Digital apocalypse.

                        Digital apocalypse.


Imagine a day waking up in the morning of the year 2020 and finding your mobile is not
Working. There is no power supply. You went to an ATM to withdraw cash and your card is not accepted by your bank. There are also issues with the bank. There is an endless traffic jam. Metros, trains and flights are being cancelled.

The above narration seems to be ridiculous and fictional. This could be something out from a sci-fi movie. But there is no ghost of chance but a fat chance. The technological fault or error or we can say limitation can lead us to a day of digital apocalypse.

Until the 1990’s many computer programs were designed to digit to a 2 digit in order to save memory. As back in those days expanding or increasing memory size was not economical. For example, the year ‘1992’ would be recognised as 92 by the computer. So, in this way, year ‘2000’ might be interpreted as ‘1990’ as both could be represented by ‘00’. This was a bug known as ‘Y2k’ or ‘Millennium bug’.

This was taken as a serious concern by the western countries. Special committees were set up by the government to monitor remedial work. Over 300 million US dollar was spent globally to tackle this unhappened happening. It was found that such misinterpretation would lead to system failure in important sectors such as banking, government records, military installation, power supply and so on.

How was it tackled?

Organizations raced to fix the bug. There were different approaches used to undertake this crisis.

The very first method that was used ‘Date expansion’. The two-digit year were expanded to involve all four digits of years.

The second was ‘Data windowing. Small programs were installed by which it can determine the century value. Though, this was a less costly but not permanent solution.

In the end, there were few reported incidents, where this bug created a problem. For example, nuclear energy facility in Ishikawa, Japan, had some equipment failure. The US detected missile launches in Russia.

Return of Y2K

Dylan Mulvin, an Assistant Professor of communication at the London School of Economics told that data
windowing during Y2K was the worst all possible solution. it was a quick and dirty approach.

There has been a recently reported case of the Y2K bug.

*Professional wrestling video game WWE 2K20 Stopped working.

*Cox cable sent out bills dated January 1, 1920
.
*New York's 1400 parking metre 7 lists of accepting credit card.

Though it did not affect the normalcy it reminds us of our technological limit and fault.

2k38.

The world has successfully tackled the Y2k bug but there is another devil in the town and this is known as 2k38.
Most of the computer keeps the time using a 32-bit processor and assume the beginning of time is 1st January 1970 at 12:00:00.
The processor running on 32-bit software can handle 232 -1 different values or 2,147,483,647 different number within 4 GB of memory after 1st January 1970. Tie after this would be wrapped around. It means, 7 seconds after 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038, this 32-bit storage would run out of memory space.

Now let us understand why 1st, January 1970 is taken as standard time. Usually, on software that was developed initially around the world set this timestamp and marked it as ‘0’.
Once, the software reaches this threshold it could cripple the software around the world. Since the software with time stamp licence won’t work. The system used in different sectors like aviation, traffic control, banking, military and nuclear installation may suffer equipment failure and can cause panic.
The simple solution for this would be updating the processor and fixing the software. But this isn’t so easy. The biggest challenges would be finding the software with date independent code. Many products, equipment and gadgets are equipped with an embedded system and hardly they are updated. Let suppose, if there is a bug in power plant and this small bug can lead to providing false data and suddenly all the alarms go on and as a precautionary step you had to shut down the station. This would result in havoc in the many parts of the country. There would be loss of human life and economic loss.

What’s the fix for this?

The option is to change the data storage system of 32-bit integer to unassigned 32-bit storage. But again, this will be a temporary solution. There would be similar issues again in the year 2106.
Second, if the data storage is increased to 64- bit, then there might be compatibility issues with the system that uses 32-bit data storage.

However, there is no universal unique solution for this. But there is a matter of sigh, that most of the new electronic gadgets are designed to use 64-bit storage system. That means another similar issue with the existing gadget will be faced after 4th December, 292,277,026,596.