Biggest Y2K Problem so far?

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I'd be interested in candidates for the single worst Y2K problem documented so far. A sentence about why it was so bad would be interesting. Some comments ridicuing me would be humorous also.

-- ImSo (lame@prepped.com), February 05, 2000

Answers

I suppose you would believe that there where not serius possible consequences (possible). When NSA lost it's survelance satelites during the roll over..Nor do you count the numerous and continuing "accidental" losses of so many digitally controlled valves in the oil refining and transporting segiment of our economy...

"As for me...I shall finish the Game"!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Shakey~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-- Shakey (in_a_bunkeer@forty.feet), February 05, 2000.


The worst problems haven't been documented and will probably never be. The worst documented problem is probably the series of air disasters that have killed hundreds of people.

-- (JimBB@horeth.net), February 05, 2000.

Number of y2k problems that have affected me: 0. Percentage of people who have been affected by y2k problems: less than 0.001%. Enough said.

-- joey (jrmarello@aol.com), February 05, 2000.

The worst problem now is the way the seemingly uneventful rollover has put everyone back to sleep. Y2K is one of the least of our problems, but now the sheeple think we are invinceable.

Kook

-- Y2Kook (Y2Kook@usa.net), February 05, 2000.


Shakey--

I understand that it was POSSIBLE for TEOTWAWKI.

All I'm asking for is the largest ACTUAL Y2K problem DOCUMENTED so far.

I realize that planes have crashed, nuclear weapons have detonated, and whole countries are using candles for heat and warmth, but there is no documentation because of the cover-ups, and other stuff will happen REAL SOON NOW that will keep you at forty feet. I'm just trying to get a feel for the WORST, DOCUMENTED, problem SO FAR.

-- I'mSo (lame@prepped.com), February 05, 2000.



Stop trolling. The problems are being covered up.

-- (JimBB@horeth.net), February 05, 2000.

The Hershey chocolate factory production problems. Personal impact? Withdrawl. :(

Now, ImSo, stop being a Troll!

-- TrollStomper (DoomersUnited@TB2000.Net), February 05, 2000.


OK; let me get this straight:

This is a board relating to Y2K problems, and if you post here requesting people to list what they consider the biggest problem to be so far, you are labeled a TROLL??!!

'Nuff said on whether Y2K is a problem, I guess. I'll go back under the bridge now. Back to the chemtrails.

-- Imso (lame@prepped.com), February 05, 2000.


It might help if you would give us your definition and criteria for acceptable (to you) "Documentation". It's an obvious implication that all the "documentation" provided here at TB2000 doesn't meet your critera. What does?

-- mush (mush@psicorps.com), February 05, 2000.

Stuff being posted here equals documentation? Well the sun is shining and it is early Feb, here in the Emerald city so that must be due to Y2K because it usually is not that way and it is now and Y2K rollover happened so thats enough proof for me.

The sun is shining and it is warm in Seattle, you know..the city where it rains all the time? Y2K I say.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), February 05, 2000.



"International Y2K Glitch Report"

http://www.iy2kcc.org/Glitches2000.htm

The glitch report is from the International Y2K Cooperation Center. The IY2KCC was created in February, 1999 under the auspices of the United Nations, with funding from the World Bank.

http://www.iy2kcc.org/

Also see this thread:

"IY2KCC summary report on Y2k glitches experienced worldwide"

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002UQf


-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), February 05, 2000.
OK; I'll give up. I wasn't looking for a list of glitches.

I leave the specific documentation up to the individual.

I wanted to get a sense of what someone might consider the BIGGEST problem so far.

-- ImSo (lame@prepped.com), February 06, 2000.


We KNOW what you were looking for.

Now go away, you stupid polly troll.

-- (brett@miklos.org), February 06, 2000.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,ART- 40599,FF.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,ART- 40599,FF.html

Satellites on the blink for days

Y2K software glitch garbled data sent from U.S. orbiters

By John Diamond

Washington Bureau

January 13, 2000

WASHINGTON -- The nation's image-collecting spy satellites were all but blinded by a Y2K computer bug for nearly three days, an outage far more substantial than the Pentagon initially reported, according to knowledgeable government officials.

While the Pentagon first portrayed the interruption as lasting a few hours, in fact virtually the entire constellation of high-accuracy optical and radar spy satellites was either out of service or functioning far below capacity for most of the New Year's holiday weekend.

Though no emergency occurred, the three-day interruption came at a time when the entire U.S. intelligence community was on global alert for potential terrorist activity relating to the year 2000 celebrations.

The interruption began when a computer patch intended to avert any Y2K glitches failed to function properly, resulting in data from five spy satellites coming in as undecipherable garble.

Within a few hours, technicians at the Pentagon's main satellite ground station, the Army's Ft. Belvoir in suburban Virginia, redirected satellite signals to a receiving station at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. They then began a slow process of manually deciphering the signals into usable imagery.

As the problem emerged on New Year's Eve, controllers greatly narrowed the data they were collecting so that images of only the top- priority targets were painstakingly recovered. This effort enabled the Pentagon to assert in news conferences that it managed to collect most of the intelligence it needed.

The lost spy satellite imagery represented "a significant source of information in our national intelligence capabilities. It was not an unimportant dimension," Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre said in a Pentagon news conference on Jan. 4. "Fortunately, because we were able to restore operations through the backup procedures so quickly, it has an insignificant impact when we look back in retrospect."

But officials said privately that the glitch seriously "degraded" the flow of satellite imagery throughout the weekend, and that the vast majority of what would normally be collected was lost.

How a Y2K problem that even Hamre termed "significant" could turn up in an area as sensitive as the nation's spy satellite system, and virtually nowhere else in the vast military network of computers, is something Pentagon officials were unable or unwilling to explain.

Hamre did not return a phone call seeking comment, and other Pentagon officials declined to comment on the record.

None of the security threats that had U.S. officials on edge over the holiday weekend emerged. But the interruption in spy satellite imagery was felt throughout the intelligence community, up to the level of the White House, which receives a daily diet of classified imagery focusing on areas of national security concern.

"I was aware of the problem because all of a sudden there were no pictures coming in," a senior administration official said. When an intelligence officer arrived the Tuesday after New Year's for the official's daily briefing, the official was presented satellite images taken before and after the computer glitch. The pictures indicated nothing unusual had gone on in the intervening time.

The year 2000 flaw interrupted the highly classified intelligence collected from all three of the U.S. electro-optical imaging satellites orbiting Earth and from both of the radar imaging satellites, which can assemble a detailed picture of activities on the ground even in darkness or through cloud cover.

The problem was centered at the National Reconnaissance Office's main ground receiving station at Ft. Belvoir, just south of Washington, officials said. The satellites themselves were functioning normally.

When the Pentagon initially reported the Y2K flaw, Hamre, the Pentagon's No. 2 official, said the blackout lasted "about two hours" and involved "one of our intelligence systems." At times during the briefing, he referred to the problem affecting "the satellite."

Hamre said he was reluctant to provide more than sketchy detail on the temporary blindness of the U.S. spy satellite system over the weekend because it might provide an opening to "bad guys" who would seek to take advantage of that vulnerability.

Although Hamre and other defense officials insisted that nothing critical was missed as a result of the spy satellite shutdown, there is no way to know for sure, because much of the garbled data cannot be recovered, according to knowledgeable officials.

The interruption in the flow of imagery intelligence stemmed from a flawed attempt to avert any Y2K problems in the computers that handle incoming satellite data, said a senior defense official.

A computer software "patch" installed by officials of the National Reconnaissance Office, which designs, launches and operates the spy satellites, failed to prevent an interruption of service with the arrival of midnight, Jan. 1, 2000, Greenwich Mean Time, or about 6 p.m. CST on New Year's Eve.

In news conferences on New Year's Day and again on Jan. 4, Hamre emphasized that the intelligence interruption affected "only one segment of our satellite-based capabilities."

The U.S. intelligence community maintains dozens of spy satellites, some engaged in intercepting foreign electronic communications. Others in much higher orbits can detect the heat plume emitted by rocket launches and provide early warning of possible enemy missile attacks.

But the five satellites affected are by far the most expensive intelligence platforms in space, costing more than $1.5 billion each to build and launch, according to unofficial estimates. The actual costs are classified.

The three electro-optical satellites, which take pictures, digitize the image and send the data to Earth, are on a level of sophistication similar to that of the Hubble Space Telescope, the difference being that instead of pointing out into space, they point down to Earth. In ideal weather and lighting, the spy satellites can distinguish objects smaller than one foot in size.

Launched in the 1990s, these bus-sized satellites, called Advanced KH- 11s, are so secret that the U.S. government does not acknowledge even how many are in space. Close followers of intelligence have been able to discern the number of satellites and their orbit by combining known information about classified launches with sightings of orbiting platforms by telescopes on Earth.

Known as Lacrosse, the two radar imagery satellites cost about $1 billion each. The two now in orbit were launched in 1991 and 1997, according to Jeffrey Richelson, author of several books on the U.S. intelligence community.

Spy satellite imagery can be used in a number of ways. During wartime, spy satellites serve an immediate function, providing early warning against threats and targeting information to battle planners. In peacetime, the images can be used to determine if nations are violating arms-control agreements. Even pictures of empty fields or forests can, in time, be useful if later pictures of the same spot show that an adversary is building a major military installation.

Recently the U.S. intelligence community has been focusing on a missile-launch facility in North Korea, a country that has made development of longer-range missiles a priority and which is considered a potential threat to the U.S. and its allies.

Richelson said that losing a large volume of imagery intelligence may not be as significant as it seems, because the U.S. intelligence community routinely generates far more images from its spy satellites than it has time or manpower to analyze.

"You may have lost all that data, but a lot of it may have been stuff you never would have looked at anyway," Richelson said.

John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington- based group that closely follows intelligence matters, credited Hamre with acknowledging the intelligence interruption at all.

But, he said, "Their claim that this outage did not seriously impact national security was overly optimistic and understated the level of the problem."

Pike said the spy satellite system was "seriously shut down for the weekend" and that had a national security crisis developed, "it could have been actively problematic as opposed to noticeably annoying."

-- One nomination for (most@serious.glitch), February 06, 2000.


Imso, since you've changed it to allow personal experience, here are two Y2k related failures that I've experienced:

1. An old '486 at work booted up with a date of Jan 1980 after the rollover. Used the DOS command to change the date setting and it worked fine after that.

2. Sorting through the mindless postings on this forum of every little problem in the world by disappointed doomers epitomised by Carl Jenkins to see if there might be one that even could be date related. So I've added Carl to kind of a mental killfile and ignore his postings.

All in all pretty much a non-event.

-- Mikey2k (mikey2k@he.wont.eat.it), February 06, 2000.



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