Re: Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 2001 GMT

From: Joseph Mallett (jmallett@NewGold.NET)
Date: 08/29/01 

Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 16:55:41 +0000
From: Joseph Mallett <jmallett@NewGold.NET>
To: Rķkharšur Egilsson <Rikhardur.EGILSSON@oecd.org>
Subject: Re: Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 2001 GMT
Message-ID: <20010829165541.A44861@NewGold.NET>

It will affect people who use braindead sorting algorithms in things like
perl to sort dates in unix time() format.

I guarantee it will be a bigger problem than Y2K, but that is not saying
much at all.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 11:03:30AM +0200, Rķkharšur Egilsson wrote:
>
> Has anybody done any research in what production systems (web, mail-
> servers, OSes etc) might have a problem at :
>
> perl -e 'print localtime(1000000000) . "\n";'
>
> The only thing I have found, so far, is this (old) version of KMail :
> http://dot.kde.org/985599243/
>
> The whole issue, and the absense of any discussion, looks like either,
>
> (1) A disaster just waiting to happen or
>
> (2) A non-problem.
>
> Personally my wote is for (2).
>
> For vulnerable systems, there might be a problem if the system accepts
> dates from users and a user enters a date after September 9th 2001.
> (buffer overflow ?)
>
> --
> Rķkharšur Egilsson - Networking/Security EXD/ITN/CCO
> OECD/OCDE - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 

-- 
--
Joseph A. Mallett
http://srcsys.org

xMach Core Team, www.xMach.org

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