[alblue]

TL;DR Microsoft released a virus definition file with a timestamp/serial 220101001, and is unable to parse it into a (signed) long value since the largest value is 2,147,483,647 and it’s possible that there’s a factor of 10 in the deserialisation logic.

[Flocular]

The error message " Can’t Convert “2201010001” to long." makes it seem like that was the timestamp/serial used (Would be yymmddHHMM format). No factor 10 in deserialisation needed for an overflow.

[ginko]

But 220,101,001 isn't larger than 2,147,483,647.. Did they get the number slightly wrong?

[cnorthwood]

It also included a serial number following the date part of 001 (also 002, etc)

[jonny_eh]

Clearly this should stay a string. But I suspect they’re converting to an int to compare which definition is newer.

[genocidicbunny]

Comparing with strings ain't no panacea either. There's some suspicion that Windows 9 was skipped because a lot of old software checked for Windows 95 or 98 by just doing a string compare against "Windows 9". (For the record, I kind of doubt this was much of a concern by the time Windows '9' was being worked on, but there's a certain logic to it.)

[turminal]

That would work just fine with a string comparison.

[priansh]

Yeah my first thought was, well you could lay out the timestamp in a way that supports lexicographical sorting, and then realized they had already done so. No reason this shouldn’t be a string!

[petee]

It can be both. DNS serial numbers are YYYYMMDDnn, and it works just fine for humans, it is easy to convert, more compact, and you can compare in a single operation. Internally, there is no reason for it to be a string.

[mark-r]

I think the point is that a 3 digit serial wouldn't be enough to cause overflow, it would need to be 4 digits. But who makes a post like that without using copy/paste to get it exactly right?

[Cycl0ps]

There's three 0s before the last 1. That pushes it over the edge of what a long int can handle

[mark-r]

I've gone back to the original just to double check. It's very consistent about having only 2 zeros before the last digit, not 3.