Very Troll ish but
Ha ha ha ha ha
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 …
Seems they used a 16-bit integer for the date on Windows Mobile. That would allow a device to have a 16 year life span.
Windows Mobile developed in 1992 as Windows CE (it was released 2 years later). Now its 2010. Exactly 16 years. Bam! It's lights out for Windows Mobile.
Obviously there's some common dodgy code lurking about creating this problem, but I can't for the life of me figure out how you'd go about coding something that copes with dates up to 2010, but gives 2016 for 2010.
I imagine finding this in the code:
if (year > 2009) {
year = 2016; // Lolz!!!11 Jokezorz
}
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I'm using a HD2 but all the standard HTC texting implementations use Windows mobile's Date and Outlook APIs, I'm pretty sure. Still grand for me, though. As mentioned earlier this isn't winmo specific and it doesn't seem to be happening in the UK. Nice fact-checking before the headline was written I see.
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.
HTC Touch: Model No.: RAPH800 as listed in 'Device Information' Rom version: 1.03.651.4 Rom date: 11/11/08 Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional CE OS 5.2.19965; so there, someone saying they are affected =)
FYI, it happens intermittantly. My first message of the new year was dated 1/1/16, as a side-effect it wouldn't show the time of the message being that the date was so far away from the current date it thought it was irrelevant and showed the year instead. From there on out about 1/3 of my texts show incorrect date. Probably is SMS protocol related therefore. Probably I should update my firmware, but I've had WinPC phones brick on me before doing so.
Unbelievable that it takes so many completely numpty posts before getting to one that actually understands the issue.
The problem is in the RTC driver.
Some RTC chips count in binary. Some count in BCD. If you take a BCD representation of 10 and run it through a binary decoding algorithm you'll get 16.
The problem will only strike devices which have BCD RTC hardware but used the stock WinCE RTC driver that expects binary.
Unfortunately most WinCE platform developers will tend to just use the drivers that MS or the BSP vendor sent.
Some will have tested and discovered the problem and will not be running the stock drivers.
Don't you know if you mention the Germans you must use the Reg approved phrase Teutonic people. Also most German stories on El Reg are reserved for poor souls that have accidents up on their roofs like the older gentleman that accidentally nailgunned his nutsack to the shingles and had to be rescued. Still I know first hand about German ATMs having lived in the the beautiful but damn cold country and with a foreign credit card it was always a crap shoot if was going to get money that day or not.
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so this may Force Locked in provider mobiles to bring out up to date firmware to fix this issue (my HTC Touch HD is running on 2008 year old firmware still, HTC SN Block there firmware update and phone companies cant be bothered to keep the firmware up to date, i had to get Pocket Shield Program to Stop the answer and hang up button from working as they are not buttons its touch sensitive Anything touch so very annoying)