TURKISH DAILY NEWS - "Western Europe calm - maybe too calm - about Y2K bug"

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23 December,1999,
Turkish Daily News

Computer experts in Europe and the United States will be monitoring early evidence from the east. They will either be breathing collective sighs of relief, or counting off the hours they have left to fight off calamity as heart rates accelerate.

Western Europe calm - maybe too calm - about Y2K bug

ANGELA DOLAND Paris - The Associated Press

Perceiving little chance of major disruptions from the millennium computer bug, most Europeans are stocking up on champagne for New Year's, not canned soup and flashlights. Western European governments may be a bit last-minute and mostly low-key about the threat, but they're confident they have pretty much dealt with the problem. Not that western Europe has dismissed Y2K. It's just that the majority of these countries had already handled the other great fin-de-siecle technology challenge - updating computer systems for the new euro single currency, introduced nearly a year ago.

To many, the Y2K bug is largely a U.S. fascination that translates badly on this side of the Atlantic. "It's clear we'll have problems, but the Americans have enormously exaggerated Y2K," said Elise Colette, 23, a French communications student. Except in the United Kingdom, parts of Scandinavia and a few other nations, European news media have not been infected by Y2K mania. Large-scale public awareness campaigns have been the exception, not the rule. By government accounts, western European nations that were lagging a year ago in Y2K fixes have quickly come up to speed. Which is not to say anyone can predict what might go wrong or how serious it could be. The more technologically advanced a society, the more susceptible it is to Y2K problems - a programming flaw that could cause computers and microcircuits to mistake the year 2000 for 1900, possibly crashing or garbling data. Last year, the European Commission, the European Union's administrative body, urged member states to pick up speed in getting out word about Y2K. But most awareness campaigns have been largely confined to Web sites and telephone hot lines. In France, the government sent eight info vans to town squares. That's a sharp contrast to Britain, whose media and government have saturated the public with news about the Y2K bug - even sending every household a booklet assuring folks there's no reason to panic or stockpile food.

Most governments insist all crucial public services are either Y2K ready - or will be ready - and are urging people to approach this Jan. 1 as any other. Swedish officials say they are more worried about alcohol and fireworks than Y2K technology snags. In Switzerland, government-appointed Year 2000 delegate Ulrich Grete urged folks not to change their plans over Y2K worries. "I'm going to spend the New Year as I always do," he said. "I'm going skiing." In western Europe, Y2K analysts say, a few major millennium bug bites or a gradual cascading of smaller but coincidental failures could trigger situations akin to major strikes: traffic at a standstill, deliveries slowed for weeks, people stranded at home, tempers flaring. Governments dismiss such scenarios. "We don't think it will be dramatic or catastrophic," said Jean Francois Gonties, a spokesman for France's National Year 2000 Information Center. But Gonties did express concern about small towns. "Some municipalities won't have traffic lights. Or the water systems won't work, or factory doors might not open," he said. In Germany, potential trouble areas include untreated microchips embedded in some hospital devices as well as electronic circuits that control water pumps in high-rise buildings - despite combined public and private spending of dlrs 83.8 billion on Y2K fixes, the government says. And although EU nations insist air traffic control systems are all Y2K ready, a little probing often uncovers repairs still being made to secondary systems capable of causing major inconveniences. As of late November, 10 percent of systems at Spain's airports had not been proven compliant, including luggage X-ray machines, walkthrough metal detectors, escalators and ticketing systems, authorities said.

International Monitoring, a British-based technology consultant, estimates the bug could cost European Union countries dlrs 210 billion in across-the-board damages. Senior analyst Nick Gogerty blames it on "basically a lack of government leadership." Many businesses and some government agencies erred in thinking that by upgrading their financial systems for the euro single currency they had also solved the Y2K problem, analysts say. Many are worried about complacency in small- and medium-sized businesses. Norway's Y2K coordinator, Geir Jacobsen, believes some jobs could be at risk: "There are still far too many leaders of small businesses who believe that the Year 2000 problem does not affect them." In the two sectors where Y2K sparks the most public anxiety - nuclear power and air travel - officials say the bug has been exterminated and contingency plans are in place. In a worst-case scenario, a country's airspace would simply be closed, said Jean-Marie Leboutte, who coordinated Y2K efforts for Brussels-based Eurocontrol. That would mean serious delays but no safety risk, he said. All western European countries insist they have made necessary modifications to their nuclear power plants and simulated the clock rollover to 2000. "Plants are ready to shut down or reduce power substantially" if problems occur, said David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body in Vienna, Austria. Kyd is much more concerned about eastern Europe. Overall, even Y2K experts who expect some serious disruptions do not look for immediate drama when midnight strikes on Dec. 31. Only a fraction of whatever failures occur will emerge on New Year's Day, they say, with the bulk likely not arising until days, weeks or even months later. The deputy director of Britain's Taskforce 2000 independent watchdog group, Ian Hugo, has turned down offers to be in a London television studio at midnight awaiting "things that aren't going to happen - at that point in time at any rate." Hugo has made his own serious preparations for the new millennium: "I've been doing some stocking up; my wine cellar is looking pretty good."

Time zones offer Y2K preview

Neil Winton
London - Reuters

If computers in New Zealand and Australia start to crash at midnight on December 31, big corporations in Europe and the United States might still have time to ward off disaster. Tonga and its hundreds of palm-ringed islands in the Pacific will be the first to ring in the year 2000. One hour later New Zealand enters the next century, the first modern economy to find out if the millennium computer bug means disaster or just a collective yawn. Two hours later Australia's east coast will be put to the test. Computer experts in Europe and the United States will be monitoring early evidence from the east. They will either be breathing collective sighs of relief, or counting off the hours they have left to fight off calamity as heart rates accelerate. Companies have spent huge sums to thwart the bug, now known as the Y2K problem. U.S. information technology research company Gartner Group has said companies around the world would have to spend between $300 billion and $600 billion to fix it. IDC, another U.S. high technology consultancy, estimated in a report last month that by the end of 1999, $250 billion will have been spent finding, replacing, rewriting, testing and documenting suspect computer code. And all because computer programmers in the 1980s used two digits like 95 or 97 to record dates on software, knowing that this would stumble over the two zeros in 2000 and cause computers to crash or spew out corrupt data. These programmers knew that this shortcut to conserve what was then precious and scarce memory would cripple data processing if not rectified before clocks ticked into 2000. They gambled that the progress of technology would be fast enough to render obsolete this method of using dates. They lost, and set off this expensive race to fix computer systems before midnight on December 31. Most experts now believe that disruption will be limited.

No parties for key personnel

But chief executives and computer engineers from big corporations will not be partying over the New Year's holiday weekend. They will be packed into control centres anxiously watching the Far East and hoping a lack of action there will mean their anti-millennium bug plans have worked. "Europe has about 12 hours to respond, the U.S. 24 hours. If you have the same system in Australia as London or New York, you might have time to fix it. It's good business practice to set up incident rooms to monitor how this develops," said Fons Kuijpers of the PA Consulting Group. Telecommunications giant AT & T Corp of the U.S. will be looking east on December 31, confident that everything will work, but taking no chances. "We are very confident that the ATT network will be in good shape and fully operational. We will begin monitoring the rollover at 6am eastern time on the thirty first when New Zealand rolls over," said Dave Johnson, spokesman for ATT's global network centre by telephone from New Jersey. Johnson said ATT's chief executive officer will be in the control centre to authorise any necessary emergency action. Action squads are ready.

BP suspending loading

Industries which use continuous processes - like some chemical production and oil refining - are theoretically under threat from the bug if computers managing production crash. Anglo-American oil giant BP Amoco will suspend loading and unloading of crude, but refining and production will carry on uninterrupted. "On the night it will be business as usual, but loading and unloading of tankers will be suspended for a few hours over the transition," said David Nicholas, press officer at BP Amoco. "Production platforms, we expect them to work through. We are not planning stopping oil production or refineries," Nicholas said. Ford Motor Co, the world's second largest car manufacture and which has huge and intricate supply chains to keeps its factories pounding out the product, said it will have a global monitoring operation in place but expects few problems on the night. Experts say that any threat to supply chains used by huge global businesses are unlikely to show themselves on the night of December 31. Slow burning and difficult-to-spot damage to computers are the biggest threat to these complicated supply chains which might threaten smaller companies in coming months. The big three U.S. car makers -- Ford, the world's biggest, General Motors and Chrysler -- have set up an action group to monitor supply chains in 2000. British Telecommunications said it has spent more than $500 million over 4-1/2 years fighting the bug and it too will be manning a command centre over the changeover.

Many phone networks use GMT, so no time window

"We operate in Hong Kong and Australia and will get feedback from them. A lot of major telecommunications systems across the world operate on GMT, so they would not necessarily hit Y2K problems until midnight here in London. We can't take it that a lack of bad news from around the globe means that everything's OK," said BT spokesman David Orr. All big companies express confidence in their own systems. So why have all these high-powered executives and SWAT teams on expensive call? ATT's Johnson says you can't be too careful. "It's like fire insurance. You'll probably never going to use it but it kind of lets you rest better at night knowing you got it," Johnson said.

[ENDS]

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), December 24, 1999

Answers

Elise Colette the famed French computer systems expert and part time mudwrestler sure gets a lot of press. Southern Europe appears to be toast but nothing of strategic importance there. Let's see Eastern Europe is probably burnt toast, central Europe toasted with burnt edges and the extreme western Europe lightly toasted. Shouldn't have any trouble feeding Europe with all that crispy bread. I am certainly glad that those European computers that boot up from the right hand side don't have any problems.

NATO we don't need no stinkin NATO.

-- Squid (ItsDark@down.here), December 24, 1999.


Mr Squidy: You have apparently overlooked the fact that Europe is the home of High Fashion, the only thing which - in many earnest people's minds - really distinguishes us from the lower primates.

Without the inexorable stimulus of High Fashion, the North American economy will run down. Western civilization will crumble.

Italy, the temple of High Fashion, is T-O-A-S-T. And right behind it is France, its altar.

This news from Europe is incomparably grave. We need fashion. We need Europe. Please, Mr. Squidy, think twice before turning your back on that august continent, no matter how apparently hopeless its foreseen future might appear! Throw them a lifeline - go out today and buy a Pierre Cardin sleeping bag or a heavy-duty Benetton winter toque. Do whatever you can!

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), December 24, 1999.


What if Sally and her husband are right and computers start crashing tomorrow with the one week look-ahead--and no one notices.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 24, 1999.

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