[LINK] Y2K10 Bugs

[Tom Worthington]

There appear to have been several software errors become apparent with
the handling of dates in the year 2010. These include EFTpos machines,
smart phones and anti-spam software. Given that it is ten years since
the Y2K bug was supposed to hit and there have been several
retrospective stores saying how it was a non-event, this is somewhat ironic.

SMS messages from smart phones running some versions of Microsoft
Windows Mobile operating system are reported to be displaying 2010 dates
as 2016. The likely cause seems to be a decimal number being interpreted
as hexadecimal:
<http://slashdot.org/story/10/01/03/1312209/2016-Bug-Hits-Text-Messages-Payment-Processing>.

It has been reported that Bank of Queensland’s Eftpos terminals were
treating 2010 as 2016. This may be due to the same bug as for the smart
phones, as the Microsoft Windows CE Operating System is used on devices
such as EFTpos machines and share code with Windows Mobile:
<http://www.smh.com.au/business/businesses-stung-by-boq-computer-bug-20100103-lmys.html>.

The Apache SpamAssassin Project reported a Y2K10 Rule Bug, which would
will trigger on most mail dated 2010, or later:
<http://spamassassin.apache.org/>.

Bug fixes are likely to be quickly available for all these problems. But
in the case of embedded code in smart phones and EFTpos machines, this
may require manual installation.

More at: <http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/01/y2k10-bugs.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274