Airline Ticketing System Keeps Mistaking a 101-Year-Old Woman for a 1-Year-Old (bbc.com) 121
Though it's long past Y2K, another date-related bug is still with us, writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423, sharing this report from the BBC.
"A 101-year-old woman keeps getting mistaken for a baby, because of an error with an airline's booking system." The problem occurs because American Airlines' systems apparently cannot compute that Patricia, who did not want to share her surname, was born in 1922, rather than 2022.... [O]n one occasion, airport staff did not have transport ready for her inside the terminal as they were expecting a baby who could be carried...
[I]t appears the airport computer system is unable to process a birth date so far in the past — so it defaulted to one 100 years later instead... But she is adamant the IT problems will not put her off flying, and says she is looking forward to her next flight in the autumn. By then she will be 102 — and perhaps by then the airline computers will have caught on to her real age.
"A 101-year-old woman keeps getting mistaken for a baby, because of an error with an airline's booking system." The problem occurs because American Airlines' systems apparently cannot compute that Patricia, who did not want to share her surname, was born in 1922, rather than 2022.... [O]n one occasion, airport staff did not have transport ready for her inside the terminal as they were expecting a baby who could be carried...
[I]t appears the airport computer system is unable to process a birth date so far in the past — so it defaulted to one 100 years later instead... But she is adamant the IT problems will not put her off flying, and says she is looking forward to her next flight in the autumn. By then she will be 102 — and perhaps by then the airline computers will have caught on to her real age.
Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Insightful)
When Y2K happened, people came up with all kinds of hacks to predict dates. Knowing how cheap companies are, a lot of that stuff is likely still running unchanged. I remember back then a lot of times we'd say "this shit won't be an issue for a couple decades, it'll get replaced or rewritten by then"... you know when you're young it feels like you won't get old ever .. like a decade will take forever to go by.
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Sarcasm detector was beeping so loud I had to turn it off.
One snag is with developers assuming that Unix time format designed for *files* is good enough for all purposes.
Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Insightful)
you know when you're young it feels like you won't get old ever ..
The next stage (speaking from experience) is "How can I be 60? In my head I still feel like I'm in my 20s! My knees, on the other hand, ..."
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I'm early 50s and my knees haven't felt this good since I was a teen.
Of course, I went from 180lbs then to close to 300 and a few years back started loosing it all again, so back down to 190....
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For me it started with the hair (gray then developed a bald spot) in my late 30s. After that was my near sight. It started to go in my early 40s and was basically gone by 46. I now have a pair of cheaters in every room of the house...
I am now approaching 50 and I am just starting to develop an ache in my left knee due to sleep position at night.... I can only imagine that this will continue to progress.
Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:4, Funny)
I hate it when that creepy old guy stares out of the mirror at me.
Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Funny)
2038 hunched in the corner, rubbing its bony little hands in anticipation...
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I'm pretty sentimental here; I think of 2038 as a kind of gift or inheritance being bequeathed down from one generation to the next, from the programmers who made an absolute killing from panicked corporations that suddenly were held to ransom by the inevitable aging of software.
Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people claimed that people warning about y2k were wrong, because planes did not fall from the sky and hell did not break lose, but they don't know how much effort people did back then to prevent those issues from happening.
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We saw it all again with COVID. Intangible consequences, if they don't happen (or sometimes even when they do), remain intangible. At least the panic for Y2K was mostly only needed in advance.
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Sure, but the intangible consequences was more what I was talking about rather than ability to plan.
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In retrospect, perhaps it'd have been better if everything ended back then.
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I can attest to that. There's a decent amount of COBOL code in some of our local programs that is using 2 digits with the logic that 78 (when the system was first installed) is 20 + number and greater than 78 is 19 + number.
That was good enough for the "operations" fields (eg when something happened, or a bill date) but it was incredibly sloppy and would eventually break in 2078. I'm thinking we'll bee off that software by then and if not I don't particularly care myself.
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Yeah, that's what people said back in the 60s and 70s - that the code wouldn't be running in 1999.
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What's odd is that there was plenty of separation between frontend and backend code even then (mainframe vs. terminal). We actually need to be better at planning for certain backend code to be running for a century or more. The basics don't change. Or when they do, it's so piecemeal that you might as well be maintaining the original code. It seems less plausible now, but few programming languages haven't had breaking changes in the past decade. And security patches for versions before the breaking chan
Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:4, Informative)
I was at a medical device company, and some there naively felt that 2 digits for years was all you needed, or that signed 32-bit unix time was good enough. Except that if you need to enter a patient's birth date that it wasn't going to work for a large number of actual living people. Sometimes I'd get blank stares, other times they'd claim it was such a very tiny number of people who were over 90 that it didn't matter.
It's a problem all over with software designers - they don't want to talk to real experts and assume that they are expert enough themselves. A common problem is assuming they are experts on times and dates. After all, they learned how to tell time back in kindergarten, how hard can time be?? Then they screw it up badly.
And there's the old software, no one wants to fix the old stuff, not even airlines. They paid a lot of money for the original buggy version, and they don't want to pay more to keep it updated.
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It's common in a lot of companies, they're figuring they'll have exited the company by the time the bill comes due so to speak, and they'll have collected their bonuses and left.
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Back in the late 80s, I was learning to write code and I was told to write the date in 2 digit formats. I thought that was stupid. They thought the code would be gone by then. I write code to last forever. Apparently, it is lasting forever.
It is only short sighted folks who keep using kludges instead of doing the real work. Too bad there is no eugenics program for that rather than skin and hair color.
Software Engineering (Score:2)
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So negative! It is working well for 99.99999....% of passengers.
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100-(80139/331449281*100) = 99.9758216401% (2020 data)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I stand corrected!
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Trump is already more than 3/4 of the way to 100, it's going to matter to him in a few years.
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Isn't all that airline and air traffic related stuff still stuck in the 70s? And where it is not, it has to be compatible to systems stuck in the 70s? What about non-ASCII letters in your name? Or at least case sensitive passenger names? On my tickets, my name and middle name get mushed into something unreadable that has nothing to do with my name.
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Such as?
(This is a trick question on a slashcode-powered forum)
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ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü, ß, é, á, o, ê
have fun :-)
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âoeThe only thing we have to fear is fear itself.â
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“The only thing we have to fear is HTML entities instead of Apple keyboards”
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The reason they suck is that they are the biggest and therefore there's huge inertia to make any sort of change. A small organization can easily rewrite its stuff, change platforms, whatever. American Airlines is likely to think they need to allocate and invest a billion dollars to fix their stuff. I mean, I am sure it can be done for a LOT less, but since it's a big organization you can't really tell people to suck it up we're changing this shit. It would need a strong personality to come in and do somethi
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Question is, where does the bug manifest. ... have seen bollocks like this enough.
Could be as simple as a web interface limiting a field to two digits, and cutting off the lead digits if the user types more.
But could be as arsine as someone made some code like "if age greater than 100, subtract 100"
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But could be as arsine as someone made some code like "if age greater than 100, subtract 100" ... have seen bollocks like this enough.
Most likely if $birthyear > $currentyear assume 19$birthyear else assume 20$birthyear...
A crude temporary kludge for the y2k problem, instead of a proper fix. People don't properly consider corner cases like these and it just comes back to bite you at some point in the future.
She should take advantage of this bug to get child fares, assuming they are cheaper than senior fare rates.
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People don't properly budget for corner cases like these
FTFY. They knew at the time what would happen. But it was again tomorrow's problem.
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Possibly, or there wasn't a test case for a passenger over 100 years old so the developer took a short cut.
Assuming the system was originally developed in the 1960s there would have been people born in the 1800s still alive.
Re:Software Engineering (Score:5, Informative)
She should take advantage of this bug to get child fares, assuming they are cheaper than senior fare rates.
That would be funny and would make news, haha.
Of course, because American Airlines would have a fix in place within a week if the person leveraged the system to get a discount.
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Maybe she could just ride on her mother's lap for free.
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Did you read my last line?
Re:Software Engineering (Score:4, Interesting)
American Airlines has one of the worst booking systems/websites of the major airlines. For being the world's largest airline, they website is so embarrassing. Errors all the time, really slow, can't easily change flights as it generally fails and tells you to call in the change. On top of that, their flights are delayed all the time. Delta is leaps and bounds a much better airline in every aspect. I avoid ever booking on American Airlines and if I do, it's because I had a strict timeframe and they had a flight that worked out instead of Delta.
Not to mention silliness like requiring the credit card used to pay for the flight to match the exact name of the person flying. (Why do they care if someone else pays for your flight? What business is it of theirs? Why do the credit card companies even allow them to put in additional restrictions like that?) My mom goes by her middle name, and all her cards are in that name. This causes all manner of h**l every time she tries to book a flight from American (and only American).
And any time you end up calling them, you're guaranteed hours of hold time, because they don't have a tenth as many agents as they need to handle their average call volume. And if you're really lucky, they'll fix the problem. If you're not, you'll find out that the flight you thought was booked and paid for didn't actually go through, and you have no ticket and no recourse.
I swear, the best thing that could happen for the industry would be for American Airlines to go under and be replaced by about five smaller airlines that are actually run by people with at least a tiny bit of technical competence. Because you're right. It's obvious even as an outside observer that their computer systems are a steaming pile of excrement. I can't even imagine how much horror must lurk beneath the surface that we can't see. I can fully imagine it being the sort of thing where senior engineers take one look at it and defenestrate themselves rather than touch it.
Re:Software Engineering (Score:5, Informative)
Why do they care if someone else pays for your flight?
This one makes sense only for international flights to certain destinations. Traffickers book flights in the name of mules.
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Why do they care if someone else pays for your flight?
They probably get a lot of chargebacks from people using stolen credit cards to book flights.
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How carefully do the check the ID? Do they match say your driving licence to the government database, or just make sure the name matches the one on the ticket?
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However, if
Re:Software Engineering (Score:5, Funny)
Someone out there has a passport with the name "Gift Card Recipient" on it.
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Nothing. He was taking a dig at IBM's software engineering.
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Same as it ever was... (Score:2)
Software bugs in wide release that don't get discussed publicly are just like this one. There they are, even if logged, to languish as a "feature". That's an industry standard.
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It *is* a feature.
Children under the age of 3 get to travel free as long as they're accompanied by an adult, surely.
She just has to invite a grandchild along and she can travel anywhere at no cost. Why is she complaining? :)
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She may not want to sit in her grandchild's lap for the duration of the flight. The grandchild may not want that either.
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Makes me wonder... (Score:2)
You think they've still got some 40-year-old computers hidden deep in their datacenters, still using the 2-year dates that used to be the norm back then?
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IBM is smarter than that - it probably runs on or more of their mainframes, and there's a tipping point with those, where annual maintenance on an older machine exceeds the lease on a new one.
The computers are probably relatively new, the software is demonstrably not. It's a bit of a curse with those things, they're so backwards-compatible that all you have to do is swap out the hardware for new stuff without ever having to touch the application code, so it leads to laziness.
But yes, you probably know all t
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I think it was IBM mainframe which basically promised that if the COBOL ran on Gen 'x', it would run on nearly any generation of their mainframes. And it wouldn't even need to be recompiled. Good if you've lost the source.
Fujitsu have, or are just about to, exit the Mainframe market. Expect this market to cool down and the rate of progress at the top end to slow, not to mention the prices will increase. Its the IBM way or the highway, now.
I think Porter would have a field day. You have this IT system runnin
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Unisys mainframes are used by a good number of Airlines and they are still building mainframes.
Their technology has been ahead of its time in mainframe days.
Ageism bites back (Score:2)
But we don't hire those people any more do we? We want nice young blood that is full of great ideas.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of young coders who know to use a 4-digit year, but obviously, this company didn't hire them.
Suffer in ya jocks.
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There is no way a young person wrote that code. They would have used strings to represent dates.
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Or maybe use an actual date variable,
I figure the problem is that it does indeed get converted into a string as some point - a string consisting of 2 characters for the age, so 101-> 01, so when it goes back into the more modern systems to spit out a work order for picking up the 1 year old...
Personally speaking, if there isn't a date variable/class available, I think that I'd tend to reach for int before a string for dates. Only switch to string when I'm looking to output the data.
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For the love of god, recalibrate your sarcasm detector.
Re: Ageism bites back (Score:2)
Re: Ageism bites back (Score:2)
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Not sure its great ideas so much (Score:2)
More that a lot of managers want pliable individuals who'll do what they're told because they don't yet know any better and are quite happy to work stupid hours because they don't have a family and/or they're not confident enough to tell the pointy hair that no they're not going to work until 8pm every day and to go do one.
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Re: Ageism bites back (Score:2)
I think you need to speak to your therapist again and up your meds doses.
Have them look at it this way (Score:5, Funny)
She's only 29 -- for the past 72 years.
Must be a nightmare for Napo Leon. (Score:2)
Millennium bug or age display field? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the display field can only show two digits, we would have the same symptoms.
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You'd think it would truncate in that case. So age of 10.
I would start saying.. (Score:2)
The real problem (Score:2)
Grown-up people will look at her and tell her they can't treat her like a 101 year old person because the computer says she's a baby.
While it may be funny about the age mistake.. (Score:2)
Is it really all about the age? Not having a wheelchair ready, I would have assumed that would be a separate request regardless of age. Similarly I wonder at the "transport", as other than the plane itself, I'm not accustomed to any sort of intra-airport transport that has seating specifically counted.
Airlines are super cheap and change resistant (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm routinely surprised (Score:2)
...(but shouldn't be) by the meticulous, nearly atomic-level precision modern commercial systems can manage and deal with massive amounts of data when it comes to TRACKING THE FUCK OUT OF US* but simple stuff like "your 2-year digit code in your ticketing disregards that some people who travel live more than 100 years" never seems to get fixed.
*I mean that literally: when you click on some links, your info goes out on AUCTION to be bid around for which advertising they're going to show you, they have the au
Real issue is that DOB is irrelevant to flight (Score:2)
The reason the airline is collecting DOB is to comply with TSA's "Secure Flight." Secure Flight involved a TSA mandate to collect gender and DOB to reduce the TSA's press humiliation from stopping and harassing every person named David Nelson, Robert Johnson, and some other common names, because the names "matched" the TSA's secret due-process-free No-Fly-List. (NFL). The NFL grew from under 600 names in 2001 to over 81,000 names in 2016.
Implementing the DOB check reduced the false positives enough that t
Clever hack for dumb system (Score:5, Interesting)
Airline systems tend to have problems because they were written prior to 1980, when things like BCD were still commonplace.
For software written after approximately 1980 (and definitely after the dawn of 8-bit personal computers), the "Y2K problem" was rarely about date-storage and calculation, and was mainly a usability and character-mode UI problem.
First, let's get one thing clear: programmers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't oblivious to the year 2000. Behind the scenes, most programs written after ~1980 either represented dates as 32-bit epoch time values, or represented years as a byte offset from some reference year. The result is, they were generally good for dates between around 1800..2050 or 1850..2100.
The REAL problem was the ubiquity of 80x25 character-mode displays. Especially back in the 1980s, wasting two characters of screen real estate on a seemingly redundant '19' was intolerable. The arrival of Windows and proportional fonts made programmers more willing to start using 4-digit dates starting in the early 1990s... but for charactermode programs, there was intense resistance even in 1995, with 2000 less than 5 years away.
In many cases, Y2K mitigation was REALLY an excuse to scare management into approving the replacement of DOS and terminal-based programs with Windows. The truth is, almost all programs written after the 1970s HAD arcane work-arounds to let users enter pre-1900 and post-2000 years, and they weren't really a secret... just ugly and kludgy. Like, entering/rendering dates after 2000 using a letter as the first character (ex: a0=2000, b1=2011, c2=2022, etc). Or rendering dates like 2004 as 19104 (naively printing it as "19" plus the byte-offset from 1900).
The irony is, a lot of systems that were supposedly remediated for y2k ACTUALLY have ticking time-bomb deadlines of 2038, or sometime around 2050 or 2100 that have been mostly forgotten about by now.
Solved? (Score:2)
"Hey boss, didn't our grandfathers solve this problem back in the 20th century?"
"You're not being much of a team player there, Timmy. You know the holidays are coming up and there's nothing that gets us moist like Christmas layoffs."
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For that amount she can get the deluxe first class package right next to the window seat.
Re: Riding Boeing is cheaper these days (Score:2)
I think you need professional help.
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I'll suspect that they have a system that only uses 2 decimal digits for the birth year, and does a simple "if year would be in future, then 19XX, else 20XX".
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Youngster, back in the day, a computer with 16K RAM was considered a honkin' bit of machinery. That's Kilobytes, not Terabytes, Gigabytes or Megabytes. Saving memory was an extreme priority.
There is the problem of COBOL using text strings for dates, which just seems outright demented. However, it was a very early computer language and people barely had any idea what they were doing.
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One of the Y2K bug subtypes is year of birth being > Y2K. You have to start having a conversion for 2 date years. Many "fixes" were just adding a cutoff year for which 2 digit years were 1900s and which were 2000s.
2024-1999 is something Y2K programmers would have been thinking of. Some may not be bright enough to realize that 2024-1923 would be 1 if there are old enough passengers.
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The point is, the system isn't calculating age by subtracting years. This is a simple data entry issue, they type in 101 and the system shows just 1.
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According to the article it is subtracting years. What is your source? Even the summary gets you halfway there.
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You're trying so hard here but missing the point. They truncate the year in storage and expand it out to 4 digits when making calculations. This is what a lot of businesses did to solve Y2K issues. They use a generic cutoff year and substitute either 19 or 20 depending on whether it is before that.
So 66 is expanded to 1966. But the year 24 in the same field is assumed to be 2024.
I did cover all this way upthread but you completely ignored it.
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I just went to the AA reservations page. https://www.aa.com/booking/fin... [aa.com] They don't ask for the year of your birth. They do ask you for your age.
There is nothing in the article that backs up your assumption.
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That's the frontend.
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Are you even a developer? There's no way to take someone's age as input, and calculate their year of birth from that. If all you have is their year of birth, you don't know whether today is before, or after their birthday. Trying to calculate their birth year would in many cases by off by one. If they actually wanted the birth year, they would just ask for it.
I'm starting to think you are just trying to tweak me, because your arguments make no sense at all.
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From the article:
the airport computer system is unable to process a birth date so far in the past
What part of that statement relates to asking her numerical age as an input?
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First, consider the audience and the author. This is not a technical article, the point is not to provide a root cause analysis.
Second, "so far in the past" does not equate to Y2K bug. If it were a Y2K bug, then the system would also glitch for people who are 92, 82, 72,.and even 32, because all of them have birth years before 2000, and all of those ages would lead to incorrect calculations if the algorithm truncated the century from the birth year. The article does not say anywhere that younger people are
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When Y2K bug fixes were going on NOBODY has a birth date in the 2000s. They wouldn't truncate without having an algorithm for going back to 4 digits with a cutoff year
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If they chose 24 as the "cutoff year" (23 = 2023, 24 = 1924) then back in 2001, anyone over the age of 77 (born in 1924) would have encountered this problem. In 2002 anyone over 78, in 2003, anyone over 79. It's highly unlikely that this is a "cutoff year" Y2K bug.
If they used a floating cutoff year (i.e., current 2-digit year + 1) then it's still not a Y2K bug, because it's not pegged to the year 2000. It's a "can't handle 3 digit age" bug, i.e., field overflow.
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If it's floating and they implemented it to handle 2000s dates then that makes it a Y2K bug by definition.
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All right, well I'm so glad we got the definition nailed down.
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It's taking you a bit but we'll get there.