The 2016 hit-list is getting longer

David Heath
Tuesday, 05 January 2010 07:11

IT Industry - Market

A variety of banks are now reporting impact from the 2016 bug, along with phones based on the Windows Mobile platform.

Reports are surfacing of a number of Australian banking organisations being affected by the 2016 bug.

Thus far, it seems the entire Bank of Queensland EFTPOS network has been affected along with a small number of similar terminals managed by Bank West (a subsidiary of WestPac).  In addition, the small number of business customers of the Cuscal network (credit unions in Australia) also seem to be suffering the problem.

Interestingly, there also seems to be an issue with mobile phones running the Windows Mobile platform whereby all TXT messages received since January 1st are date-stamped 2016.

The phone bug seems to be linked to issues in the SMS gateway, although why only Windows Mobile devices are affected is currently unknown.  An unofficial work-around is available to instruct the device to rely on the internal clock, rather than gateway timestamps for all messages.

There are a number of theories as to the origin of the problem, but most have homed in on the relationship between numerical systems of base-10 and base-16.

In base-10 (the 'normal' counting system we humans use), we count 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 etc. In base-16, it is ... 7 - 8 - 9 - A - B - C - D - E - F - 10 - 11 etc.

So, what if we were relying on a 2-digit year identifier, incrementing in accordance with base-10 but interpreting in accordance with base-16?  You guessed it; we happily go from 2009 to 2016!  Some observers (Si in TheAge link above and Telic in a response to my earlier article) have also suggested the added possibility of BCD coming into play, which does seem quite likely, knowing the way banks work!

One other thought - perhaps this is a very cunning way to bypass the effects of the Mayan calendar 2012 problem; by jumping straight forward to 2016!