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Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of these systems would really be sensitive to the clock overflowing to 1901. HVAC, kitchen applications, information signs, traffic lights... they all seem relatively low-risk to me. As long as things still happen in regular intervals, it's hard to imagine a crisis. (I would be surprised if many of these even have synced clocks in the first place, I can imagine them happily thinking it's somewhere in the 1980s and nobody is the wiser.)

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Does your system need to connect to a service on the internet? Does that service use an SSL cert?

If so, it almost certainly has a not-before time, and overflowing back to January 1st, 1970 will be before that not-before time. And so any behavior relying on that IoT device connecting to a service will fail.

If a device isn't receiving any updates, SSL would be an issue even without the 2038 problem - eventually all the trusted root certs will be expired.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Recently I brought up an emulated PPC running Mac OS 9. The included copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer couldn't connect to any site that used https -- and virtually everybody uses https these days.

That version of Internet Explorer did not support SNI, which is used by basically everything these days.

Not supporting SNI will get you a certificate error, but you’ll still be able to connect. What’s more likely is that old IE only supports SSLv3, which is disabled on most servers in light of POODLE.

https://disablessl3.com

And some certificates with long life are already post-2038

https://quickview.cloudapps.cisco.com/quickview/bug/CSCsc455...

I certainly hope traffic lights are never connected to the internet.

I’d always assumed they must be connected to support the ability of fire engines to setup route plans or the central traffic management teams to be able to override light sequences.

I see now there are other novel ways of supporting preemption for emergency vehicles, although I’m still unconvinced that’s what our city uses as the lights often preempt several minutes in advance and from over a kilometre away.

Most US preemption devices are just a visible (and sometimes optional infrared) stroke at 80Hz. Visibility to the sensor/receiver device is largely subject to prevailing light (bright day, more challenging, night/shade, then it's easy to pick out the strobe).

-- fire/ems provider.

In Queensland, Australia it's all an (internal) networked thing, relies on a lot of hardware interacting on IP networks. I can't imagine what'll happen in the 2038 situation - hopefully they've got a good vendor :)

Question, since I've always been curious about this: How difficult would it be to make your own preemption device? Are such things available on online stores?

I'm assuming it's illegal to use one obviously, but I wonder what precautions are used to prevent unauthorized usage, if that can even be disclosed to the public. What's stopping the average joe from getting one from Alibaba?

Honestly, pretty little, other than the risk of being observed. There may be systems that allow for authentication, but I've not seen them (though I'm not an expert).

There is an encoding standard for prioritization that some larger systems use, that mass transit may utilize, but can be overrode by Fire/EMS/LE.

They don't have to be connected to the Internet for that functionality.

REST API for my city's traffic lights (and associated detectors): http://trafficlights.tampere.fi

Realtime map someone made with that: http://jouni.kapsi.fi/trevalot/

I think you're already a bit late.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3dkk8k/how-las-tr...

Didn't you ever see the Italian Job circa 2003?

Fictional or not, cities are hyped up on 'smart infrastructure', sorry to deliver the bad news.

Even if the system isn't calendar aware, if all of a sudden you have negative timestamps you can have strange boundary conditions where loops might run forever, hanging the system.

I will never forget discovering that "SELECT FROM_UNIXTIME(-1)" would instantly crash MySQL.

I imagine that most of those applications are very much tied to the calendar — traffic lights and HVAC systems need to behave differently on different days.

Trying to minimize the amount of broken code that's still running in 2038 is a big part of why people are working hard to fix the problem now.

Maybe we could set them to 1907 and remain happy that near-future leap years and weekdays will align perfectly well. At least until 2100 needs to be skipped as a leap year ;)

Unix epoch: the number of seconds passed since 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit binary integer

The minimum representable date turns out to be on 1901 and zero is a valid value (1 January 1970)... I wonder what problems people with that birth date have? Similar to the person named Null, or Bobby Drop Tables?

The first-generation Zune had a leap year bug that caused it to get stuck in an infinite boot loop on December 31, 2008. Not exactly the kind of thing you want happening to traffic infrastructure.

Even if it has no issues rolling over, a big problem could be that anything that works on a weekly cycle (I imagine traffic lights, HVAC, etc have different schedules for workdays compared to weekends) will skip some days, as Jan 19th 2038 is a Tuesday and Jan 13th 1901 is a Friday.

Following up with this, it is highly unlikely the overflow will happen at midnight, or at the top of an hour. Even if a timezone or clock adjustment is possible on the system leap years and other calendar offsets will be different that can cause some continuing frustration for any workaround with an out of sync clock.

You never know, some devices may start incorporating AI algorithms that make behaviors based on past data, so a consistent timeline can become important even if there should be no inherent reliance on absolute dates.

The rule I follow is the same one I had for Y2K. If there is no interface to enter a date, you don't have to worry about it.

For example, on the sensationalized "documentaries" we had leading up to Y2K, they showed a stream of appliances and gadgets that had processors in them -- hair dryers, microwave ovens, dishwashers, food processors, etc saying they all would be vulnerable. Some of these display the time, but I haven't run across a microwave yet that accepted a date input.

These days, the "date input" tends to be the internet connection.

This is great for thinking about the non-internet connected devices. What's also interesting about this idea is that we can test what 2038 will be like by slowly shifting the time for certain networks forward to see if a subset of stuff will fail. If it does, we can resort to turning off systems.

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