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iPhones Bricked By Setting Date To Jan 1, 1970 (theguardian.com)
lightbox32 writes: Beware of a hoax circling the interwebs, which can be seen by setting your iPhone's date to January 1, 1970. Many people are reporting that doing so will brick the device. It's unclear what exactly causes the issue, but could be related to how iOS stores date and time formats. Jan. 1, 1970 is a value of zero or less than zero, which would make any process that uses a time stamp to fail. Apple is aware of the issue and is looking into it.
No problem. You can reset your iPhone to factory default by placing it in a microwave oven on high for 2 minutes. ;-)
Have gnu, will travel.
https://xkcd.com/376/
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
nm
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The thing that bothers me about all of the summaries I've read, is that a timestamp less than zero (which is Jan 1 1970) is still valid - otherwise how would you represent dates before 1970???
You represent dates before 1970 with a negative number.
It's not the representation that is the problem-- it is letting the iPhone operate with today's date being a negative number.
The iPhone concludes that you have just time-travelled, and thus bricks itself to enforce the chronology protection protocol.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Okay guys, calm down. Assuming iOS is really based on OS X, I'll test something on my Mac right this instant.
Setting the clock to january first 1970 right noW. I DO NOT SEE ANY DIFFERENCE.
OH WAIT, ALL THE COLOURS ARE GONE. IN FACT I THINK THE RESOLUTION IS WAY DOWN AND I'M ONLY SEEING PURE BLACK AND WHITE PIXELS.
So the representation of dates must either handle negative values or have some other method of representing dates as far back as 14,000,000,006 years.
Reminds me of this joke:
Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, "Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?"
The guard replies, "They are 3 million, four years, and six months old."
"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist. "How do you know their age so precisely?"
The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were three million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago."
using petalobe screwdrivers
Yeah, those 10^15 sided screws are a bugger to not strip. That's why I replace mine with pentalobe screws - much more robust.