How THIS wallpaper kills your phone.

here's a fun story I've managed to break my phone by just applying on wallpaper to it and I'm not alone it seems like hundreds of people in the last week of had their entire phones wiped because of this this photo Aversa on twitter ice universe famous leaker he basically made a post saying people are spreading this wallpaper don't apply it please don't apply it but of course people did what would you know a sister or world-renowned smartphone enthusiast and I don't think I've ever seen karma bite back faster the comment section is filled with two types of responses people who've applied it and got away with it on their phones and who seem to be using it as a way to prove they've picked a superior device and the other less fortunate group who've applied it and quickly realized they probably shouldn't if they post the videos of their devices basically going schizo in a lot of cases they've had to wipe everything listen to the cat people the cat never lies anyways there are three unusual things that happen here number one that whether or not your device gets destroyed depends on who made it for example Google and Samsung they're know goes don't go there - if you upload the photo to a social media site like way bug and download it again the colors will shift to this less vibrant version and it's safe to use and three you might notice I've been showing you this wallpaper on my samsung phone this whole time and the way I've done that is just by taking a screenshot of the image and setting that as my wallpaper which is safe - on the face of it none of this makes sense so what the flip is going on here well I spell the last three days trying to find out okay my initial assumption was this is malware someone has obviously designed this wallpaper to conflict with the code of Android and start crashing phones the resolution is exactly 1440 by 2560 that is the current standard android wallpaper resolution it has been made to apply as a wallpaper and add to that I've never in my life seen a wallpaper that can so consistently kill phones what are the chances someone came across that by accident well did the more I dug into it the more it seems like my initial assumption was wrong I thought the best way to find out if something was malicious or not was to find out where it came from so I did a reverse image search Google Images has a clever little feature now that allows you to use an image to search for similar images and by doing this within two minutes I traced the cursed wallpaper back to its original source turns out the wallpaper being circulated around was not the original photo this is the original photo from hdq walls calm and if you don't know the original and check the data of the image you can see it is just a photo taken from a nikon d80 camera surely that can't be the problem this is just someone who's taken their camera to a national park maybe they've come tower overnight to get this stunning shot of a sunrise that's not gonna break your phone plus a lot of people online was saying that the reason the cursed photo was crushing ferns was because it was encoded in a color profile called Google's skier but singers are now managed to get hold of the original photo and I could see that this wasn't a Google skier image I applied it to my Galaxy S 20 ultra big mistake gone finito Galaxy S 20 ultra in one fell swoop mute I couldn't get past my lock screen and even safe mode wouldn't let me recover it all dater on that phone that I didn't backup is gone and I won't lie to you this felt like that part in a detective movie where the detective gets too involved in a case and the criminal isn't happy about it so he starts taking away family members from me I've lost my data trying to fight for this cause I thought it would be okay I thought this is the original image it's just a photo this can't be the problem but I was wrong and I'm a little bummed but a sub to the channel would be amazing but anyways we can see that this crashing then wasn't caused by some malicious third party who tampered with the image afterwards like I'd initially suspected it's the original photo that's enough to break your phone so that just leaves the question how okay let's talk about color for a minute take a look at this diagram this represents all the colors that us humans can see this triangle inside of it that's the sRGB color space it's a subset it's a small section of the full range of color and more importantly for this case it's the only set of colors that Android really understands so yes most Android phones historically they haven't been able to display the full range of color but they're limited like this for the sake of consistency sRGB is what almost every device is calibrated to digital cameras printers the Internet so by having an operating system based on it you can ensure that let's say I post something on Instagram for example then when you see that post on the other end it can make sure that you're seeing it in the way that I intended it or that when I see a photo online and I print it out it should look pretty similar to the preview I saw on screen but there are many different color spaces you've got Adobe RGB as an example which has a wider range of color or if you wanted to go a bit crazy with things prophoto RGB which is this huge triangle here and this all seems really complicated but all it means for this is that if I convert an image from srgb to Adobe RGB it's going to effectively stretch the color space the color that was previously here gets mapped to here so this is a random photo - it took a few days ago in srgb and moving it to the wider Adobe RGB it just gets more vibrant and the same will happen again if we move from Adobe to prophoto RGB because these points are moving to these points so what I got to do with the sunrise of nightmares well it turns out prophoto RGB is the colour space that this photo is encoded in and you can see the appeal of doing this now that I know how it was encoded I can actually flick it back to standard srgb and it becomes this this is the true original photo and all of a sudden it doesn't look so hot so whoever took the photo probably just thought oh I really like the colors in prophoto RGB mode I'll just export it that way and this explains what I mentioned earlier about Weibo Weibo doesn't support this ultra white color space so if you upload a profile encoded image to Weibo the reason it changes is because it's actually being converted back to srgb so okay we've established that something about this color space is causing a problem but it's not as simple as that because Android can actually handle Profoto even though Android support srgb only it is programmed to convert images from other color spaces back to srgb just so we can have that level of consistency trust me I wish this was simpler too but when le though it seems like this conversion is actually where the problem is where Android is trying to turn this Profoto into an sRGB image that's the bottleneck and you won't believe this the reason these devices are crashing all comes down to one pixel this one right here according to de'vide who I was talking to about this google's color engine can't for the life of it convert this one pixel to srgb specifically because of the luminance of it luminance is basically brightness but just adjust it for the way that we humans actually see things because you might know this humans see green tones far better than we see red tones and we see Red's better than we see blues so the luminance of a pixel on Android is calculated by this formula it gives green the most weight then red and then blue to put it another way you need a lot of blue light to give the same luminance as a little bit of green light anyway the max value of red green or blue individually is 255 so the way this code is put together you shouldn't be able to get an overall combined value past 255 because all the formulas really doing is taking a weighted average but for this one particular pixel it just so happens that the red green and the blue values are all incredibly high 255 255 and 243 so plugging it into the formula we get red as 54.2 1/3 green has 180 2.3 76 and blue is 17.5 for 4-6 if you add all these up you got around 254 which is still under 255 so what's the problem it turns out Google uses a type of rounding that basically rounds each one of these numbers up so those RGB values actually end up as 55 plus 183 plus 18 which gives 256 which is over the theoretical maximum of 2 5 5 error 1 number in one pixel is enough to send your device into this spiral of doom in a normal situation when Android encounters a problem like this it'll try to close the process but by setting it as your wallpaper Android can't just close it you're creating a permanent loop of errors as it keeps trying to fix itself and and this also explains why screenshots of the image are safe there's a bit of a misconception with screenshots when you screenshot a photo your Android phone is not making a copy of the photo it's creating a new image that by default is going to be an sRGB shot because it's Android so that conversion that's causing all the crashes doesn't need to occur if you're wondering why only some devices are broken by the wallpaper it's because they're all phones that use Google's default color engine which is the part that's messing up the conversion as however you should worry about it not really I mean obviously don't apply this wallpaper ever but I've been working a bunch of developers been working for hours continuously trying to recreate the error and we couldn't so the chances that you're gonna see this popping up in other wallpapers I think is pretty low but just for peace of mind the next Android 11 should be fixing this problem anyway it is a pretty easy one to solve you just need one line of code that says if this value is above 255 then make it 255 anyways this has been a stressful video to medic if you enjoyed it do consider subscribing and huge thanks to Michelle on Twitter and daveed who's working on his own custom ROM called POS P right now those guys have helped out massively with this without being said my name is Aaron this is mr. E's boss and I'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 15,236,068

Rating: 4.9359345 out of 5

Keywords: android, wallpaper crash, android phone, ice universe, smartphones, tech

Id: iXKvwPjCGnY

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/shaggy_almighty]

theres a single pixel in the image that googles color algorithm cannot convert to rgb. the rgb color limit is 255 but the single pixel is 256. if you set it as your wallpaper the algorithm will constantly try to correct that pixel, and since it cant it kills your phone completely

[u/tedford]

"Google Images has a clever little feature now that allows you to use an image to search for similar images"...

This has been around for 9 years...

[u/Competitive_Rub]

Oh, that sweet 10 minute monetization. I hate these videos. Or should I say "You know what I hate? I will tell you what I hate. In my 33 years on this Earth I've hated many things, but none as much as this. This thing that I hate is so incredibly bad that you will hate it too after I tell you, and you will feel the need to tell your friends how much you hate it so you can hate it too. The thing I hate the most is truly a problem of epic proportions. These videos. Dont forget to like, comment, subscribe and ring the bell, bell the ring, join, call mom, and wash behind your ears."

[u/phadeone]

That was really interesting.

[u/DelLosSpaniel]

Video would be much better if the explanation wasn't completely wrong in the most basic way. That pixel is nowhere near (255, 255, 243), which would be almost white (basically white with a veeeery slight yellow tint). Apparently the problem is related to a (255, 255, 243) or similar pixel, but the red pixel shown is not it.

[u/free_waffles4kings]

Virus: I am the best at messing up and ruining phones

That one 256 pixel: hold my beer son

[u/bruh-for-life39]

Damn I'm never changing my wallpaper then.

[u/evilkaiju]

Can someone give the link to the wallpaper

[u/HeIIbIazer23]

Ok, but if someone applied this as their wallpaper, is there a way of getting rid of it without losing all the stuff you had on your phone?