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05 January 2010, 11:51

The year 2010 is causing IT problems

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Following the 2010 bugs in SpamAssassin and problems in Germany with many cash point and credit cards, there have been even more reports about decade change bugs. For instance, consumers in Australia encountered problems when paying by (debit) card because a programming flaw caused shop terminals to assume that it was the year 2016 and that consequently the presented cards had expired.

According to a post on the WMExperts Windows Mobile blog, an increasing number of smartphone users running Windows Mobile are reporting that received text messages are being pre-dated to 2016. However, the problem only appears to exist with some of the mobile telephony providers. Microsoft has apparently been informed of the problem and is working on a solution. Speculations that a misinterpretation of the decimal number 10 as a hexadecimal number (10hex = 16decimal) could have caused the problem have not been confirmed so far.

Symantec's "Endpoint Protection" business anti-virus solution started the new year by labelling signatures dated 01/01/2010 or newer as "out of date" even though the signatures are current. Symantec is reportedly working to fix the flaw. Until an update has become available, the vendor will date any further new signatures December 31, 2009 and only increase the revision number. Affected products include Symantec Endpoint Protection v11.x and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition v12.x.

The Internet Storm Center reports that Cisco's Content Switching Module (CSM) has problems with its load balancing feature. The default cookie expiration in the load balancer is reportedly set to 01/01/2010 and has, therefore, expired. As a result, connections to programs such as web applications are reportedly being continuously "rebalanced".

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