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Comment by DuskStar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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/

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