Starting around 1998, a number of standards and trade organizations approved standards and recommendations for a new set of binary prefixes that would refer unambiguously to powers of 1024. According to these, the SI prefixes would only be used in the decimal sense, even when referring to data storage capacities: kilobyte and megabyte would denote one thousand bytes and one million bytes respectively (consistent with SI), while new terms such as kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte, abbreviated KiB, MiB, and GiB, would denote 1024 bytes, 1048576 bytes, and 1073741824 bytes respectively.[1]

The proposed patch replaces old terms such as kB or KBytes by new terms such as KiB.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix