Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Ten years after the millennium bug scare, there's a new computer glitch hitting users of Sony's PlayStation games consoles Age: 10. Appearance: Surprisingly youthful. You do realise the millennium bug is old news? The clue's in the name. Yes, yes, but it's back! And this time it has come for our children! What are you on about? Remember how a decade ago the bug nearly destroyed civilisation? Planes were going to fall out of the sky, nuclear power stations were going to melt down, clock radios were going to wake us in the middle of the night . . . Unless we paid trillions of pounds to IT specialists . . . That's right. And all because other IT specialists had sold us computers that couldn't handle the switch from 1999 to 2000. That's the kind of organised blackmail even a banker could admire. Still, what has it got to do with 2010, especially now we're several months into it? Something very similar has hit Sony's PlayStation games consoles. On Monday, when February turned into March, millions of PS3 owners had their machines' calendars reset to 1 January 2000, and lost their high scores. Oh, the humanity! Have they been offered counselling?
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Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
BBC hits out at the Millennium Bug. Was it a hoax?
I only caught a smidgen of Radio 4's latest attempt to make Stephen Fry's name synonymous with technology - an Archive Hour special last Saturday that looked back on the Millennium Bug (called In the Beginning was the Nerd ). But last week the Radio 4 blog teased the broadcast by helpfully including the long version of an interview with Ross Anderson from Cambridge University, a security expert who rarely minces his words and essentially says that it was all a big swindle. Now, I don't know much about the ins and outs of the way the Y2K bug was reported (I was still in short trousers at the time) but the programme no doubt stirred up some deeply felt sentiments: the comments thread on the blog post certainly contain a lot of disagreement. Accurate? Misleading? Did Radio 4 capture the history correctly? Y2K bug Computing BBC Bobbie Johnson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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BBC hits out at the Millennium Bug. Was it a hoax?