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You don't even need a bug. Just a wrong system clock.

We had a few windows laptops where something caused them to time travel to 8000 years in the future. Then, they'd slowly spend a few hours deleting every local profile, as nobody had logged in to them for 8000 years. Then, they'd do something to their time zone database and travel back 8000 years.

When they started the process, it was unstoppable. Trying to modify the system clock to something sane just caused them to depart to the future again, even if disconnected from the network. None of our users was very amused by this behavior, even if everything important was backed up.



that is almost cartoonishly nightmarish


It happened specifically to 1 type of laptop and we only had about 30 of them. So we pulled all of them out of roulation. Then covid struck, so I reformatted most of them with Debian and we gave them away for home schooling. I wonder if I managed to linuxify some kid in the process.


Thanks to you, plenty of kids now think they live 8,000 years in the future! :)


Oh man, so this was relatively recent no less. Hopefully you did!


Considering the sorry state of videoconferencing on Linux they probably all immediately had Windows reinstalled.


Not sure what this means, I've been using video conferencing on my Linux laptop for work on a daily basis for the last 5 years.




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