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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.
My question is why does it even allow you to set the clock back that far? Are they expecting a lot of sales to time travelers that never go back farther than the 1970s? At this point nothing made today should accept a year less than 2000. Idealy the clock would have a hard coded default time of when it was manufactured.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
It's not unusual to see some timestamp issues. It is unusual to see a device crippled so sharply by that. It's VERY unusual for Apple to allow such a range of values- this is the same company that doesn't normally even provide options like "make unread mail appear green instead of blue" or whatever.
But most disturbing is that this would allow any source the iphone trusts for timestamps to mostly disable the phone. I'm not sure whether the iphone prefers to get data from a trusted NTP server or some part of the 3G standard, or if it supports all of that, but it implies that you could...
1- (as just some guy) Set up a wifi network that spoofs whatever the trusted NTP server is, and then assign the epoch date that way. ...and of course a more sophisticated attacker could probably do more.
2- (possibly as some hackery type) Find any way to do the equivalent at a greater level.
3- (as some radio phreak) Find a way to spoof the epoch date with a bogus 3G transmitter.
Its also bullshit on iOS 9.2.1.
I just set it to exactly midnight EPOCH, I set it to before epoch and I set it back to now. Rebooted multiple times all along the way.
My phone works fine.
I got kicked out of anything authenticated the instant I did the change since doing so effectively renders every certificate on the device invalid as it is suddenly years before the certs were 'issued' but thats exactly as expected.
I pretty much can't find any truth in the story. It claims you can't scroll back that far in the date/time picker without open and closing multiple times, yet here I am with just a bunch of finger flicks looking at the date/time as Dec 1969 right this very moment and I did so without having to enter it multiple times.
Dear slashdot, you have been trolled. Please stop believing the random shit you read on the internet.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I have owned multiple iPhones. I love taking apart electronics and fixing/modifying/resoldering them. Taking apart the iPhone to do anything, even as simple as unhooking the battery, is a special hell I would not recommend for any but the most diehard enthusiasts. (Or a dedicated repair outfit, ofc.)
First, you'll be fucking around with itty bitty screws that have a significant digit measured in microns. And there are like five (slightly) different kinds of the little bastards. Second, if you don't put everything back in *precisely* the right alignment, you will notice. Maybe Home clicks kinda funny now, or Volume Up is a bit squishy. Third, and maybe this is just observational voodoo, but I swear that manhandling the flexible polymer battery too much degrades battery life.
tl;dr - If you set your clock to 1970 because some FB chain letter told you Jim Morrison's ghost would bring you good luck, just let the damn thing run down to 0%.
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