unreasonable.org

There are reports of POS credit/debit card terminals and cellphones jumping from 2009 right past 2010 to 2016. The problem seems to be the interpretation of what's intended to be a BCD value, as a hexadecimal one.

(For non-geeks: remember way back in school when you learned about different "bases" for numbers? Because computers use on-off signaling -- two possibilities -- we need to use base-2, "binary" arithmetic a lot. But because base-2 is a pain, we often use base-16, "hexadecimal", which is easy to convert to and from binary. In hexadecimal, the string of digits "10" actually means the value sixteen: instead of the ""one times ten plus zero times one" that we usually mean, we read it as "one times sixteen plus zero times one".)