外刊阅读 | TIME | 微软大面积蓝屏背后的网络安全暗流，警钟长鸣！

Paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, universal healthcare, paid sick leave and policies like four-day work weeks or 35-hour-a-week limits on paid work would help ease time and financial costs for working families. 

带薪育儿假、儿童保育补贴、全民医保、带薪病假，以及每周工作四天或每周35小时带薪工作限制等政策，将有助于减轻工薪家庭的时间和经济成本。

Y2K Sent A Warning. The CrowdStrike Outage Shows We Failed to Heed It

Y2K 发出警告。CrowdStrike 中断表明我们未能注意到它

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We were warned that our embrace of computer technology would lead to disaster.By incorporating computers into ever more areas of our lives, we were told, we had created a scenario in which a mundane glitch could bring everything crashing down. Air travel would be snarled, bank accounts would become inaccessible, essential services would be seriously disrupted, and people would stare in horror as the computers they relied on for so much simply stopped working.

The events that played out on July 19, 2024, when a faulty software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread outages for users of Microsoft Windows, seemed to be a replay of the failures anticipated in the Year 2000. Even as CrowdStrike rushed to fix the problem, air travel was grounded, many people struggled to access their bank accounts, essential services genuinely were disrupted, and many people felt themselves turning red as they stared at their computers’ “blue screen of death.”

There are key differences between today’s CrowdStrike outage and the scenario warned about in Y2K. But there are significant parallels too. The most important may be what the CrowdStrike outage reveals about what we have failed to learn from Y2K itself: the computer systems on which we depend are fragile and error prone—and these systems are so interwoven in our daily lives that, when disaster strikes, it can hit us everywhere at once.

The Y2K problem is now nearly ancient history. In the 1950s and '60s, computer memory was expensive, and computer professionals were under pressure to save money. One solution they hit on was to truncate dates, lopping off the century digits so that 1939 would be coded as 39. To be clear, this worked. It saved memory, it saved money, and it did not impact the calculations computers used dates to make. Simply put: 1999 minus 1939 equals 60, and 99 minus 39 also equals 60. However, 2000 minus 1939 equals 61, but 00 minus 39 equals -39. And when computers encountered these incorrect results some systems and programs would start churning out garbage data, while others would fail entirely.It turned out that straightforward programming decisions taken in the moment could have long-lasting, potentially calamitous implications—especially when so many people and systems came to rely on those underlying programs.

The Special Committee highlighted how advances in computer technology had been hugely beneficial, but with those benefits had come new dangers. And though the Special Committee was not encouraging anyone to stock up on canned goods and head for the hinterlands, or arguing that computer networks needed to be dismantled, they emphasized that Y2K was “an opportunity to educate ourselves firsthand about the nature of 21st century threats” and an occasion “to consider carefully our reliance on information technology and the consequences of interconnectivity, and work to protect that which we have so long taken for granted.”As a result, Y2K helped drive broader awareness of our shared reliance on computers for everything from banking to keeping the lights on. 

It is very expensive to fix something once it is broken versus making sure that you have resolved the issue prior to.

与确保事先解决问题相比，一旦出现问题再去修复成本非常高。

In its initial report, the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Problem, echoed Schick, and described Y2K as “the first wide-spread challenge of the information age,” which was delivering “a crash course in the fragile mechanics of information technology.”

句子主干是：the Senate Special Committee echoed Schick and described Y2K as....这里使用了并列连词and连接了两个并列的谓语动词echoed和described，which was ... 是一个非限制性定语从句，修饰前面的整个主句.

翻译：参议院2000年问题特别委员会(Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Problem)在其最初的报告中呼应了希克的观点，将千年虫问题描述为“信息时代的第一个广泛挑战”，这为“信息技术脆弱机制上了一堂速成课”。

The CrowdStrike outage is a reminder that if we do not take seriously “our reliance on information technology,” ultimately the joke winds up being on us.

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