Why am I getting the date as 1/1/13?

Time on Digital Matter devices is given as seconds since 01/01/2013. Before a device is powered on, it has no Real Time Clock (RTC) value. Once it comes online it will get a timestamp from the GPS or from the server. So if your device has had a hard reset - and not yet got a new GPS fix - the time sent in Field 0 will be 00:00 1/1/13. Any logs sent before the device has got a time from the server will also have this time. 

Can't parse the TCP data correctly - strange values - additional EFBFBD 

Your system might be encoding the TCP stream to a UTF-8 stream, rather than raw.