2 Billion emails on my iPhone? I'm gonna be here a while...
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The first time I configured my iPhone to check my gmail account (which I almost never read), it downloaded my messages just fine. The next time I told it to fetch some more messages, I saw "-1 unread." That's fine. At least it didn't prompt me to read more messages. The next time through, I see that I have 2 billion or so to read. I can download those 2 billion messages 25 at a time...I figure at a million messages a day, I should be able to get through them all in about 10 years.
Click the image to see a larger version.
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I wouldn't be the geek I am if I didn't recognize that number as the the (almost) largest you can make with a 32-bit signed integer.
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I think anyone here should be able to recognize insanely large and wrong numbers as integer wrapping immediately.
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Very true, but we're still not closer to figuring out what happened.
Uninitialized variable? Runaway loop? Incorrectly cast integers?
Something more obvious? Maybe just an unexplainable wtf.
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Oh come on, he's just really popular, and everyone he knows had a lot to say. Admit it; it's possible that there actually are 2B messages waiting for him. Google never lies!
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Did you get my 6,938,741 emails?? If not, I'll re-send...
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@aythun said:
I think anyone here should be able to recognize insanely large and wrong numbers as integer wrapping immediately.
The thing is that the amount of unread e-mail in the screenshot is 0x7FFFFFFE. -1, I can kinda understand - that's 0xFFFFFFFF in two's complement, and you could imagine that's some kind of error code. But the new value? Unless there's a different error code of 0x7FFFFFFF/they for some reason did an AND with that value, and he read one e-mail, thus decrementing the counter (not that makes it a better solution, but it's an explanation), I can't see a reason for such a value.
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@belgariontheking said:
Very true, but we're still not closer to figuring out what happened.
Uninitialized variable? Runaway loop? Incorrectly cast integers?
Something more obvious? Maybe just an unexplainable wtf.
Nope, Someone notified the spammers of his email address...
