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Harry Waldron - IT Security

Security Developments, Software Updates and Best Practices

Milestone dates ahead - Affecting future computers

SANS has highlighted future dates that may impact computing.  New standards would most likely address these design issues:

Milestone dates ahead - Affecting future computers
http://blogs.sans.org/appsecstreetfighter/2009/10/29/the-day-the-world-will-end/

QUOTE: With a new movie coming out about how the world will end with the (supposed) end of the Mayan calender, I figured it would be nice to get a list of software related “end of calender” issues:

Time Dec. 31st 1999, 23:59:59 GMT -- The famous Y2k issue. We made it… (so far)

Time Dec. 21, 2012 -- end of Mayan calendar. Just listed here because everybody is talking about it. Should not affect software (other then the fact that the world will end that day).

Time Jan. 19th 2038, 03:14:07 GMT -- The end of the Unix epoch. Unix uses a 32 it signed number to express time. The last date that can be expressed using unix time is Jan 19th 2038. After that… who knows? This can already be a problem. Imagine you are a bank and handing out 30 year mortgages?

Time Dec. 31st 9999, 23:59:59 GMT -- The end of 4 digit years. Well, we got a while until that will happen.

Posted: Nov 01 2009, 01:13 PM by Harry Waldron | with 2 comment(s)

Comments

Tony said:

As far as the Mayan calendar goes I like the cartoon I just saw somewhere.  One stone carver to the other "Once we finish these whaddya say we go for a few beers."

# November 1, 2009 2:32 PM

Angus S-F said:

[quibble] Get a Spell Checquer!!!  Since when is "Calendar" spelled with two "E"s? [/quibble]

Good compilation.  But to be culturally complete [g,d,rlh] shouldn't you include the date when the Chinese and Hebrew calendars roll over to 5 digits?

Chinese calendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The year 2009 in the Chinese calendar is the Year of the Ox. It lasts from January 26, 2009 to February 14, 2010. According to traditional beliefs, some form of the calendar has been in use for almost five millennia. Based on archaeological evidence some form of it has been in use for three and a half millennia. It is reckoned in the seldom-used continuously numbered system as 4705, 4706, or 4645 (depending on the epoch used)."

en.wikipedia.org/.../Chinese_calendar

Hebrew calendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Years in the Hebrew calendar are labeled with the era designation Anno Mundi (Latin for "in the year of the world"), abbreviated AM and A.M., and are numbered from the epoch that, by Rabbinical reckoning, is a year before the date of Creation. 30 September 2008 through 18 September 2009 corresponded to Hebrew year 5769; the Hebrew year 5770 began at sundown on the evening of 18 September 2009 and will end on 8 September 2010."

en.wikipedia.org/.../Hebrew_calendar

The math is left as an exercise for the student [BSEG]

# November 2, 2009 11:55 PM