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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.
I practically guarantee you...
The problem is with a long or int (32 bit) value having its address passed in for a time_t (64 bit) value.
As long as the number is positive, it appears to work, but if it goes negative (and given that most of the people setting it to that date are West of GMT, it *will* go negative), then the underflow blows all the adjacent bits in the next 32 bit word over.
And it appears that something important was there. This will likely be a problem for the code after 19 January 2038, if that's the case.
This is why there should be strong type enforcement set in the compiler settings, to make sure it doesn't compile if you have this kind of bug in your code.
This should be a trivial fix, but it's pretty clear that you could fix the problem on your own by temporarily disconnecting the battery and/or letting the battery drain (which would likely take a very long time). So take it into your local Apple store and be done with it.