Why would someone's "last visit" date???

Why would someone's "last visit" date show as the beginning of (computer) time, the UNIX Epoch time?

12/31/1969?

I get the whole significance of the date, and the part about their geographical location being east of the Zulu line at midnight on 1/1/1970 in Greenwich, but what would this ever have to do with a member's "last visit" on ATS???

The first thing that came to my mind was that's someone that never logged in.

a reply to: ArMaP

Well, that makes sense somewhat, but wouldn't it just default to their signup date instead?

ETA - And what's even stranger still is there are a couple (unrelated) posts, very cryptic, which show a posting date of the same date. You're probably aware of those ones where the member type was 'the 4', and the member name in each was "0", "1", "3" and "4" (posts: urgent 0, 1, 3 and 4). I suspect those ones had to be intentionally modified to show that date.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

To know that I would have to know how the forum software works.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Buffer overflow?

Oddly enough I just noticed last night that a video of a dead friend of mine changed its time/date stamp to December 31st 1969 @ 7:00pm... not quite sure why only the one or when it happened but it is kind of odd... there’s also another set of photos taken in 2015 that suddenly show I was “in China” at the time they were taken... anyhoo... there’s that...

Clearly John Titor just doing John Titor things.

This was asked and answered before, I don't remember the answer, so I'll show myself out now....


I'll see if I can find the other thread....

a reply to: elevatedone

Yes, here is a reply by William back in 2003.

ATS Thread

originally posted by: William
no glitch

BillGray registered today at about 6:50 PM EDT. After registering, he hasn't returned to the site, so the "last active date" in his database profile remains null or 0.

Unix/Linux keeps track of time by using a large integer that represents the number of seconds since Unix-Zero, which is 1969. So... our new Mr. Gray's last active time of 0, is indeed 1969.

Interesting, so it really does have to do with UNIX-zero.

The account in question wasn't BillGray though, just FYI. Guess it doesn't matter anyway. Not many examples of this, but there are a few in my scant search.

Maybe the date was put in wrong or formatted wrong? Like saying they visited on the 7th day of the 13th month.

Or maybe they are from across the pond and put the date in wrong and messed up the system.

a reply to: Nivhk

Or maybe they are from across the pond and put the date in wrong and messed up the system.

Actually, I think it's the other way around. They were west (I said 'east' earlier, wrongly) of the GMT line, so assuming you are in the US, it would be Dec. 31, 1969. UNIX-zero is Midnight Jan 1, 1970 GMT (or UTC). Anywhere west of this would show a default time of Dec 31, 1969. That default time reference could only live/exist for 12 hours, because then you'd be at the International Date Line. So, from a UNIX perspective, the day before time began was only a 12 hour day.

I recall hearing years ago that back in the days of ATS games, there were several accounts related to one of the games that involved that date.

Hackers installing malware possibly?

a reply to: Zaphod58

Some of the accounts I referred to only had posts in a now non-existent 'Games' forum here.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Those would be the ones. I don't know what the game was though. Most of them were before my time here.