What is the Millennium Bug?

The computer year 2000 problem is also called "the millennium bug", "the computer millennium millennium bug problem" or "the millennium crisis". Abbreviated as "Y2K". Refers to some intelligent systems (including computer systems, automatic control chips, etc.) that use computer programs. Because the year is only represented by two decimal digits, when the system performs (or involves) a date that spans the century When processing calculations (such as calculations or comparisons between multiple dates), erroneous results will occur, which will cause a variety of system dysfunctions or even crashes. Therefore, the millennium bug is fundamentally a program bug (computer program failure), not a virus.

Millennium bug

(Computer 2000 issue)

The "Millennium Bug" impact is huge. From the computer system including the BIOS of the PC,

Where are worms?

So, where does the millennium bug mainly occur? As far as the situation in the world is concerned, the millennium bug mainly focuses on two aspects:

One is an application system on a host computer equipped with an earlier (approximately put into use before the mid-1980s), such as an application running on IBM 4381, IBM AS / 400 and other models. These machine systems have been applied quite early in the world. Therefore, the applications on them have been developed and developed for more than ten years, and their scale has been very large. For example, AT & T Telecommunications Company in the United States has more than 360 million rows of internal application needs. Detecting whether there is a problem in the year 2000 is indeed a lot of work, so it caused great trouble to solve the problem in the year 2000.

Another vulnerable aspect of the millennium bug is embedded devices. The so-called embedded device refers to a system using a smart chip in the device. Due to the low price of smart chips, embedded devices have become ubiquitous. Production lines, a large number of automated instruments, automobiles, elevators, alarm systems, fire detection Appliances to medical equipment, as well as telephone exchanges, air conditioners, traffic lights, thermostats, etc., can be said to penetrate every corner of daily life. The programs used in these devices are often hardened into components. Therefore, once the product uses only two digits to indicate the year, it will cause the year 2000 problem. To replace these chips, the entire system often has to be replaced. This will cause financial and operational difficulties, make it more troublesome to solve the year 2000 problem, and it is also one of the hidden dangers that the year 2000 problem cannot be solved on time.

What about the PCs we commonly use?

2010 Millennium Bug 2010

The millennium bug incident of 2000, a loophole that paralyzed almost all electronic devices, quietly appeared again after 10 years of silence.

According to recent Internet news, unexpectedly, in 2010, a "Millennium Bug" problem similar to 2000 appeared again. (year 2010)

Bank card failure

The German Banking Association warned on the 5th that when it enters 2010, more than 25 million German bank cards may be damaged by software vulnerabilities similar to the "Millennium Bug", causing computer chips to fail to recognize the year "2010", thereby allowing automatic withdrawals Bank customers who use the card to make withdrawals or use cards in Germany or even overseas branches cannot use bank cards.

Skip 2010 until 2016

For some unknown reason, the computer clock at the Queensland Bank Card Processing Centre in Australia, after passing December 31, 2009, abnormally turned directly to January 1, 2016, passing six years in the middle. However, what are the consequences of such a situation?

Most directly, a large number of Queensland businesses rely on the bank to process their credit card payments, and a large number of credit cards have expired before 2016, so almost all transactions are paralyzed. However, although the cause has not been identified, the bank has initiated a manual approval process to ensure the normal operation of the economy.

The millennium bug problem is reproduced on mobile phones

Maybe everyone thinks that Australian banks are still far away from us, but what effect would it have if the same loopholes appeared in our phones? Most of the found have appeared on WM system models, and the text messages received by users after January 1, 2010 will be displayed as January 1, 2016. Although some players have released patches, Microsoft officials have not taken any action.

"Receiving future information" is always a joke, but the same incident reappears after 10 years, it is really incredible. Is the machine inherently unreliable? Or is the machine language written by humans inherently flawed? Everything is inconclusive.

Symantec Product Events

On December 6, according to foreign media reports, Symantec warned that its Endpoint Protection Manager server product incorrectly marked virus signature updates released in 2010 as expired.

This issue affects the small business versions of this product, Symantec Endpoint Protection v11.x and v12.x. Symantec said in its blog that antivirus, antispyware and intrusion detection software updates released after 11:59 pm on December 31, 2009 were considered outdated.

Symantec has released a number of new version number updates to bypass this issue, however, the software date is December 31. Symantec is working on a permanent patch.

Symantec claims that this problem also affects users who use both Symantec Host Integrity software and NAC (Network Access Control) software. Host Integrity software checks that the antivirus software definitions of clients connected to the network are up to date. Symantec says that the Host Integrity check will fail, however, Symantec detailed in a blog post how to bypass this issue.

Taxi pricing affected

Chongqing Evening News reported on January 3 that due to the system time not automatically jumping into 2010, nearly a thousand taxis in Wuhu City, Anhui Province, had the first zero-hour meter in 2010 to "zero" failure.

According to reports, there are two kinds of "symptoms" for a malfunctioning meter. The meter that was produced in Shanghai arrived at 00:00 on January 1, 2000, and its displayed price automatically jumped to 0 yuan. Then there is no reason to change the starting price from 5 yuan to 6 yuan. Experts said that the failure was due to the chaos of the computer system time of the meter from 2009 to 2010, which caused chaos. It is very similar to the "Millennium Bug", so the old meter must be replaced with a chip.

2038 Millennium Bug 2038

Similar to the Millennium bug problem in the early 21st century, the 32-bit Unix operating system and Linux operating system time overflow problem is also known as the Year 2038 problem. If you want to know what the 2038 problem is, you need to know some technical things. This bug is caused by the C language used to write Unix / Linux. In C, time_t is used to represent time and date. Time_t is an integer (int) type. It is used to record from January 1, 1970 to 2000. The number of seconds elapsed.

This data is stored in 32 bits, the first bit is the sign bit, and the remaining 31 bits are used to store numbers, and the maximum number that can be stored by these 31 bits is 2147483647.

Calculated from 1970, the maximum number of seconds that can be represented by these 31 digits can be up to 03:14:07 on January 19, 2038. When the time reaches this number, the system will have problems. It will automatically increase, but will become -2147483648, and the time represented by this string of numbers is 20:45:52 on December 13, 1901, which will cause a lot of problems and even crashes.

The 2038 problem is not only more covert than the millennium bug, but also more destructive than the previous millennium bug, because the millennium bug problem will only cause problems at the application layer, such as credit card payment systems or management systems. The 2038 bug will affect the bottom-level time control function of the system.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to extend the length of Unix time and represent it as a 64-bit number. The actual usable number of 64-bit binary numbers is 63. The maximum UTC time to the Gregorian calendar is 292,277,026,596 at 15:30:08 on December 4, 1949. If human civilization still existed at that time, the AD era is probably already too difficult Used and abandoned. Ideally, by 2038, 64-bit systems have become mainstream, thereby avoiding the large overhead required to deliberately fix this problem. Otherwise, people have to split the new 64-bit time into two parts and save them in two variables, which is a cumbersome and inefficient choice.