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2016 Bug Hits Text Messages, Payment Processing

Posted by Soulskill on from the y2k16-has-more-characters-than-2016 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems some systems are suffering from a Y2K16 bug. When 2009 ticked over to 2010, some Australian EFTPOS machines skipped to the year 2016. Coincidentally, some Windows Mobile users are also having issues with their new year SMSes coming from 2016. What function could cause this kind of error?"

5 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft by sopssa · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seems Microsoft is supplying some code for EFTPOS machines that is common with Windows Mobile, so it's most likely the same bug in both.

  2. 10 hex is 16 decimal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could be botched string parsing. Could be binary coded decimals interpreted as binary numbers: BCD encodes two decimal digits in the high and low nibbles of a byte. Therefore BCD 10 is 0001 0000 in binary, which is 16 in decimal.

    1. Re:10 hex is 16 decimal by nycguy · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is almost certainly what it is. The year is stored in an SMS message as a two-digit BCD value, according to this spec. (Click on the link for the "timestamp" field.) Some phones must be treating it as a hex field. (Note that most other fields in the SMS message are in hex.)

  3. Re:Some kind of... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't think you quite have the hang of binary (10 would be 2, not 3).

  4. Re:Some kind of... by msauve · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, I meant exactly what I said. I didn't say 0b01. 0x10 is the hexadecimal notation for "00010000" binary, which is 16 decimal.

    I used 0x10 because that's standard ANSI C (and ECMA-334 C#), and C is what seems to be spoken on /.. 0b00010000 is non-standard (but allowed by some compilers).

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law