2010: Is it all hype?

When it turned the year 2000, there was all this worry that computers would crash, and our infrastructure would have problems from date rollover. Nothing significant happened. But we surprised ourselves as the year 2010 came around, and there were actually news reports of computers having problems with the date change.

Some of the reported problems included:

Symantec's "Endpoint Protection" business anti-virus solution started the new year by labelling signatures dated 01/01/2010 or newer as "out of date" even though the signatures are current. Symantec is reportedly working to fix the flaw. Until an update has become available, the vendor will date any further new signatures December 31, 2009 and only increase the revision number. Affected products include Symantec Endpoint Protection v11.x and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition v12.x.

The Internet Storm Center reports that Cisco's Content Switching Module (CSM) has problems with its load balancing feature. The default cookie expiration in the load balancer is reportedly set to 01/01/2010 and has, therefore, expired. As a result, connections to programs such as web applications are reportedly being continuously "rebalanced".

I guess it's never too late to check to make sure your code is date compliant.

Geocities set to close today

It's a sad day for many of us who've been around on the Internet for a long time. Geocities is set to close today. Started in 1994, it was the place for the masses to have their own website. I remember getting my own page and email address at geocities in 1995. I was lucky and early enough to get a short email address with just my name at the time.

Somehow, Yahoo never figured out how to make any money from Geocities, even though the network is still among the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the Internet, according to metrics tracker Alexa. That alone should have given Yahoo some reason to keep the site and try and revive it's usage, at least for ad content revenue.

But alas, that's not the case. But for those of you still looking for Geocities content, you may be relieved some it will be saved at the Archive Team, where they've been busily rushing to save pages, before today's deadline.

How the Internet Got Its Rules

I came across this piece in the Op Ed section of the New York Times on the 40th anniversary of RFCs (Request for Comment). It's a delightful piece, authored by one of the early pioneers and a contributor to RFC 1. This intro should whet your appetite and convince you to read on by clicking the linked article from the title above.

When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at four research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The government financed the network and the hundred or fewer computer scientists who used it. It was such a small community that we all got to know one another.