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.

Comments

Hrm

[cfalcon]

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.
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. ...and of course a more sophisticated attacker could probably do more.

Bullshit headline, it doesn't work.

[BitZtream]

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.