If you see a graphic on the Internet in the next couple days saying you can unlock a classic Macintosh easter egg theme by setting your iPhone’s clock back to January 1, 1970, do not do it. Doing so will trip a bug in iOS that will brick the device up until the battery is physically disconnected and reconnected by a technician, or the battery wears itself off in standby mode.
With a fully charged iPhone, this could take up to two weeks. You would still have to reset and reinstall iOS onto your iPhone or other iOS device after that as well, meaning that if you haven’t backed up your data before then, it would be lost.
The issue only affects 64-bit iOS devices. That means that any iPhone released after the iPhone 5, which is 32-bit, is susceptible to the date brick bug, and so is most of all the modern iPads.
A reddit thread about the bug suggested the idea that a malicious actor could use this bug to brick iPhones connecting to the Internet at a public Wi-Fi spot. This could be a plausible vulnerability, since an iPhone receives its time and date instructions from an NTP server and the NTP packets could be spoofed.
The graphic floating around the Internet trying to trick people to brick their iPhones by promising a classic Macintosh easter egg theme supposedly came from or at least was spread on 4chan, according to this reddit thread.
The 4chan community has been implicated in proliferating iPhone destroying pranks before. These include the Waterproof iOS 7 Software Update and the Charge-By-Microwave Wave Feature pranks. Both had a similar style as the current graphic that is trying to convince people to brick their iPhone by setting the iPhone’s clock back to Jan. 1, 1970.
The graphic in question is pictured below. Again, Do Not Do This unless you want to brick your iPhone or iOS device for up to two weeks and risk losing all your data.
View post on imgur.com
