The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you’re around then.
Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.
Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn’t an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date “0” which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.
Finally it’d be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
AfaIk that’s not entirely true, e.g. Debian is changing the system time from 32 bit integer to 64 bit. Thus I assume other distros do this as well. However, this does not help for industrial or IOT devices running deprecated Unix / Linux derivatives.
industrial or IOT devices running deprecated Unix / Linux derivatives
This is my concern, all the embedded devices happily running in underground systems like pipes and cables. I assume there are at least a few which nobody even considered patching because they’ve “just worked” for decades!
