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OT: date formats
From: full-disclosure () lists netsys com (Steven M. Christey)
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 18:45:59 -0400 (EDT)
Brian Hatch said:
You're thinking Europeans date format. Here in the US, we usually use MM/DD/YY, so he's probably out more like 4 days.Here in the US, those who prefer nasty ambiguity problems use MM/DD/YY format.
Because of these differences, security advisories that use these date formats have the unfortunate effect of being difficult or impossible to resolve more than a few months after they were initially published. This matters if you care about historical or trend analysis. If you like vendor status timelines, the European/US format can mean the difference between whether a vendor took a day to respond, or 2 months.
Those of us who prefer to have easily identifiable dates use YYYY/MM/DD, which also has the side benefit of sorting correctly in ASCII.
Having done a little thinking on the use of dates, it seems that only the MM/DD/YY* or DD/MM/YY* formats have these issues. "20-Sep-02," "February 9, 2002," "2002-04-05," "2002-10-12," etc. don't seem to be ambiguous (YYYY-DD-MM doesn't seem to be used.) - Steve
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- OT: date formats Steven M. Christey (Aug 08)