Twenty years of Y2K. The disaster that was not

For those of us born long before, the year two thousand was full of promise. Going on vacation to Mars, almost instantaneous travel to places thousands of miles away, delicious pill meals, and robots doing all the hard work. As the date drew near, it was clear that almost none of that was going to come to pass. On the contrary, it seemed that the change of the first two digits it was going to bring us a huge headache.

I am not referring to the discussion of whether the millennium began in two thousand or two thousand and one (which, oddly enough, took up a lot of time in the media). I'm talking about called “two thousand or Y2K effect.

The problem of the year 2000

If you had the opportunity to see pre-printed documents from the last century, you will have noticed that the first two digits of the year were pre-printed in the date section. Programmers the days when RAM was expensive and in short supply they had adopted the same custom. It is thus that years were represented by the last two digits.

¿What would happen after 11:59 on December 31, 1999? The fact that date counting would start over from the first day it appeared in the operating system. For example, in all Windows up to version 3x, January 1, 2000 would be April 1, 1980, the earliest date that appears in MS DOS.

At that time already quite a few essential services were controlled by computers. The specialists were afraid that the power supply would be suspended, the planes would go down and the data of bank accounts would vanish.

The linuxeros of the time did not care. Unix-inspired or derived operating systems they would not have problems until 3:14:08 on January 19, 2038. In fact, we are not going to have them because by that time all systems are going to be 64-bit. The error derived from storing the day in 32-bit format.
Although there were isolated incidents throughout the world (El article from Wikipedia consists almost entirely of an enum) were not significant enough to justify the concern generated. In fact, it is worth asking if it was not an orchestrated campaign by computer companies to generate millions in consulting billing or force equipment upgrades. Politicians also did not hurt to do what they like the most. Spending our tax money on publicity campaigns about the problem.

Twenty years of Y2K. We learned nothing

Although in practice Y2K had no real effects, It could have left us the teaching of keeping our computers up to date and having backup copies of everything. In these two decades we had quite a few real disasters. Let's list a few.

heartbleed

Heartbleed was a severe vulnerability in the widely used OpenSSL cryptographic software library. Thanks to this error it was possible steal information protected, under normal conditions, by SSL / TLS encryption. SSL / TLS encryption is used to provide security and privacy for communications over the Internet for applications such as the web, email, instant messaging (IM), and some virtual private networks (VPNs).

Unauthorized persons could read the memory of the systems supposedly protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromised the secret keys used to identify service providers and to encrypt traffic, user names and passwords, and sensitive content.

Meltdown and Specter

In recent years we learned about a series of computer problems that were not limited to one program or operating system specific. Since they had to do with the very heart of computing (microprocessors) they could have consequences as serious as the hypothetical Y2K

Meltdown and Specter take advantage of critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. Thanks to them programs can be created that steal data as it is processed on the computer. Although software is not normally allowed to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Specter to take over data stored in the memory of other running programs. This can include passwords stored in a password manager or browser, personal photos, emails, instant messages, and all critical information for the user.
Vulnerabilities like these work on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud.

The moral of this is that the Y2K did not pass, but something the same or worse could happen. Hence the importance of having the system updated and paying attention to security notices. And of course take backup of the backup.