD disabled that module, we wouldn't be getting a web page saying "Sorry, we have temporarily disabled this module.".
  • No shit... Its just the point that these sites are adding hype to y2k bull.
  • You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format.

    No good. This would cause Y10K bugs 8000 years from today.

  • I thought it simply returned a 2-digit value for the year. At least I had it set up to append '20' to the year once it rolled over to '00'... guess I'll have some code to fix Monday morning.
  • So that's a let down. But I'm using Yahoo as my e-mail server and it's still in the last millennium, so there's hope yet.

    I do, however, enjoy the fact that "there have been no major events", oh, except for two reported false alarms in Japanese power stations. I'm sorry, but a false alarm in a power station does just fall into my "major" category - there doesn't have to be a mushroom cloud for it to be of concern.

    What I am particularly concerned about is the immediate "The geeks were wrong and we wasted all that money" attitude that's been expressed on the TV things I've been watching. Um, people, there was a problem. If it doesn't manifest itself that's because we fixed it, not because it went away by itself. But I'm preaching to the converted here.

  • Anonymous Coward Wrote:
    By "server room power supply vendor" I meant "the company we bought the *huge* server-room power-supply conditioner / UPS from". Sure, it's supposed to take care of things, and there must be some kind of warranty, but 1) you'd have to get them to pay up, and for a multi-million dollar claim there's gonna be serious paperwork, to say the least, 2) then you have to find the hardware, and you can't just buy a Starfire at CompUSA, 3) you have to rebuild the whole cluster
    This is, in a word, stupid. If you have to worry about power problems destroying your power conditioner, then you've bought the wrong power conditioner. The setups I've seen (and I run a wimpy one-lung little ISP [brokersys.com] so I don't have any of that kind of serious hardware, oh and if you go, be sure to check out our y2k policy it's at the bottom of the page) [brokersys.com] the only danger the power system can be to the protected computer is if a power pole is driven through it by a tornado or something.

    From my perspective, either what you've got works, or it doesn't. If it works, then you've got no reason to go off-line, and every reason not to. If it doesn't work, then you shouldn't be up at all if you're afraid of the risks because the risks tonight aren't going to be any greater than the risks any other night.

    Tomorrow, on the other hand, is a different story. Think about it: 90% of all the cops of the face of the earth will be sleeping off the 36 hours of duty they have tonight, but why would anybody worry? After all it's not Y2K.

  • Well, it doesn't matter who is at fault, it's a Y2K bug anyway. Having said that: it's actually always a coder.

    No, it's not a Y2K bug. The code(r) didn't either add 1900 or prepend 19 to the string. So in 1999, it would appear as the year 99. A Y2K bug is one that works before 2000, but not after. Clearly, this would not work at any time. So it IS the coders fault (not a Y2K bug - that was the comparison I was making, coder vs. Y2K, not between the code and coder.)
  • The only thing that could damage your site as badly as you fear it would be a major nuclear catastrophe. And in that case, I believe that you and your PHBs will have other worries than your fuckin' website.
  • If you have a processor that needs to have bytes aligned on a 4 bytes boundary, then you probably have lots of memory to spare. Hint: the C library dates back from a few years ago. At that time, there was no such need for alignment ... and much less memory available.
  • because as years from 1900, it can be a byte up till 2155 or thereabouts and save memory (so theres a y2.155k problem due to ppl saving memory, but i doubt it couldn't be changed to a (small) int in another century or so, with no adverse effects, if its still a byte)

  • I'm assuming (having not seen the problem in question), that like a number of site I've seen today, people have really not been paying attention when they've been writing their perl code.

    Specifically, and as Tom Christiansen states in his Y2k essay [perl.org], the value for the year returned by the time functions is _NOT_ a two digit year... it merely _USED_ to be the case.... If you try to calcluate the year by "19".$year, you're going to be in trouble, but 1900+$year is entirely fine.

    In keeping with the whole Y2k issue in general... fixing the base behaviour of the system (if necessary) is easy... fixing the behaviour of the cluefully-challenged coder, or (worse still) the end user, is a far tougher job.

    Personally... as somebody who's just survived the whole roll-ever thing with nothing worse than a feeling that he shouldn't have hit the scotch _QUITE_ so hard, and a crashed MS Exchange server that he'll fix tomorrow, I'd just like to say that I feel pretty damned good about the whole damned thing. Now... if only I'd have been on paid overtime for posting comments at >5am the following day ;)


    -- Jules
  • That's right, I spent yesterday afternoon backing up the servers then shutting the entire company down. We left up the PABX, an answering machine, a couple of faxes and the fridge - but everything else was turned off.

    See, while our major telecommunications giant stood up and said that ther would be no Y2k problems, our power utility only ever went as far as to say "the disruption should be minimal". Since the quality of the power in our building is crappy at the best of times (the UPS for one server trips every morning when the air conditioning is switched on) we decided that we should turn off and un-plug everything we cared about.

    Anyway, it's just a moderately sized local real estate agent - it's not like the computer systems will be needed until Tuesday anyway. Better safe than trying to source parts in January.

  • Those stupids blocked ICMP packets, including ping and MTU discovery. I'm guessing it was Al Gore's fault.
    ---
  • I wonder if Perl will get a bad wrap (sic) as these programs start to break and die.

    Here's one example [internic.net] of this, where someone posted a message to a mailing list claiming that Y2K errors in his Perl scripts are due to a "bug" in Perl.

  • It would be server side (CGI, ASP etc)
    Dynamic HTML is done client side, all the text would be downloaded but then the text would dynamically change from what's already been downloaded.
    And you'd need IE to do it properly anyway.

  • While I've been a loyal Audi fan/owner for over 15 years, I'm affraid that when my co-workers hear about Audi's "millennium madness" over Y2k, I'm toast. So much for my plans to buy an A8 and TT this year.

    Then it seems to me you're buying cars for the wrong reasons. Why on earth would you change your opinion about what car to own because of the manufacturers website? I can well imagine Porsche not having a great website (I don't actually know) but if I had the right amount of money it wouldn't hold me back, let alone what my coworkers thought. Hell if I went by my coworkers opinions I'd have a Ford Truck and a Cadillac.

  • My concern was more about viruses than y2k. Because of the holidays, we have been flooded with this animated greeting card crap. No matter how many times we tell our users not to run 'em, they never listen. We decided to deny all attachments that came in though our firewall. Standard email worked just fine.

    Several of our clients/vendors likes the idea and decided they would do the same. Problem is, they don't run linux firewalls/servers... they are all MS shops. They could not find a way to just remove the attachments. They had to either deny all email or let everything through. I have no experience with MS exchange so I don't know if it's a limitation of the software or of the admins... regardless... I still find it pretty funny.

  • It would be on CNN. Nukes traveled more than 500 km would be reported. Any warheads not travelling that far have not been reported. I.E. the scud missles that were actually launched to test radar.
  • The page is more than likely a bad Perl program. The localtime function (what most people use to get the date), returns a list with the hour, minute, day, month, etc. It returns the year as the number of years since 1900, hence in 1999 it would have returned 99 and now it would 100.

    Some Perl programmers (use the last part loosely), have been concatingating "19" to the front of the year instead of adding 1900. I wonder if Perl will get a bad wrap as these programs start to break and die. I hope not; I Perl.

  • nmap -sS 198.137.240.92 -O -F -o oops.log

    What was that about script kiddies now? =)

  • audi is owned by VW and vw.com is also down!!


  • "actually, this is a perl-ism. Perl returns the year as the actual year -1900. "


    Don't make it sound like perl is to blame here.
    It's the ANSI C library's method of storing time.
    Perl, in order to be portable, uses ANSI C, so it
    inherits this from C.

    At least perl scalars are able to hold the five
    digits of "19100" without causing a segfault.
    If a char pointer in C has been alloc'd 4 bytes
    for the year, and gets 5 bytes copied into it,
    unpredictable behavior follows.
  • which starting 1/1/2000, is going to be in fact 100

    Yeah, and before that would be 0-99, so I guess if this page was up yesterday the date would have read Dec 31, 99? Obviously if the method of generating this year generates 100 now, it wouldn't have added a '19' previously. The coder (if this date is truly generated and not hardcoded) is at fault, not the software; if a 0-99 was expected before, a 100 should be expected now. That's what they got.
  • I laughed my ass off. I think the page (complete with "NEWS FLASH" in big red letters) was intended as a joke.
  • http://www.rolls-royceandbentley.co.uk/
    The web guys at rools must have some brains -they all run netscape enterprise 3.6
  • I came here to post that vw.com is also down, and that audi is part of the volkswagen motor group... since that's already been mentioned, I'll just say this: The is just a preventive measue. I think we can all feel comfortable that VW and Audi's servers are probably Y2K compliant. But, as has been mentioned, there's an undeniably higer probability for cracking, etc. on this day, and they're just covering their ass. What's the big deal? Seems to me that they're just being prudent, not being pussies... Jeff Croft http://newbeetle.org
  • We use older systems dated 1995/1996 (running Linux and FreeBSD), which weren't checked/fixed against possible y2k problems. They run webservers, databases, home-made programs (C, shell-scripts, PHP/FI) and everything still works fine.

    So was all this Y2K-panic-making really necessary? Everything works - no extra checks were necessary.

    :-)
    ms

  • My Quicken gives the year 100 for transactions in 2000. Fortunately, I never really use it... :)

    Known bug in NT SP 4 and unpatched Win95's MFC short date format. (Notice: For NT 4, the bug was introduced with that service pack, and fixed in SP 5.

  • So the plane only experienced rollover once. (Facts mess up fun...)

    Irrelevant: The passengers got to celebrate the new year twice. That's the important bit.

  • I went through all of the screenshots there. As expected some the same bad programming shows up over and over.

    1) Many were of the variety 19100 because of the lousy years since 1900 design of unix/C/Perl, etc.

    2) A number of site demonstrate the even bigger kludge of Java returning 2 digit year, unless it is 2000+, in which case it is a four digit year, thus 192000 (only some versions of java)

    3) Jan 1 1900 was popular as well -- of course, this was the failure mode that was always reported by the news media. A pretty obvious programming error.

    4) Dec 32 1999 was a lot more common than I would have guessed. Is there a simple algorithmic flaw that would allow this? I know that if you clock reports a julian date, and you convert this to a plaintext equivalent and you start by getting the year wrong, it would be possible to end up with December 32. But why would you have gotten the year wrong in the first place?

    5) There were a couple of bizarre ones, like the year 3700. I can't image the coding errors needed to produce this.
  • Heh, is he serious?
    I've just fixed the code to display date correctly at the top of the page whcih is a perl script by adding the command:
    $year = 2100 - $year;
    That's just too stupid... He'll be showing 1999 when 2001 comes around :)
  • This looks like it:

    http://douglas.min.net/~drw/y2k1.gif [min.net]
  • Despite what you saw on the news, 100 or 19100 is extremely likely. The only reasonable explanation I've seen for 1900 is COBOL programs where 99+1 can wrap to 0.
  • Most likely it was something like a server-side include. If they're working properly you never see the HTML code that inserts the text into your page -- just the result.
    --
  • For the record, the Volkswagen Motors Group owns all of these: VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Rolls Royce, Bently, Bugatti, and Lambroghini.
  • Who's to say they didn't just pop another box in here right now on that IP so that if there is any exploits, they won't harm their real content?

  • like the swiss page that has "19%d",date making it 19100 and the like. It just means we should have to come up with a slightly different way of displaying the date. A pain in the arse, true, but that's the way the sundial crumbles.

    19%d is the different way of displaying the date. tm.tm_year is the number of years since 1900. "19%d", tm->tm_year saves a couple keystrokes over "%d", tm->tm_year+1900, that's why people do it. It's very easy to add 1900 to a number, and it's very well known that this is how localtime() works. No pain.

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