What is causing the 2010 bugs?

Question

There are a lot of reports of systems failing to understand the year 2010 but I've no idea why. Current systems I look after are working fine as far as I could tell but I'd like to know what the actual problem is to search better.

Could anyone shed some light on it please?

Edit: http://www.rte.ie/business/2010/0105/bug.html - Information about it affecting credit cards in Germany

Answer 1

Several protocols used in banking and telecommunications - including the SMS protocol - encode the year as BCD in a single byte.

From 2000-2009 one could easily make the mistake of interpreting the year as a standard binary number since the encoding would be the same:

Encoding  Binary-interpreted  BCD-interpreted
0x01      2001                2001
0x02      2002                2002
...
0x09      2009                2009
0x10      2016                2010
...

That is most probably the cause of the Windows Mobile bug.