• dan@upvote.au
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    15 hours ago

    some malfunction in systems around the world only supporting max 9 digits

    That’s not how computers work, though. They use binary so they care more about binary digits rather than decimal digits.

    Very old systems store numbers with a fixed number of digits, but those systems don’t use Unix time.

    • Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 hours ago

      But you could feasibly have conversion that crashes a system.
      Say a log is generated and prefixes the entries by a padded unix timestamp. The field is padded to length 9, so after y2k1 the unsigned integer math specifies to prepend -1 = 232 - 1 spaces