The year 2010 problem (also 2010 bug) refers to several software errors that occurred in various computer applications at the turn of the year 2009/2010.
Y2K10: When millions of Debit Cards failed due to a date Programming Bug
The most widespread public attention was caused by a programming error in various debit and credit cards, which temporarily rendered more than 30 million cards unusable. The Dutch company Gemalto accepted responsibility for this error. The problem has since been resolved by changing the terminals so that they read the magnetic strip rather than the EMV chip, which is actually obsolete. Savings banks and other banks have agreed to reimburse bank customers for any costs incurred as a result of the failure (e.g., for international transfers made by vacationers).
In Australia, Bank of Queensland ATMs were rendered inoperable by an error that resulted in the current date being set to 2016, causing customer cards to be considered “expired.”
An error in the SpamAssassin spam filter caused many emails sent after December 31, 2009, to be incorrectly classified as spam. The mail services GMX and 1&1 were among those affected. The cause was an incorrect rule.
Since January 1, 2010, short messages from smartphones running the Microsoft operating system Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 have been displaying a date in 2016 as the date of sending.
There was also a problem for users of SAP’s ERP software. The expiration date was calculated incorrectly for spool entries.
An error in Symantec’s Endpoint Protection Manager, a security software for corporate customers, caused virus definition updates with a date in 2010 to be classified as out of date.
On Apple’s Newton PDAs, an integer overflow in the date calculation for data after January 5, 2010, 6:48:31 p.m. caused alarm messages to repeat in an endless loop.
The Year 2010 problem arose unexpectedly, so it took some time to resolve. In contrast, the Year 2000 problem (“Millennium Bug”), which received extensive media coverage, did not cause any complications, or those that did arise were quickly resolved. This was probably due to the fact that the problems were predicted in advance of the turn of the millennium in 1999/2000.
Year 2010 problem : Causes of the forgotten date bug
Various systems, particularly EC cards, use the BCD code to store years, in which the numbers 0 to 9 are represented by four bits. The (incorrect) interpretation of a two-digit year stored in this way (X’10’, binary 0001 0000) as a 1-byte dual number leads to confusion between 10 and 16.
In other programs, the date format 200x was expected at certain points, so that data in the year 2010 was handled incorrectly. Beyond the realm of software, “Y2K” also became a cultural touchstone — evolving into a nostalgic aesthetic trend in fashion and design, often drawing inspiration from the same turn-of-the-millennium technological era that produced these bugs.
Year 2010 bug also discovered on computers
So far, the 2010 bug has only annoyed owners of around 30 million EC and credit cards, because some of them have been unable to access their money or use their cards to make payments since January 1, 2010. Now this bug has also hit Microsoft. Some users of mobile devices such as smartphones were surprised when messages sent since New Year’s Day were suddenly dated 2016. Certain devices with the operating system versions Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 are affected.
This issue stemmed from imprecise date conversion routines : a sloppy date conversion in the programming. Internally, the software often uses the hexadecimal system. The results are only converted back into the decimal system, which is easier for normal users to understand, at the end. The peculiarity lies in the fact that both number systems are the same up to the number 9 and only differ for larger numbers, as the following table illustrates.
Year 2010 problem in GMX spam filter
Since New Year’s Day, GMX’s spam filter has been flagging an excessive number of emails as spam – apparently because they appear to be “from the future.”
Anyone with a GMX email account should check their spam folder starting today. The service’s spam filter appears to have a problem with the year 2010 and is incorrectly marking many emails as spam. This can be recognized by a header such as
X-GMX-Antispam: 5 (Score=6.300;BAD_ENC_HEADER,FH_DATE_PAST_20XX);
The text FH_DATE_PAST_20XX indicates the problem: The filter appears to be sorting out emails whose date is “suspiciously far” in the future. Now, the future seems to have caught up with this filter rule. GMX is not the only email service affected by this bug. For example, 1&1 is experiencing the same problem. The error is located in the widely used spam filter SpamAssassin and has already been documented. Anyone who relies on a server-side mail filter should therefore keep their eyes open – it could be a SpamAssassin with a 2010 problem.