Posted on 02/17/2016 2:17:17 PM PST by for-q-clinton
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) â A digital prank making the rounds on Facebook has been ruining iPhones everywhere, and it now has Appleâs attention.
The company has acknowledged that the prank is actually a bug that will prevent your phone from restarting.
The message looks like an old Macintosh ad, and asks people to set their phone back to January 1, 1970 to experience a special feature that allows you to ârelive the magicâ of the past.
Indeed, when the date is set back and you restart your phone, it will leave your phone stuck on the greeting screen.
According to ZDNet, the iPhone 5 and newer, the iPad Air, the iPad Mini 2, and generation six of the iPod Touch are all at risk.
Apple is willing to provide support for anyoneâs phone that has been affected.
The company also promised âan upcoming software update will prevent this issue from affecting iOS devices.â
This may be old news to you, but in case your ping list hasn’t heard. You may want to warn them about this nasty DOS attack.
Plus, now iPhone’supprt ISIS.
For those who want to experience what it was like to use an iPhone in 1970...
Imma letchu finish but right now,
Imma brick yo I-phone!
My 1970 Iphone was limited compared to todays models. One of the limitations was my service was limited to the amount of cable I could carry and without charcoal it was worthless for making pictures.
Relive the wonders of the days gone by when YOU DIDN’T HAVE A CELLPHONE!................LOL!...........
The rotary dial is the thing I remember most about it...
And I remember that I didn’t have to say, “Sorry...could you repeat that...lost the signal...” half a dozen times during a conversation.
Especially if someone had a lot of 9’s or 0’s in their number.
reminds me of the old .sony file on the macs back in the day,,
I only read about it of course..
I understand that if you remove the battery, it will resolve the problem. You need to purchase a pentalobe screwdriver,
but the procedure is fairly straight forward.
Here is a youtube video showing how to ‘unbrick’ the phone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofnq37dqGyY
Actually, you just momentarily disconnect the battery and the
date and time will reset.
Rotary dials actually figured into area code designations for that very reason. That's why the original NANP area codes for high population areas were given codes with lower dial pulse counts (i.e. 212 for NYC, 213 for L.A.) than those with lower population densities (i.e. 602 for AZ, 701 for N. Dakota, etc.)
Almost certainly incorrect, for anyone west of GMT.
Modern operating systems, and possibly even newer versions of Windows, don’t store time as a date, they store it as a number of seconds since midnight GMT Jan 1, 1970.
A theory has been posted on other threads that setting the time back to 1 Jan, 1970 will cause “time” to be set to zero, resulting in a division by zero error. This is almost certain nonsense, as “time” would only be zero at exactly midnight GMT, and for the life of me I can’t imagine any practical application for dividing by the current time.
A vastly more likely scenario is that this issue only affects devices configured in time zones between the east side of the date line and GMT. In those cases, if you set the date to 1 Jan, 1970 and the time early enough to be before midnight GMT, the OS would store the value of “time” to be a negative number. For those of us (in a time zone) east of GMT, setting the time to any time on 1 Jan, 1970 will result in a positive value of “time”.
Now, if you set your date to 30 Dec, 1969 I can see you being pretty screwed.
A bug, yes, but no where near windows 95 level.
I’m a a tech dunce——why was the date Jan 1,1970 chosen?
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