Private sector gears up
for Y2K bug
Telephone companies around the world have taken sufficient precautions to protect themselves from the millennium computer bug, industry leaders told a conference in November.
British Telecommunications said it has almost completed its remedial program and believes the industry generally has the issue under control.
"We will have completed our work by December 1998 with just
a few minor laggards," said Andy Green, BT's director, Group
Strategy and Development.
"Yes, we do not expect the process to be an easy one as this
is a serious issue. However, most of the industry is dealing with
it in an effective way. We have insisted that all of our companies
around the world comply and we don't expect any variation,"
Green added.
Experts believe that many computers may crash at midnight on December
31, 1999 because they only use the last two digits to signify
the year. Therefore 1900 becomes indistinguishable from 2000.
According to Christopher Rooney, chief executive officer of Cambridge,
Massachusetts-based Cignal Global Communications, the telephone
industry is on top of the job.
"Carriers are pretty well prepared-big and small, seasoned
and new," said Rooney.
However, other experts are not so sure.
Ross Anderson, of Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory said
there is a big difference between the attitude of big companies
like BT and telecommunications companies in the Caribbean and
the Far East like South Korea.
According to Anderson, BT bought telephone hardware in the late
1980s and has spent around $829 million to thwart the bug. South
Korea bought similar equipment and has spent nothing because it
sees no problem.
"They can't both be right," Anderson said.
In the Caribbean however, computers owned by the state bureaucracies
and governments are most likely to succumb to damage from the
millennium bomb says regional experts.
"It is governments that will be most vulnerable because they
often use aging systems. Local Government agencies in the United
States, Europe, Asia, and the Americas are moving far too slow.
I'm not worried about the telephones. It's the government systems
for pensions, social security and veterans are where the problems
will be," said Rooney.
Most desktop computer users, particularly, owners of systems
and software shipped after 1995 can feel relatively safe. As an
added precaution to address the concerns of PC users, utility
software maker Symantec started shipment of its first Y2K auditing
package for the desktop in mid November.
Priced at US$49.95, Norton 2000 1.0 pinpoints pieces of the system
that aren't compliant by scanning data, applications, and hardware,
including the BIOS and real-time clock.
A number of PC vendors consider the Year 2000 threat to the real-time
clock as minimal and have been criticized for releasing computer
systems that include non-Y2K compliant software.
This has caused confusion among some PC users, caught between
listening to their computer vendors, Y2K analysts and toolmakers
who have pointed out the vulnerabilities of applications that
use the real-time clock for time and date reference.
Symantec executives said their product will address the real-time
clock and those applications use it.
"Small businesses and home users have heard the hype but
don't know how it will affect their PCs," said Dana Prussoff,
senior product manager at the company.
Norton 2000 uses a boot floppy to test and fix RTCs and the BIOS,
thereby preventing users from inadvertently destroying data and
program configurations during testing, the company said.
The product also pays close attention to spreadsheets and databases
where data is constantly changing.
This feature of the product scans Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and a handful
of other popular spreadsheet applications. For recent Excel spreadsheets,
Norton 2000 color-codes and annotates the spreadsheet to highlight
and explain Y2K issues in each affected cell.
The new Y2K PC package also audits other popular software applications
for Year 2000 compliance and compares those applications against
a database of known Year 2000 compliance problems. The database
is kept up-to-date using LiveUpdate, Symantec's utility program
that locates and helps install hardware drivers and software updates
specific to the user's system from over the Web.
The problem, often called the millennium bug, is rooted in the
way dates are recorded and computed. For the past several decades,
systems have typically used two digits to represent the year,
in order to conserve memory. With this two-digit format, however,
the year 2000 is indistinguishable from 1900, or 2001 from 1901.
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