[107346] in Cypherpunks
Cyberapocalypse?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Mon Jan 11 21:05:33 1999
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 11:05:20 +0900 (JST)
From: Anonymous <nobody@nowhere.to>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@nowhere.to>
<http://www.worldandi.com/article/cijan99.htm>
Cyberapocalypse?
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
The Y2K problem affects most of the
world's infrastructure-related
computer systems and could bring
society to a virtual halt on January 1,
2000.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is a senior
adviser at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies and a
former editor in chief of the
Washington Times.
hat there will be a global
year-2000 computer crisis
is a given. Only its severity
remains to be determined.
Who will get hurt, how badly, and for
how long are all questions that are
impossible to answer.
Y2K--the acroynm for the year-2000
``bug''--is not a hurricane or tsunami that
can be tracked by satellite, nor rising
floodwaters, but a series of electronic
tornadoes that will sweep the globe in
crazy-quilt patterns. As with weather
tornadoes, many will be destroyed and
many will escape unscathed.
There is no way to predict who will be at
risk--but clearly the United States is
ahead of the rest of the world in its
efforts to fix the problem, followed by
Britain, Canada, and Australia. The rest
of Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and
Latin America are 6 to 18 months behind
the pack. So, many will not be ready in
time.
There are the known unknowns and the
unknown unknowns. ``The things you
didn't know you didn't know,'' said
Hunter College's Howard Rubin, a
leading consultant on Y2K problems.
There are also the things you know that
are wrong. It is not a question of one
thing going wrong but of tens of
thousands of things going wrong the
world over.
A recent survey found that 44 percent of
respondents have already experienced
Y2K-related failures under business
conditions, and 67 percent of them in
Y2K tests. They range from advance
travel agency bookings to interest
payment computations into 2000 and
beyond.
``We live in a network of multiple,
complex, interacting systems, and it's
hard to tell where one system ends and
another begins,'' says Bruce Webster,
chairman of WDCY2K, a group of some
2,500 Y2K specialists in the
Washington, D.C., area. ``When things
fail, we will be facing multiple,
overlapping failures, not isolated events.''
etc etc etc
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -0777-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RC4-3-lines-PERL
@k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_
]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256;
&S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
