Chapter 30 Y2K Judgment Day

When it comes to the Y2K bug, everyone who uses a computer will be familiar with it.In the era when computer terminal equipment has been popularized in thousands of households, human beings are increasingly dependent on computers.Without it, the convenient modern life will not go on normally.Therefore, once a computer crisis occurs, the entire human society will be paralyzed. In 1988, a storm in the Internet world attracted the attention of human beings. This is - computer "worms" will eat the Internet.This computer crisis lasted until the millennium, and the system crisis of the computer itself reminded people of the end of the world. Therefore, some people defined the millennium as the judgment day of the Y2K bug.

"Worm", more precisely, should be a computer virus.The virus always replicates itself in binary form and spreads via remote logins, file transfers, and e-mail.These programs also have their own encryption measures and exist as files in the root directory of the computer.Computer users usually delete them manually, but just deleting them is not enough, they may be regenerated the next time the computer is started. In the next few days, this virus attacked the Internet with an unstoppable force.Thousands of computers were infected, the Internet was nearly paralyzed, and the whole world was in panic about computer viruses.

Thousands of computers were completely paralyzed under the large-scale attack of "worms". They not only replicated themselves in large numbers, but also locked the computer system tightly, so that IBM, the world's number one computer company, had to shut down the infected "worm". 350,000 computers infected by the "worm" virus for as long as 3 days.The worm attack caused direct economic losses of several billion dollars. Although the virus was broken in the end, the crisis in the computer system itself has not been eliminated.Especially at the end of the century, the "millennium crisis" began to rage, and people believed that this crisis in the computer itself would lead to the end of the world in advance.

It turns out that most software of the computer system uses the last 2 codes of the AD year to represent the date, for example, December 22, 1998 is represented as 98/12/22.This is a kind of memory saving under computer binary, which is convenient for calculation.However, the problem lies in this way of dating.Because the computer system cannot recognize the true meaning of 00, it may be 1900 or 2000, so the computer cannot recognize the date correctly, or a calculation error occurs.For those industries and businesses that rely too much on computers, it will cause irreparable major losses and disorder.Further, it will lead to the paralysis of various industries in the society, which will lead to social turmoil.

Year after year, until the new century was approaching, everyone suddenly realized that using two digits to represent the year would not be able to correctly identify the year 2000 and beyond. In 1997, the information industry began to raise the alarm bell of the "Year 2000 Bug", which soon attracted global attention. How did the Y2K bug disrupt our lives? If the Y2K problem is not resolved in time, our lives may experience some unexpected chaos.For example, in the financial industry, by the year 2000, the computers in the bank may interpret the year 2000 as 1900, causing confusion in the interest calculation of the financial industry, and even automatically deleting all records; In the telecommunications industry, if a call was made for 3 minutes at 23:59 on December 31, 1999, the bill of the telephone exchange may display these 3 minutes as 100 years.

Even if people didn't buy computers, they wouldn't think Y2K had anything to do with you.That's why the Y2K crisis has everyone panicking. The crisis about the millennium is getting worse.Some people predict that the paralysis of computers will cause large-scale power outages, and even cause unpredictable disasters such as nuclear explosions.And the culprit of all this is just that little "worm" virus.This atmosphere of terror and panic spread from the United States to Europe, and then became popular all over the world.Panicked people bought guns and ammunition to protect themselves, and some even dug bunkers in advance as shelters in times of crisis.

When the bell struck the year 2000, the millennium had truly arrived.However, human beings have not come to an end, and they still exist on this planet stably.Prior to this, computer experts overcame the chronological problem in binary, and there was no so-called confusion about whether 00 represented 1900 or 2000. The impact of this change is long-lasting. The Washington Post has reported that evangelical new churches are advising believers to stockpile food for the most dire of times.Leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have hinted that the dawn of the new millennium will lead to the destruction of the world, as described in the book of Revelation.

However, the Y2K crisis did not disappear with the passing of the millennium. The Y2K event 10 years ago, the virus that paralyzed almost all electronic devices, quietly reappeared after 10 years of silence.According to recent Internet news, beyond people's expectations, the "Year 2000" problem reappeared in 2010. The Association of German Banks warned on the 5th that as we entered 2010, more than 25 million German bank cards could be damaged by a software bug similar to the "Year 2010 bug", which caused computer chips to fail to recognize the year "2010", thus allowing the use of automatic withdrawals. Bank customers who withdraw cash at machines or branches in Germany or even abroad and spend with cards cannot use bank cards.To this end, banks have initiated manual approval processes to keep the economy going.

It is indeed unbelievable that the same incident happened again after 10 years.Is the machine inherently unreliable, or is the machine language written by humans inherently flawed?Everything is still inconclusive, but the Judgment Day caused by the Y2K bug may continue to dominate in the long future.