Why 1/1/1970 bricks your iPhone

boing
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And do you write perfect code? Hell, just today there was the disclosure of a really bad remote execution bug on Linux machines. Everyone makes bugs in their code.

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Link, please?

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CVE-2015-7547

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@shaddack, I donā€™t think you can still get direct access to canonical stratum 0 (or at least, I canā€™t any more in the USA) so the best you can do will be stratum 2. (EDIT- THIS IS WRONG, as noted by @renke in reply below).

@mewyn, thanks!

But my code has no bugs. That anyone knows about. And those lumps in the cellar are definitely not the graves of people who found bugs in my code. (EDIT- AND I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE RUMORED DISAPPEARANCE OF @renke)

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You should just do what Knuth did, declare your code officially bug free.

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Damn it - POC worked, my day just got busier! Also thanks!

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No, I mean a genuine brick, UL Listed and rated for face-smashing.

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Oh, the HBS, or Half-Brick in a Sock, the gold standard to compare the cost/effectiveness ratio of weapons.

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DONT DO THIS*

*Hereā€™s what to do if you do thisā€¦

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Iā€™ve no doubt you use one Iā€™ve not heard of, but there are these popular alternatives built into the iPhone. I wonder how far back one has to go to brick it in the original Chinese?

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Fun fact: if you do brick your phone this way, you can easily restore function by boiling it in blue crayons!

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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.ā€™ā€™

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33

Unbrick THIS!

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So if Appleā€™s default timeserver crashed and then came up serving the Grand Epoch, would it brick all their phones?

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Pretty sure it was from /b/ and personally I thought it was a nice piece of work.

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36

lol yes

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No. Why would it respond to queries before calibrating itself against other authoritative timeservers or a hardware device? My home server would never reply with 1970-01-01, even after a power outage, and Iā€™m pretty much the only one using it, never mind millions of customers.

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38

Use erosion and weathering to redistribute the contents.

HTH.

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Can anyone give us in text form the gist of why changing the date on the iphone bricks it? I just canā€™t really conceive why they would give a calendar the power to kill.

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What about a hostile timeserver? You could easily take over the default oneā€™s domain name if you control a DNS resolver.

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