
Y2K20 Parking Meter Software Glitch Causes Citywide Snafu - lelf
https://gothamist.com/news/y2k20-parking-meter-software-glitch-causes-citywide-snafu
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iforgotpassword
It should be sufficient if we hot-patch the end date to 2030 - we'll surely
have updated or replaced those systems until then.

I'm curious what part of the system even required specifically coding an end
date, and not just sanity checks relative to the current date.

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nottorp
I’m sure that’s what they also thought in 1981 when storing only 2 digits of
the year and we all know how that turned out.

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perl4ever
I honestly am using 2 digit years again because I _know_ I'm not going to care
in 2100.

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nottorp
Creating job security for the developers of 2098, I see :)

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ChuckMcM
One of a number of errors that are showing up. My favorite are the websites
that regex the '20' out of the year to get just the decade, "Whoops!"

In many ways I'm glad we didn't bother to fix the bugs this year like we did
for the 1999 - 2000 transition. Way too many people think that Y2K was just
some big 'scare tactic' and nothing ever happened. It is sad that operations
is always like that, you work your arse off things operate smoothly and the
unknowing just say "I don't see what the big deal was all about."

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Unsimplified
Reliability work is unfortunately under-observed and under-valued... until its
absence triggers an incident.

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megaframe
This is so funny I just had a similar bug yesterday and named it our y2k20
bug, just a path name change that someone forgot to map correctly

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mickotron
We had to do an emergency patch to the config of a well-known data analytics
platform, because their regex to identify/extract 2 digit years did not cater
for anything beyond 2019... We dodged that bullet, but shows a lack of
foresight by said company. Lucky we don't have much data that has 2 digit year
dates.

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perl4ever
My Android phone started glitching and freezing just after the new year. I'm
assuming it's a hardware failure, but I wondered if it were a year 2020 bug
(or a virus).

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sschueller
It only effects card payments. Cash still works. It appears the CA certs may
have expired and a secure connection to the credit card server can't be
established.

Easy fix but you do need to update your machines from time to time...

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alias_neo
Who wants to bet that is not a numeric bug, but a certificate expiry?

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mxuribe
I have no experience with parking meters, but surprising that software updates
need to be done at the site/hardware (as opposed to, say, online or "over the
air" or updates).

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mannykannot
If we can judge the vendor's competence from the problem reported here, then
if they had made them updatable wirelessly, they would likely be easily
hacked.

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coin
> Y2K20

It’s 2020. Why use a cryptic abbreviation with _more_ characters? If they want
to use the SI “k” prefix shouldn’t it be Y2.02k?

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M4v3R
It's probably just a play on the original "Y2K" name for the problems in year
2000.

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glenngillen
Might also be actually related to the same problem:
[https://twitter.com/jef_poskanzer/status/1213258774938415104...](https://twitter.com/jef_poskanzer/status/1213258774938415104?s=20)

