WEBVTT

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if you're old enough you probably remember all the doomsdaying there was

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around the y2k problem and if you aren't old enough well lots of people were

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concerned in the late 1990s that once january 1st 2000 arrived computers would

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think the year was 1900 instead of 2000

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causing a huge number of unforeseen problems because computers are stupid

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well the year 2000 got here and not much of anything happened i mean some taxi

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meters glitched out but there weren't apocalyptic consequences but wait even

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though 2000 was a nothing burger there have been other date-related shenanigans

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that have happened since then and there might be more in the future so let's

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start out by talking about a software bug that hit in 2010 which kept millions

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of people from accessing their own hard-earned money

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over in germany roughly 30 million bank cards simply stopped working in january

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2010. some customers couldn't withdraw any yoy rose while others had their

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cards simply eaten by atms the issue was

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that the microchip inside the card simply couldn't comprehend that the year

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was 2010. what

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replacing the cards would have cost nearly a half billion dollars though

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fortunately a software patch was issued instead now another issue with more

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global consequences popped up in 2019 which affected the global positioning

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system better known as gps you see gps

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keeps track of which week it is using a counter that only goes up to 1023

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this is because the counter only has 10 binary digits meaning weeks are marked

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starting with 0 and ending with 1023

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now 1023 weeks is a little under 20

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years so each time the counter maxes out and resets to zero there's the potential

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for anything that relies on gps time to experience issues that happened in 2019

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flights were delayed or cancelled as a result and older cell phones and

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consumer gps trackers also dealt with loss of location data fortunately this

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is an issue that can typically be solved with software fixes but the problem is

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going to rear its ugly head once again in 2038 and i'd be willing to bet

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there's going to be some kind of issue because someone forgot to issue a patch

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just patch it up it's easy i think it's hard and if 2038 sounds

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familiar that's because you're probably thinking about the unix time problem

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which works similarly to the gps bug originally systems based on the unix

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kernel including macOS and anything that runs Linux used 32 bits to keep

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track of how many seconds had passed since january 1st 1970. if you do the

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math the counter maxes out in january of 2038 and unlike the gps problem we

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mentioned it's not straightforward to fix it with a software update as

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changing the way the counter works could break a large number of programs

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although it seems like this could be catastrophic when you think of how many

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servers and embedded devices use Linux the good news is that many systems based

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on unix have since been updated to 64-bit including older Linux systems and

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using a 64-bit time counter means it wouldn't roll over for another 292

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billion years i'm hoping by then we'll have figured

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out a way to write software smart enough to always know what time it is but

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human beings you never know

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finally let's end the video on a lighter note we've been used to using four digit

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years since the battle of hastings in 1066 but what's going to happen once we

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hit the year 10 000 a.d

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we got used to the idea of computers needing to use four digits for the year

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when the original y2k problem was first pondered but in about 8 000 years we

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might run into the same issue again only this time we'll need five digits instead

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of four although we have nearly eight millennia to figure it out why 10k is

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already an issue for researchers as astronomical calculations often have to

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be done on very long time scales so

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here's hoping that y 10k doesn't cause us to miss an incoming meteor as bruce

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willis probably won't be around to save us

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but who knows what i do know is that this video is

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