The internet will die in 30 years! ! !
Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working!
In 2038, exactly 30 years from now, a bug in Unix will cause all computers running a Unix-based OS to crash. The biggest problem is that most internet servers run Unix, so a majority of websites will be down. "The 2038 bug", as it is called, is a problem with how the system processes time, similar to the y2k bug. Unix systems will show the time as a negative number because they encode the time in a 32-bit format, counting seconds form midnight on January 1, 1970. That last number that will work in that format will be the time at 3:14 A.M. on January 19, 2038.
There has already been a big crash because of the bug: in May 2006, AOLServer web server software crashed. The problem came about because it was programmed so that database requests would not time out. However, instead of just setting timeout to 0, it set the timeout to 1 billion seconds in the future. One billion seconds (just over 31 years 251 days and 12 hours) after 21:27:28 on 12 May 2006 is after 2038, the system calculated the timeout date to be in the past, and crashed.
Before you panic, just remember that 2038 is 30 years in the future. A fix might come our way by then.
Labels: news
posted by carlocarr @ 10:37 PM
Comments: 0
