Circuit Writer Version 7.9

by Jim Scheef

Déjà Vu Y2K All Over Again

Who can forget the hullabaloo as 1999 passed and we waited to see what computer systems would fail when the year rolled over to “00”. Those who thought the issue was overblown called it the “programmer full employment act.” As a programmer I know the issue was real – I wrote several systems that would have failed in some truly insidious ways if fed the date 000102 on January 2, 2000.

Well, take a look at the Epoch page at computerhope.com. In only 28 years, all real computers (those running UNIX and variants like Linux) will run out of time and dates. The “epoch” in UNIX begins January 1, 1970 and ends January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 GMT. This is because time in UNIX is a 32-bit signed integer that can contain only so many seconds. Negative values go back to December 13, 1901. The UNIX operating system cannot understand a date prior to 12/13/1901 or after 01/19/2038.

The Macintosh is only a little better off. The date is still a 32-bit integer but the epoch on a Mac ends on February 6, 2040. The grace period comes from the fact that time on a Mac begins on January 1, 1904. Please do not confuse this system date with dates stored in databases. Those dates are stored however the database designer intended and modern databases are vastly more expansive. For a more in depth explanation of the impending apocalypse, take a look at unixepoch.com where you can even purchase a tee shirt that shows the 2012’ers that you know when the world really ends. Incidentally, Windows users can sleep blissfully until AD 30828 unconcerned about the void surrounding them where the world used to be.

By the way, The Computer Hope site has many other equally interesting facts about more than dates. It’s one of those places where you can click on stuff for hours and it’s all written in language understandable by mere mortals. Highly recommended.

The Facebook Privacy Oxymoron

Facebook’s relentless quest to make your stuff available to “others” means that many users need to rethink what information they put on Facebook. The root of this problem is the fact that Facebook is “free”. If we had to pay for the ability to share our fun and random thoughts with our friends, we could reasonably expect better behavior from Facebook. Last month we looked at the benefits and dangers of storing documents on “free” storage in the cloud. All of the online replacements for Microsoft Office and many online backup facilities have a capability for sharing your files. The beneficial side of this is called collaboration. What’s the easiest way to share the work on a project with several other people? Put all the files where everyone can see them and make appropriate additions, changes and updates. Of course you need to agree who is going to do what, but isn’t that just part of project management?

Facebook is a collaborative picture album where the album keeper can change the rules at will. You add your stuff to the collective album and set what you think are limits on who can see your stuff. This would be fine if those limits remained in effect. Unfortunately, Facebook changes the rules and often in ways that many people do not understand and that can trick them into removing the limits they thought they had applied to who can see their stuff. Thankfully for people like me, there are others “out there” who watch all this more closely. As a recent NY Times article pointed out: “Facebook’s Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long; the United States Constitution, without any of its amendments, is a concise 4,543 words.”

The latest outrage was a change to the privacy policy that requires users to opt out of a new set of privacy defaults that pretty much remove any pretense of privacy. If you clicked “Use the defaults” then you opened or removed any privacy settings you had set. Once again I refer you to the NY Times article “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now.” Maybe then I’ll be able to sit back and just enjoy everyone’s status updates and pictures because seeing all that stuff is fun. In fairness to Facebook, see “Facebook Executive Answers Reader Questions.”

From the Giant of Social Networking to the Giant of Data

If you choose to use Facebook and don’t take efforts to protect your privacy, that’s one thing. But it’s the issues that seem to jump out of the blue that make me really worry. If you have not secured your Wi-Fi network yet because you really don’t worry about your neighbors, well what if Google was the worry? Google is a company whose business plan has always been to accumulate data (such as every search ever made from the very beginning) and then figure out how it might be useful. So when European regulators started asking questions about data collected as part of Google’s Street View mapping, why would anyone be surprised when they first denied and then admitted that they had collected data from unsecured Wi-Fi routers during their crawl of city streets. Last week Google admitted that it has been collecting the SSID and MAC addresses of wireless routers. This violates the stringent German privacy laws. Google has agreed to stop collecting this data. Start with “Google Says It Collected Private Data by Mistake” in the NY Times and follow the links for more of the story.

If it is technically feasible for Google to collect some bit of data, you should assume that Google will collect. If you are logged into Google, they can link the data to you personally and will keep the data forever. Those of you who adopted Google because it was not Microsoft, perhaps it is time to rethink.