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Comment by pftburger | Hacker News Reader

I would be very interested in seeing the the iPhone charges while "anethitized". I severely doubt data would be accessible via standard channels, but as this kills the general clock I am assuming it should prevent any sort of lock protection mechanisms from kicking in indefinitely.

Not sure how you would get it going again and / or how necessary that would be. Perhaps heating it to excite the helium trapped in the oscillator and hoping it bounces out.

Could end up being a pretty easy go to law enforcement trick. Put a phone and a helium balloon in a ziplock bag, pop the balloon, pause the phone, deal with it later

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We were wondering if this could be used for iPhone scams. It's a dead-simple way to apparently fatally & totally destroy in a deep & non-diagnosable way a pristine iPhone which will however (probably) reverse itself in a few weeks. It seems like this ought to be exploitable somehow. Something like get a new iPhone, helium it, return it for a refund, and somehow hold onto the phone... Couldn't figure out how it would actually work, though.

how about get a phone, accumulate normal life scratches for 9 months, "helium it" hard, so it lasts a while, then get apple to replace it as defective? iiiiiii dunno... there's a scam in there somewhere, were just not being creative enough!

The problem with that is that the helium doesn't do anything special. Just damage/destroy the phone some other way. You're not exploiting its special ability to look completely broken but then magically repair itself in a few weeks.

Depends on the how the charging controller is implemented. There is, at the very least a state machine -- if not an MCU -- managing the charging process. So I think it's highly unlikely to _start_ charging with the clock stopped, and one would hope there are some analog triggers to halt charging (eg. battery over-voltage) if the clock stopped while it was charging.

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