WHAT’S THE RUMOUR
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Need to Know
WELIKE...
RoyalMailhonoursBritish
games
RoyalMailhas
launcheda setof 12
stampscelebrating
UK-designed
computergames
fromthe1980s
and‘90s.These
includeWorms,Wipeout,Elite
andDizzy,aswellasfourstamps
commemoratingTombRaider
(bit.ly/stamps493).AAacceptsWhat3words
addresses
Driverswhobreak
downin unfamiliar
locationscannow
useWhat3words
(what3words.com)
addressestotell
theAAexactly
wheretheyare,thankstoa
newpartnershipbetweenthe
motoringassociationandthe
location-technologycompany.WEDON’TLIKE...
AmazoncallsHoney
a securityrisk
Amazonhaswarned
onlineshoppers
thatthepopular
deal-finding
browserextension
Honeyis a security
riskthat“tracks
yourprivateshopping
behaviour”.PayPalboughtthe
add-onlastyearin a dealworth
$4bn(£3bn).Joker malware plagues
Play store
More than 1,
apps infected with
malware known as
Joker (or Bread)
have been
detected and
removed from the
Google Play store
since 2017. The malware uses
various techniques to register
users for premium subscriptions.Low Cost Rockets for the UK
bit.ly/rockets493 | From £Heading to space isn’t cheap – even more so if you
plan on taking cargo. Award-winning Welsh startup Smallspark is seeking to
drive the price down, with its low-cost, environmentally friendly rocket. This
exciting proof-of-concept will help scientists explore new engineering designs to
make space travel more affordable and encourage the UK government to fund
space travel, as governments do in America, China and India. Designed to make
multiple trips, backers can send messages into space for £50 and photos for a
£100 pledge. Meanwhile, £500 investors can watch a live test firing of the rocket.Cast your minds back
20 years and you’ll recall
that, as Big Ben struck
midnight, banks wiped
account details, planes
fell out of the sky and
humanity faced a digital
apocalypse.
Nope, it didn’t happen
- but, at the time, the
threat of the Millennium
bug was alarmingly real.
Experts explained that,
due to the way dates had been coded
into programs, computers would read
‘00’ not as ‘2000’, but as ‘1900’,
throwing our entire civilisation into
a tailspin.
Now it’s feared that the Millennium
(or Y2K) bug could be making a
comeback. In New York, parking meters
unexpectedly went offline, preventing
card payments. Meanwhile, wrestling
video game WWE 2K20 also stopped
working – and could only be played by
changing the date to 31 December.
Rumours abound that a recent subway
system software fail in Hamburg was
also the result of the revived Y2K bug.
It seems that rather than fix the root
cause, some developers lazily swept the
problem under the millennial rug by
altering the software date from ‘00’ to
‘20’. Back in the late 1990s, companies
spent around £400bn rewriting all the
code to ensure the Millennium bug
didn’t happen. Now, much like the
Is the Millennium bug
biting again?
What’s new on Kickstarter
Our favourite new project on the crowdfunding siteTime Warp, some businesses may
have to do it all over again.WEBOMETER
LIKELIHOODRATING
It will surprise no one to learn
that some developers took the
easy way out – rewriting code
from scratch takes time so, when
faced with an unmissable
deadline, it’s understandable
that corners were cut. We’re
unlikely to see the same level of
hype and hysteria we witnessed
20 years ago but just be aware
that the occasional ‘software
glitch’ headlines that are likely to
appear over the coming years
perhaps are because, instead of
solving the problem, some
developers simply shifted the
catastrophe to a back burner.