X-Message-Number: 10505 From: Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 11:24:05 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Y2K Spinoff#1 for me. As has been pointed out here in the Cryonet before, even if nothing meaningful happens directly due to Y2K, the social impact indirectly should also be considered. Yesterday Y2K hit my banking institution. Because of the Y2K fears, tecno-geeks at my bank have decided to place all transactions on the internet by January. Up until now they have used a convenient local access bulletin board system, but now to save us from "the coming doom", they are placing their financial transactions directly on the internet. "Risk" magazine I believe was the first to document the hacker who this year cracked the Dept of Defence's best encryption in less than 24 hours, and the true joy of hackers seems to be in duplicating and improving. So now my own bank will join the other lemmings who intend to enable the possibility of mass electronic credit card fraud to screw up the customers' credit histories and paralyze their financial standing for months or years - all to "avoid" Y2K. The exchange of a safe medium (relatively speaking) for a crackable, demonstrably unsafe medium will happen to my bank's customers still there (I won't be) on January 1. I am not qualified to judge the Y2K arguments otherwise ("Read THIS - No, read THAT"), but my bank's decision to actually reduce safety to avoid Y2K is something pretty easy to judge. They were more concerned with being safe from Y2K than in carefully thinking about whether or not they were actually leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Maybe the hacker threat is no big deal and my understanding of the risk factors (along with the best minds in the field) is in error. However, my bank's decision-making process was not based on OVERALL risk assessment, only on Y2K. ("Don't worry, George. ALL the banks are doing this." To which I replied, "The same way Barings Bank played option spreads without protective wings?"). Looks to me that my simplistic non-scientific sampling (MY bank!) may indicate a possible trend which WILL happen. I think we should at least consider the impact of "Y2K Fever" and try to prepare for that contingency. For me, it is no longer hypothetical. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10505