• FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I think you might be underestimating the potential impact.

    Remember the Crowdstrike Windows BSOD? It caused billions in damages, and it’s the absolute best case scenario for this kind of issue. Our potential Y10K bug has a bunch of additional issues:

    • you don’t just have to patch one piece of software, but potentially all software ever written that’s still in use, a bunch of which won’t have active maintainers
    • hitting the bug won’t necessarily cause crashes (which are easy to recognize), it can also lead to wrong behavior, which will take time to identify. Now imagine hundreds of companies hitting the bug in different environments, each with their own wrong behavior. Can you imagine the amount of continuous supply chain disruptions?
    • fixes have to be thought about and implemented per-application. There’s no panacea, so it will be an incredible amount of work.

    I really don’t see how this scenario is comparable to anything we’ve faced, beyond Y2K.