Why 2K?
Description
This book, originally published in 1999, describes what could have happened during the era of the famous Y2K hysteria, when computers and communications devices would have had to function when four digits were needed to use the current date instead of the two digits that were commonly used in many systems. Of course, none of the expected disasters happened and none of the Y2K terrorist plots really. Or did they? Certainly the vulnerabilities of the Hoover Dam and some NASA spacecraft control centers have been fixed, but the fixes were largely the result of general security measures taken after September 11, 2001.
This book tells the story of Y2K vulnerabilities from a retrospective viewpoint. According to Steven Musil of Cnet, the same type of problems occurred to a number of web servers, including Gawker, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, and LinkedIn, when a single leap second was added to the Coordinated Universal Time. Although the scale of these problems is much smaller than Y2K, some parts of the problem are still with us.
In case the leap second problem occurs again, or timing of messages on UNIX servers get corrupted in 2038, or the world ends in December, 2012, the author's favorite recipe for Shrimp with Sizzling Rice Soup has been included at the end of this book. Enjoy!
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Person
About the Author
I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair. (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.) While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States. We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university. I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department's hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users. We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems.
As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads. I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications. My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists. More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television.
I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas.
My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years. I was the editor or co-editor of that society's journal for many years.
