Comments on: Yo, Today is December 31, 1969?

By: Cindy

Cindy — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:32:19 +0000

A couple of weeks ago around 2:00 a.m., my son received a phone call on his cell phone. He was asleep at the time, so could not answer the call. When he tried to call the number back, he just gets the failed call message. The call was dated Dec. 31, 1969. The time the call was placed was 9 a.m. The call was from Turkey. We live in the U.S. Weird huh? I noticed that text messages were mentioned here, but not cell phone calls.

By: lisaksimone

lisaksimone — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:10:45 +0000

Brianna

What you cut-and-pasted is not a virus, so no need to worry. It’s simply another example of the problem I reported in this post. The website you visited has the software error and it is in no way a virus or anything you have to worry about. It’s just a really common mistake!

Lisa

By: Brianna

Brianna — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:04:06 +0000

hi, i’ve been suspious that my computer had a virus lately. what do u think of this? please e-mail back

Currently viewing: WILL POWER TALISMAN - WILL POWER TALISMAN TRIANGLE with BLACK CORD and SP Bail
This product was added to our catalog on Wednesday 31 December, 1969.

By: Real Life Debugged » Blog Archive » Let’s Debug it: But I Can’t Show You! Just Call Network Solutions

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:13:47 +0000

[...] SHOW you the problem other than to suggest you check out nearly any other post. Like this one: Yo, Today is December 31, 1969?. (Until, fingers crossed, this gets [...]

By: Lisa K Simone

Lisa K Simone — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:26:50 +0000

May - I’m not sure about the SMS messages and problems with the body text. But since that happens with emails, I imagine the same thing can happen with SMS messages. To your second question, the time stamps were all around the same date, depending on the time zone.

By: May Nguy

May Nguy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:10:50 +0000

So, I did read through all the information and comments that you have here on this site, and I have just a quick question. So about getting SMS messages and calls or whatever it is that people are receiving with this time stamp…Is it normal or not normal to have a body, or partial body, of text in the messages? Also, did your findings bring back a coincidental or common time stamp of these messages people received from that date? What I mean by that is did most, if not all, have the same time stamp or near the same time frame; or was it pretty random?

By: Lisa K Simone

Lisa K Simone — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:07:48 +0000

I hear that the same thing is happening on the phones, too. You think we’d learn the lesson. Unfortunately many of these types of bugs become “tribal knowledge” of the programmers who’ve been bitten by a particular bug and then remember it. But most of this stuff is never fully written down. Companies just don’t seem to understand the critical knowledge that they lose when great people leave companies to be replaced by cheaper labor. It’s not to say this info shouldn’t be captured, and the presence of the internet is certainly helping, but more and more it appears that experience is discounted.

By: Jamie Wells

Jamie Wells — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:52:24 +0000

I also received a picture text from Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00 -0800. Very weird and it will not let me erase it at all. More interestingly, it changes from Wed, 21 Dec 1969 16:00 -0800 to Wed, 22 September 2009 09:00 -0700? A little freaky….

By: Lisa K Simone

Lisa K Simone — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:37:04 +0000

Hi Saundra,

Just delete the message. It’s possible it was a corrupted part of a real message to you or someone else, or just a fragment of garbage. It’s a fart in the system (a “ripple in the Matrix” if you will) .

Here’s how texting works, simplified - when you send a text message, it reaches your friend similar to how a cell phone call works. The message goes to a base station or some central controller that locates your friend and passes the message along. When your friend’s phone receives the message, it sends an “Ok, I got it” message back to the controller. Then the controller is happy and life goes on.

But sometimes the message gets lost. Maybe your cell phone is off, or the network is too busy. So if the controller doesn’t hear back it will try to resend the message. That’s why sometimes you get the same text message two times in a row.

And the opposite can happen - which is your case.

The info in the text message gets corrupted and the controller doesn’t realize it. Or only parts are received and part of the message is interpreted as the phone number. Parts of the message may be zeros because the controller may think the message is shorter than it is, of that the the beginning of your message is really part of someone else’s. Even though the message has errors, the controller sends it anyway because it doesn’t realize it. And it generally WILL NOT contain the content of a message that belonged to someone else, so don’t worry about that.

And we know if some fields are filled with zeros, we get the magic Dec 31, 1969 date - viola! Just like the text message you saw.

Bottom line - it could have started as a real message and gotten trashed, or it could have just been garbage in the system. It might not even have been for you. Either way, it’s garbage and you can’t reconstruct it, so delete it.

A couple times a year I receive a blank email message dated Dec 31 1969 that has no Sender, no Subject line and no content. This is pretty common. Other times the email is trashed with other dates - a similar problem except the corrupted fields have incorrect, but valid, data like this:

If you still have the message, can you take a picture of it (like with a camera or another cell phone) and send it to me? My email is on my bio page. We can post it here as another example!

Lisa

By: saundra

saundra — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:50:34 +0000

i keep getting a text message that wont open…the date is wednesday dec 31, 1969 at 1900 hrs