An Android smartphone, the picture of a lake and the phone gets crazy, What is happening? It seems that a harmless picture if set as wallpaper messes the telephone. And many call the alarm “Ignore this picture!”.
The indicted picture
It is an amazing shot of the St. Mary Lake, of the Glacier National Park, in Montana, realized by Gurav Agrawal. It was the same photographer to publish it, through its Flickr profile. But he didn’t want to create all of those problems.
The cursed picture soon went all over the web, by arriving on the smartphones of many users. Some tried to put it as a wallpaper and found out that there was something wrong.
But this didn’t stop the success of the St. Mary Lake’s shot. Far from the cursed lake became even more popular, by arriving to catch the attention of many important newspapers, like the BBC or Futurism.
The discovery of the cursed lake
Ice Universe, famous twitter user known in the Android world, was between the first ones to notice the cursed lake and to call the alarm, right through the social network.
The user, infact, twitted: “WARNING!!! Never set di picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users! It will cause your phone to crash! Don’t try it! If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it”.
Which phones crash because of the picture?
They talk about phones with the operating system Android, especially the models Samsung, Google, One Plus, Nokia and Xiaomi. Tenth of phones are on tilt because of this picture and the users can’t do nothing!
But like we saw aren’t all the smartphones to be interested by the event. Some are immune, not even all the Android operating systems.
It seems, infact, that on Android 10 the problem there is. But on Android 11 not. The operating system will arrive in its definitive version only for the end of the year, but some users are already trying the Beta version.
It was the designer Dylan Roussel to try the cursed picture on Android 11 and to confirme its immunity.
What happen to the infected smartphones by the picture of the St. Mary Lake?
It doesn’t happen anything if we download the picture of the St.Mary Lake on our smartphone, not even if we open it in the chat or in the social networks and not even if we admire it between the images of the gallery. The crash happens if we put it as wallpaper of the mobile phone.
The wallpaper messes the smartphone, by creating a sharp stop and putting them in an endless soft – brick loop. To every re-start the mobile phone goes to get crazy, there isn’t any way, so to go out from the loop, if not manually take actions.
Many experts examinated the case and arrived to the conclusion that Android 10 tryes to view the colour space sRGB, but the image uses the colour space RGB.
The image was infact uploaded in a different format RGB than the standard one supported by the operating system Android 10. The version Android 10 isn’t able to understand the image and it tries so the autonomous restart to correct the error. But there isn’t any error in the picture and so the smartphone enters in an endless loop.
The indicted picture of the St.Mary Lake was considered a malware image, but the photographer always said that he didn’t want to create problems. And the experts confirmed that he isn’t guilty. “I wanted to make viral one of my shot.. but I didn’t want it to happen for this reason”.
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