August 24, 1998

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August 24, 1998

Editor's Notebook

Y2K humbug has transformed into simple hysterics

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Brian Kaberline

The people shouting that the end of the world is nigh are dressing much better these days. Instead of walking around in tie-dyed T-shirts passing out leaflets on the city streets, they now wear suits and ties and fax out press releases.

The latest apocalypse is the Y2K bug. As you've heard (over and over until you're ready to buy Y2K Raid), this problem afflicts older computers. Programmers trying to save a couple of keystrokes noted years by the last two digits. It was fine at the time, but any programs still using this method will be celebrating New Year's Day 1900 when the rest of us are toasting Jan. 1, 2000.

To hear the Y2K faithful, the world will crash on that day. Financial centers will crumble. Business will come to a halt. People won't know whether to drink milk with an expiration date of JAN 5 '00. (Got milk? Who knows?)

Of course, those hyping Y2K have been the consultants, programmers, computer companies and lawyers who stand to profit from the situation. You can't blame them for pumping up the threat a bit. It seems to take at least a crisis to get the public's attention these days.

When pressed, most technophiles concede it's unlikely that planes will literally fall out of the sky and, OK, the warning that toasters would stop operating was probably a little silly.

But they created a monster and, as Dr. Frankenstein will tell you, it's hard to keep 'em down in the lab after they've been to the big city. The Y2K monster has been adopted by survivalists as poster boy for the survivalist movement.

A prime example is a videotape written and produced by KC's over-the-edge conservative, Jack Cashill.

"Surviving the Year 2000" starts out talking about the "interconnectedness" of the U.S. economy and the problem of time-sensitive imbeded computer chips.

Then the veil is ripped away and Cashill's tape turns into a recruitment film for the militia movement. The premise is that the government and society will fall beginning with the federal government's fiscal year beginning of Oct. 1, 1999.

The tape launches into a how-to for survivalist wannabes. You learn how to store food for up to a three-year period, how to hook up a home generator and construct a neighborhood trash dump. Then it gets scary.

Cashill turns to that most-trusted of computer consulting groups: the Missouri 51st Militia. Why listen to someone with IBM when a militia leader can tell you how to assemble medical supplies from your local drug store or gun show (for those hard-to-find items)? Why interview someone from Microsoft when militia members can sing the praises of the AK-47?

The only thing missing -- maybe Cashill ran out of tape -- was the threat of an attack by the United Nations on Jan. 1, 2000. Of course, it's getting harder to be scared by the U.N. when its peacekeepers repeatedly show they'd have trouble maintaining order at a picnic for pacifists.

OK, back to reality.

Is Y2K a total scam? Although I've claimed this around the office to annoy the doomsayers, it's not. Too many important functions in business, government and daily life are left to computers to take any problem lightly.

But reliance on computers brings threats every day. From the hacker who can scramble a company's secret files to the power surge that can fry your Christmas card list, connectivity carries risks.

Y2K may end up performing an important function. Think of it as natural selection for the computer age.

If you're still using a 20-year-old mainframe computer, you were courting disaster. If you don't bother to maintain business-critical software, your operation is probably sloppy in other areas as well.

So Y2K appears to be just another risk that businesses face. You try to study the situation the best you can, minimize the threat to your operation -- from within and without -- and proceed.

The doomsayers are right. The end of the world could come any day, give or take a few hundred million years. And, yes, the worst can always happen. But it rarely does.