By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator

We've been talking about the Y2K bug for so long it's hard to believe it hasn't actually occurred yet . It will finally be here in a couple of weeks, though. I sincerely hope that you have a great time this New Year's Eve and no, I don't think the world will end. Anyway if you're worried about your Web browser being Y2K compliant, then this column will answer your concerns.

Web browsers and Y2K

Web browsers, as far as we know anyway, do not have any Y2K bugs that would render them useless. However, if you visit many SSL encrypted Web sites you could run into an annoyance. This is because on January 1, 2000 the root certificates from Verisign (a company that specializes in issuing SSL certificates which are a critical part of SSL infrastructure & security) will expire. This means most SSL sites (including the GroupWise Web and UNT Internet Account Management system and the forthcoming EagleMail server) will present an error message saying the root certificate has expired. This does not comprise the security of SSL or functionality of the browser in any way.

This is not a bug, it is a security feature. All SSL certificates are set to expire, usually within a year. Root certificates generally have longer lifespans because they are used to sign other certificates. However, they all must expire eventually to limit the amount of damage that could be done if someone "stole" a certificate. Unfortunately Verisign picked a rather bad time to expire their initial root certificates -- January 1, 2000.

Upgrade your browser

It's easy to fix, however. You simply must upgrade your browser. Thus if you have a Web browser that is below version 4.5 for Netscape or version 5 for IE, you should upgrade to the latest versions of these browsers. Not only will you fix this Y2K annoyance you will also be able to take advantage of the latest in Web development and security. And since both browsers are free, there really isn't a reason not to. I would suggest you do upgrade before Christmas because during Christmas the browser sites* are always jammed with people who got new computers for Christmas and need to upgrade their browsers.

Happy holidays.

Mark

*For Netscape see: http://home.netscape.com/try/download/index.html

For Internet Explorer try: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/