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So, I've started seeing warnings that there is a troll/hoax saying that people should set the date on their phone to 1st January 1970 to get a retro logo to display.

The warnings say that this will end up bricking your phone, and even a reset of the phone won't help.

Is the warning about bricking well-founded? What is this exploit and how could/should it have been prevented?

HorusKol
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  • Seems real to me. Also doesn't seem on topic for this site. http://www.snopes.com/apples-blast-from-the-past/ – Neil Smithline Feb 14 '16 at 06:22
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    Looks like a duplicate of a question on [Ask Different](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/227394/cause-of-unix-epoch-time-integer-underflow) – Leland Wallace Feb 15 '16 at 02:53

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It's real, sadly. From Wired article:

The bug appears to only affect 64-bit iOS devices, meaning iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and iPad Mini 2 and newer are affected. It’s almost certainly related to the same Unix glitch that caused Facebook to wish people a happy 46 years on the service; the date 1/1/70 has an internal value of zero on a Unix system, which in this case is leading to a software freakout.

Mark Buffalo
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