2016 bug hits Windows phones
Y 2.01K spreads
The date bug which is interfering with Aussie point of sale transactions has spread to some Windows mobile phones.
The glitch means that text messages received since New Year's Eve will appear with a 2016 date. Card scanners in thousands of Australian shops have also been hit, as we reported yesterday. Bank of Queensland systems, believing it was 2016, rejected most payment cards because they'd passed their expiry date.
The bank introduced a manual workaround which effectively tells systems to ignore the date.
Windows Mobile users, running versions 6.1 and 6.5, may have noticed text messages from the future - all messages received since New Year's Eve will have a 2016 dateline, according to Techradar.com.
A Microsoft spokesman said: “Microsoft is aware of reports that phone messages received after 1/1/2010 may be dated 2016. These reports have not yet resulted in widespread customer inquiries; however, we are working closely with our manufacturing and mobile operator partners to investigate the cause and correct the issue as appropriate.” ®
COMMENTS
Its the real time clock chip
This problem has hit some RISC OS computers which have a Dallas real time clock chip rather than a Philips one. It's down to the clock chip returning the date in binary coded decimal rather than plain binary. it worked up to now as the values 0-9 are the same in both schemes, but 10 is 0x10 in BCD rather than 0x0A, which the clock code has incorrectly read as 16, hence thinking it's 2016.
My Xperia X1 is not affected..
My Xperia X1 is a windows mobile 6.1 phone and it is not suffering from any such affliction.
Bollocks!
WinMo 6.1 vanilla here and every one I've received so far this year quite correctly says 2010.
If you actually *read* the linked article, it says specifically that it's not confined to WinMo devices and seems to affect all US carriers.
I wonder what's really at fault here?
But the good news is...
...if we're getting messages from 2016, it means that the world didn't end in 2012! Yay!
Phew
Thank goodness that it's just a Windows bug on some phones. I started to get really worried for a moment when I received a message from 2016 saying, "Please help - Shut down the Large Hadron Collider - The Portal has opened - agggghh"
