No, just say the Y2K bug was severely overhyped, and that there was NOT a civilization ending catastrophe, since the bug had been fixed in basically every major computer system before that date. Current dangerous computing epoch bug is the 32bit integer epoch bug,
which will strike in 2038. Current progress toward 64bit integer time adoption however suggests that this event will also likewise be overhyped, and is nothing to concern oneself with.
Then ask politely why it is important that this antique computer system be capable of accessing the mortal internet.
Alternatively, this is an SSL certificate problem, since SSL uses synchronous timestamps to assure there is no man in the middle. In our universe, SSL was implemented with 32bit time_t, (the kind affected by the bug previously cited).
http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.8/ssl_faq.html#ToC6Given that the rift suffers from time asynchrony, it could be that with the recent trend to make everything use HTTPS by default (which uses SSL to assure a secure channel), the system could no longer communicate with the target computer on the internet (because it switched to HTTPS, and now the asynchronous time issue happens), resulting in the error.
This does not explain the strange seal placed over the network adapter configuration dialog though.
- Ask the DagonForce representative if the chat client supports file transfers, and if so, what image formats his system supports, as we have some questions that will require him to see things from our end. Failing that, we can still do the laptop thing with a really long USB cable, and a webcam. (you really CAN buy 25ft USB cables. Presumably we can extend items through the rift, using the selfie stick.)