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Story Filed: Monday, January 03, 2000 2:35 PM EST

ROME (Jan. 3) XINHUA - The much feared and perhaps overrated Y2K or Millennium Bug appears to have made an appearance in Italian southern city of Naples upsetting the computerized records of prisoners and detainees awaiting trial.

Employees in the prisoner records office, in fact, returned to their offices Monday morning, after the holiday break, to find mistakes in the birth dates of some detainees, in detention orders, special parole permits and other measures.

The bug, in some cases, pushed trial dates and some birth dates ahead by 100 years. Thus there were prisoners slated for release January 10, 2000 who Monday morning should have been released January 10, 1900, while others have to wait until 2099 for release.

The court's chief magistrate, Angelica Di Giovanni, ordered staff to get out paper and pens to cope by hand with all urgent cases and briefs approaching deadlines.

Paper and ink work will begin on records pertaining to the release of prisoners in such special circumstances as suspension of sentences for illness, release for good time, release to work- prison programs and the like.

The head of personnel, Luigi Zuccarino, said Finsiel technicians were on the job and expected to have the entire system "de-bugged" by Monday evening.

Then, all the records dealt with manually will be fed back into the computers.

In Venice, staff in the records office were forced to cope with the same problem today. An office manager said all the dates were wrong.

"Instead of reading 1945, for example, we read 2045 on the terminal. But once printed out, the date was correct on the sheet, "the manager said.

He said after telephone contact with other offices around the country, including Naples, that "no so much the bug, I think this is a specific problem with the system we had installed, like in Naples, for the management of data."

In Rome, Engineer Augusto Leggio, the technical director of the Year 2000 Committee installed in Fort Braschi and given the task of girding for possible Y2K trouble, said Monday, "there were some problems reported at the local level. They were quickly dealt with and solved."

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), January 03, 2000

Answers

Fix on Failure! They'll have by tonight. the plan? to correct the data and re-enter it again ....!

Note the problem may be systemic, rather than "local" as the offical stated -- in that both Naples and Venice reported similar glitches.

-- SH (squirrel@huntr.com), January 03, 2000.

Great, I live an hour north of Naples....sigh..

-- Ynott (Ynott@incorruptible.com), January 04, 2000.