you might think of malware or poorly coded programs as common causes of a
crashed phone but users of both Android
and iOS have reported their devices being taken down by things as simple as
text messages or even photos how in the world could receiving a string of
characters or loading up a picture forced your phone to shut down or worse
get stuck in a boot loop let's start with text bombs which have notably
affected iphones several times in recent years a text bomb is simply a specific string
of text that will cause your device to crash because it can't handle it
correctly typically a text bomb may contain symbols emojis or rarely used characters
that make your phone do additional processing one well-known example is the rainbow
glitch from a few years ago where typing a white flag emoji the number zero and
then a rainbow emoji and then sending it would cause the recipient's phone to
freeze because iOS tried to combine these characters into a rainbow flag but
a bug in the programming kept it from doing so properly more recently we saw a
certain text string in the cindy language which is spoken in parts of
india and pakistan crashed some devices running iOS 13. the bug was caused
because some languages written in a peugeot arabic script including cindy
stack diacritical marks on top of the
main characters meaning that an individual character can get quite tall
with lots of marks above and below it when iOS went to show you the
abbreviated version before you opened your full messaging app it would get
confused because it didn't know how to handle the extra character bulk
ultimately the operating system would try to access an area of RAM that didn't
even exist and if you know anything about programming memory faults like
this commonly cause crashes now let's shift gears and talk about how photos
can also bring down your phone in may 2020 there was an innocent enough
looking photo of a landscape circulating that caused some Android phones to crash
if users tried setting it as their wallpaper ironic given the tranquil
mountain scenery that it contained the issue here had to do with color
space you can learn more about color spaces right up here but put simply it's
the system that software and hardware use to store color information and
reproduce colors accurately the Android operating system uses the srgb color
space which is quite standard across the web every pixel in an srgb image has its
red blue and green values the three primary colors expressed as 8 bits so
each pixel can have 255 different intensities red green and
blue to create whatever color you're supposed to see
problem is if an image is coded to use a different color space it might support
more values than just 8 bits per channel RGB
so if the values in an expanded color space are higher than what the srgb only
operating system expects it can generate what's called an out of bounds exception
and make your phone crash since the os doesn't know what to do with those
values making matters worse because your wallpaper obviously loads whenever you
restart your phone incidents like these can trap your
device in a boot loop meaning you might have to resort to a complete factory
reset to resolve the problem what can you do as a user to prevent this kind of
misfortune well unfortunately these issues are really
just caused by programming bugs so the best thing you can do is keep tabs on
your favorite tech news sites and steer clear of any game-breaking texts or
photos until the problem is patched now if you'll excuse me i've got to message
some beautiful pictures to people that i don't like
for now though let's talk about something i do like the mass drop x
sennheiser open back hd 58x jubilee
headphones tuned by axel grell of sennheiser and massdrop based on
community feedback he's a super cool guy by the way i had the privilege of meeting him once they feature new 150
ohm drivers and a colorway inspired by the hd 580s you get a clear fast and
dynamic sound profile glossy black headband elliptical ear cups super comfy
replaceable soft velour ear pads also comfy and a detachable six foot cable
check them out now at the link in the video description so thanks for watching
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