Setting This Image As Wallpaper Could Soft-Brick Your Phone (androidauthority.com) 42
Well-known leaker Universe Ice on Twitter, along with dozens of other users, have discovered that simply setting an image as wallpaper on your phone could cause it to crash and become unable to boot. Android Authority reports: Based on user reports, many models from Samsung and Google are affected, while we've also seen some reports from users of OnePlus, Nokia, and Xiaomi devices (it's not clear if these latter devices ran stock software or custom ROMs). From our own testing and looking at user reports, Huawei devices seem to be less exposed to the wallpaper crash issue. There are a few solutions, depending on how hard the phone is hit. Some users were able to change the wallpaper in the short interval between crashes. Others had success deleting the wallpaper using the recovery tool TWRP. But in most cases, the only solution was to reset the phone to factory settings, losing any data that's not backed up.
The issue affects up-to-date phones running Android 10, but as it turns out, it's not actually new. Users have been reporting similar problems for a couple of years, and just last month Android Police reported on what appears to be a closely related issue specifically impacting Pixel phones running the Google Wallpapers app. [...] An issue with a very similar description has been reported in Google's Android issue tracker back in 2018. At the time, Google developers said they were unable to reproduce the issue and closed it out (Hat tip: inverimus on Reddit).
The issue affects up-to-date phones running Android 10, but as it turns out, it's not actually new. Users have been reporting similar problems for a couple of years, and just last month Android Police reported on what appears to be a closely related issue specifically impacting Pixel phones running the Google Wallpapers app. [...] An issue with a very similar description has been reported in Google's Android issue tracker back in 2018. At the time, Google developers said they were unable to reproduce the issue and closed it out (Hat tip: inverimus on Reddit).
Just when I get sick of iOS bugs... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Just when I get sick of iOS bugs... (Score:1)
compared to google? you have to be kidding right. the company that turns you into a product?
Re: Just when I get sick of iOS bugs... (Score:2)
So what if Google makes money off my viewing of ads, no big deal. Are you trying to equate that to being a whore? Something that should have a negative stigma?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
If yer so smart, why ain't ye rich?
Because my endorsement deal hasn't been accepted yet...
Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
Re: (Score:2)
Pursue on.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Only if you set them as wallpaper.
Re: (Score:2)
False. It's a bug in Android image processing itself. It's just a bit more fatal as wallpaper because the launcher is responsible for that which causes it to crash. But any app doing the same thing will expose the bug, just it will crash the app which is far less serious since the main UI is still running.
So yes, an MMS can do interesting things - like a bad text message can crash the messages app like it does on iOS.
Re: (Score:2)
Given how a user gets all the way to setting the damn wallpaper on the phone including opening and previewing the damn picture in the gallery in the process, no I don't see any way you could possibly come to the conclusion that this is some all encompassing OS image handling bug.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The belief that iOS is immune from issues, bugs, and attack vectors is a common conceit of iPhone users. In real life, these devices are made by humans and also have vulnerabilities, not unlike Android. Android is not particularly more buggy than iOS.
https://www.techtimes.com/arti... [techtimes.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Do you read or just react?
Re: (Score:2)
OH! I thought you were somehow implying that Android messed things up in some special way, that iOS doesn't.
Re: (Score:2)
Which you expressed by saying:
"The belief that iOS is immune from issues, bugs, and attack vectors is a common conceit of iPhone users."
Yeah.... ok.
Re: (Score:2)
"The belief that iOS is immune from issues, bugs, and attack vectors is a common conceit of iPhone users."
Yeah.
All in all, (Score:5, Funny)
it's just another brick in the wallpaper.
Maligne Lake (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Well if that is the view I think it is I guess they don't call it "Maligne" Lake for nothing.
Nice, however the image is Saint Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. Maligne Lake photos are strikingly similar.
Breakthrough in Google AI (Score:1)
I'm with the Google AI on this one, I'd vote to lock your phone up also if you try to set a wallpaper with a tilted horizon line.
lulz (Score:1)
Crashing when there is a thin blue line background image? More liberal tech companies censoring conservative speech.
For those who don't want to RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
So it's not this image per se which is causing the crash. It's a setting in the image causing Android to try to set the color profile to an unsupported state. You could create a plain blue background image which causes the same thing. Setting the image as a wallpaper elevates the consequences of the bug from crashing an app, to crashing the launcher.
Dell Monitor (Score:3)
I have an older Dell 27" screen with the same problem. One particular wallpaper, if allowed to display causes it to shut off.
So if that's the one that gets selected randomly at login when you can actually see the desktop then off it goes.
Went through two replacement monitors and a video card before I'd narrowed it down. It's not as bad as bricking the phone but stI'll bloody annoying.
Wow, that's shoddy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Wow, that's shoddy (Score:4, Interesting)
It's hard to understand why they didn't just call an rgb to yuv conversion instead of that ludicrous explicit channel scaling. That would guarantee clamping to the correct range and likely be much faster. This is what you get when you let programmers loose on problems they barely understand.
Re: (Score:3)
The code is appalling. Note that the grayscale bitmap...isn't. Love the "fine tune the performance here" comment in a wasteland of lost FLOPS.
Re: (Score:2)
This is not true and goes to show you "Insightful" means nothing. The code is terrible, but not because the histogram is stupid. It's terrible because of the wasteful, Rube Goldberg determination of luiminosity. The histogram appears broken because you can't add RG and B components together without overflow, but that doesn't actually happen because the "grayscale" image is not actually grayscale but rather contains the separate RG and B contributors to luminosity. When the three are added together you s
Meanwhile on Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Since XP, as far as I am aware, Windows do not use your selected image as a background. Instead it saves a modified JPEG copy.
Most likely for the exact same reasons: If image display software has a bug, its less likely to be a issue if input is sanitized. And its far better to have the JPEG file converter to crash, than the core desktop system.
Soft-brick (Score:2)
If the user can simply start the phone holding a few buttons and trigger a factory reset it isn't "soft-bricked". It's not any kind of bricked.
Who's in charge? (Score:2)