The Sky Intertoobz
Is Falling!

Here at the start of what it appears will be a very nice week in our corner of the sticks.....(continued below image)

.....or the Eve of what could be anything from the end of the world as we know it, or a hoax perpetrated by the FBI so they can (fill in nefarious aim here) or much too much ado about nothing (like Y2K wasn't, but appeared to be thanks to the work of geeks everywhere once they realized the mistake of not using 4 integers to represent the year back when both data space and processor cycles were in limited supply). This depends on which new sources you use and how much you know about computers and how the Internet works. The truth is, it is a nice day today with, we hope, more to follow, AND there is a very real "threat" facing an estimated 7,000 Canadians and perhaps a half million worldwide.

No Alice, thousands of computers are unlikely to start exploding at midnight, midnight in a specific time zone or a midnight that rolls west around the globe - like a midsummer's nightmare version of New Year. You can diagnose and fix today in seconds, or maybe minutes if you test positive for the "infection." Tomorrow, if the symptom present and the Internet is out of reach, you can skip the diagnosis and go straight to the fix, which now will involve resorting to the almost deprecated data transfer protocol "sneakernet," simply carrying disks, thumb drives or even floppy disks (ever more deprecated as I type) or POTS )Plain Old Telephone System), which can involve endless hours on hold to a call centre, especially on a day when many users are experiencing the same problem as you.

You probably will find that you didn't need to have bothered, but a quick little visit to the DNS Changed Working Group or DCWG, just might save you a lot of time and headaches tomorrow.