Y2K20 Parking Meter Software Glitch Causes Global SNAFU (gothamist.com) 42
New submitter grunby shares a report from Gothamist: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 -- and had never been updated by the company. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date." NYC DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters -- the NY Times notes that NYC has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix. The report notes that parking meters are still accepting coins, and the ParkNYC app is still working if you want to use credit cards.
Somewhere in the code (Score:4, Funny)
# Hey, there doesn't seem to be a chance in hell that this company will be around
# in 2020, so I'm just going to terminate any transactions after December 31 2019.
What is a coin? (Score:2)
is it some sort of bitcoin? I don't see how to insert a bitcoin into the meter?
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Comments in the code? What comments?
A US Company is Claiming TAX (Score:3, Interesting)
What the fuck bullshit is this, a US company is basically charging a carparking sales tax globally, like what the fuck is wrong with countries across the globe for fuck sake. Why the fuck do you allow US corporations to charge what basically amounts to a corporate tax on transaction between citizens and government, what the fuck insanity is this. If they can make a profit doing this, than the fucking government can charge less doing it at fucking cost. Talk about the insanity of corporate taxes on transaction between citizens and their government, talk about insane psychopathic greed and in your face government corruption, so what are the kick backs on allowing corporate taxes on transactions between citizens and their government must be pretty chunky.
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Because in their worldview the economy works when people spend money, not save it.
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The economy is the start and end of everything. - David Cameron
Re:A US Company is Claiming TAX (Score:4, Interesting)
And to add insult to injury, their software is obvious crap and coded cheapest-possible.
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Why the fuck do you allow US corporations to charge what basically amounts to a corporate tax on transaction between citizens and government, what the fuck insanity is this.
Yeah why do I let my farmer charge a tax for getting vegetables out of the ground. Why do I let a power distribution company charge a tax for transmitting me power. Why not re-invent all the wheels all the time. Everyone should do their own thing, and no one should ever pay for a service from other people. *WARNING EXTREME SARCASM ALERT* I'm sure nothing bad has ever happened from governments attempting to code, design and engineer their own systems instead of paying for something off the shelf.
Also Parkeo
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All those hacky Y2k fixes (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of these systems didn't fix the Y2K bug but delayed it. I was on extra notice at work this week expecting some legacy POS system to fail because the coder just added 20 years to the date-time control.
Of course, we have to the year 2038 for the Unix bug to come out. Sure most systems have a fix that has been around for a long time. But I expect there is some mission-critical Unix box running for decades without updates. Because it does what it needed to do.
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A common problem with embedded programming is that the coders don't think about either the longevity of the software or the difficulty of updating it.
On a desktop computer, the software is often updated every few months, and the hardware is replaced in a few years. Almost nobody is using a 25 years old laptop with all the original software. So it seems reasonable to verify a date by doing a sanity check and rejecting any date more than 25 years in the future.
For embedded stuff, you can't do that.
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Some of my embedded code will fail in the 2060s. If I'm still alive they can call me...
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No one's running it on ancient hardware, but ancient software still runs today. Windows XP is nearly 20 years old, you run it in a VM.
DOSBox lets you run applications from the 80s on a modern machin
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How quaint. Desktop based thinking.
While there are organizations out there running on 40 year old hardware. Because there may not be a good emulator for it.
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The 2038 problem has already been occuring in some cases. Ie, a certificate that expires in 20 years may show up as expired already if the software isn't careful when converting between the certificate's time format and a 32-bit unix-style time format. And yes, many many systems use 32-bit time, and it's annoying because many C libraries refuse to provide 64-bit time in a 32-bit version of their libraries.
Time handling is actually HARD, and a lot of people wrote code assuming it's all very easy. So you s
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Some versions of Mac OS went back to 1920 a few days ago too. A lot of stuff failed in 2000 not due to Y2K but because it couldn't handle the lack of a leap day in February. I have some Amiga accounting software that is forever a day off now.
Taking volunteers for street duty! (Score:5, Insightful)
Individually updating 14,000 meters? I don't mean to smirk. I can hardly get a crew to install 14 hard drives without having to revisit one of them. I'd have to guess that this will be completed sometime just before the next cutoff date.
On the plus side, this probably creates another job or few for the economy.
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Why go to heaven and sit back and take it easy when you can go to hell instead and make a difference. - Anthony T. Hincks
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Individually updating 14,000 meters? I don't mean to smirk. I can hardly get a crew to install 14 hard drives without having to revisit one of them. I'd have to guess that this will be completed sometime just before the next cutoff date.
On the plus side, this probably creates another job or few for the economy.
I'd guess they're all gig jobs, paid by the meter repaired....
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I help make devices for utilities. Sometimes with a bug they want to know how it can be remedied over-the-air because the cost of sending out a technician is amazingly expensive (called a "truck roll"). So sometimes the "correct" fix may be to replace a defective battery but the actual fix is to try and work with that battery anyway. And there's a market for ways to reduce the number of truck rolls too.
Installing however seems easier. Maybe it's all from a different budget. They may do 14,000 device ins
Re: Taking volunteers for street duty! (Score:1)
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Anti-fraud (Score:3)
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I don't get it. What's funny about the number twenty? Also, what's with all those dots? Can't you learn to type properly?
How is this a Glitch? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 "
The system was designed to do X on a certain date and it did X on that date. How is that glitch?
Computing systems do what you program them to do and they are not clairvoyant.
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>"The system was designed to do X on a certain date and it did X on that date. How is that glitch?"
Bingo. What it probably was is a douche-bag timebomb to force the owners to continue to be extorted for "support." I had something similar happen in a call accounting system. I refused to pay for a "support" subscription any longer, because they would not fix the serious bugs I reported (and one was so bad it would constantly corrupt the running system and I would have to restart the whole system every 3
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> The system was designed to do X on a certain date and it did X on that date. How is that glitch?
The hardware did what the programmer wanted. The /system/ failed to meet customer requirements.
If you're not programming for your customer then you're a hobbyist. Which is fine but don't expect to run a business- they exist to provide value to customers.
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If you're not programming for your customer then you're a hobbyist. Which is fine but don't expect to run a business- they exist to provide value to customers.
In an ideal world, then yes.
In the current world, then all deprecated code (even though some customers might still be relying on it) makes the likes of Apple and Microsoft "hobbyists"
More on Potential "Y2.02K Problems" (Score:4, Informative)
From Has Y2K windowing been addressed by banks or is Y2.02K a risk? [computerweekly.com]: One senior IT professional in the UK financial services sector, who was involved in several different Y2K projects at banks, said many of the legacy systems they expected to be defunct by now are still in use.
"One of the popular solutions was called windowing, which involved leaving the years as two-digits and using a reference year to determine which century a two-digit year was in," said the IT professional, who wished to remain anonymous.
"The figure of 20 was used in many cases, but other figures were also used depending on the systems and products involved. Typically, this work applied to old code written around the 1970s in languages such as PL/1 and COBOL running on mainframes. A lot of this code is still in use today around the big banks and other large organisations that adopted computers in the early days."
If the reference year was set as 20, when 2020 is reached, the system will think it is 1920. The risk today is that the remedial work was done about a quarter of a century ago, many of the people involved have long since retired and the system documentation may not be perfect," they said. "If those who followed in their footsteps have overlooked the legacy of the Y2K solutions put in place all those years ago, we might all be in for a nasty surprise on 010120 if critical systems read that as 1 January 1920."
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old code written around the 1970s ... remedial work was done about a quarter of a century ago
And more remedial work being done now. What's the betting that in around another 20 years, there will be another round of fixes needed (with the same "many of those involved have long since retired" problem to work round), as literally nobody thought that code written seventy years before would still be in use
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Sounds like a job for me. I can fix this.
Of course, I'll be expensive. And require occasional rest breaks. Maybe naps.
And get off my lawn!
Kids today .. they haven't even heard of PL/1. Or even COBOL, if they're lucky. RPG, anyone? APL?
But still, many systems are running with these old systems deep deep deeply hidden, but still crucial.
It has to be said. (Score:2)
Old data formats never die (Score:2)
Y2K? Meet IoT
This is why we can't have nice things.
So, is Parkeon paying for this?
Y2K20? Stupid name. (Score:2)
While we're at it, let's add -gate to the end of the name of this scandal. Y2K20-gate has a ring to it, no?
SimDesk hard-coded expiration (Score:2)
This reminds me of a hard-coded expiration date in SimDesk's (now defunct) email software. They were so sure the "version 1" product would be rewritten within 5 years, that they hard-coded an expiration date. Of course, that date came, and the version 1 software was still in use. Several of us had to physically travel to libraries where the software was installed, defeat the anti-tampering software the libraries had in place, and manually update the software. Some lessons are never learned.