WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.240 You might think of malware or poorly coded programs as common causes of a crashed phone, 00:00:06.240 --> 00:00:12.300 but users of both Android and iOS have reported their devices being taken down by things as 00:00:12.300 --> 00:00:15.800 simple as text messages or even photos. 00:00:15.800 --> 00:00:20.640 How in the world could receiving a string of characters or loading up a picture force 00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:25.080 your phone to shut down or worse get stuck in a boot loop? 00:00:25.080 --> 00:00:29.880 Let's start with text bombs, which have notably affected iPhones several times in recent 00:00:29.880 --> 00:00:36.280 years. A text bomb is simply a specific string of text that will cause your device to crash 00:00:36.280 --> 00:00:44.360 because it can't handle it correctly. Typically, a text bomb may contain symbols, emojis, or rarely used characters that make 00:00:44.360 --> 00:00:51.960 your phone do additional processing. One well-known example is the rainbow glitch from a few years ago, where typing a white 00:00:51.960 --> 00:00:57.520 flag emoji, the number zero, and then a rainbow emoji, and then sending it, would cause the 00:00:57.520 --> 00:01:02.640 recipient's phone to freeze because iOS tried to combine these characters into a rainbow 00:01:02.640 --> 00:01:07.200 flag, but a bug in the programming kept it from doing so properly. 00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:11.660 More recently, we saw a certain text string in the Cindy language, which is spoken in 00:01:11.660 --> 00:01:16.360 parts of India and Pakistan, crash some devices running iOS 13. 00:01:16.360 --> 00:01:20.840 The bug was caused because some languages written in a Perso-Arabic script, including 00:01:20.840 --> 00:01:27.720 Cindy, stack diacritical marks on top of the main characters, meaning that an individual 00:01:27.720 --> 00:01:32.560 character can get quite tall, with lots of marks above and below it. 00:01:32.560 --> 00:01:36.680 When iOS went to show you the abbreviated version before you opened your full messaging 00:01:36.680 --> 00:01:41.320 app, it would get confused because it didn't know how to handle the extra character bulk. 00:01:41.320 --> 00:01:45.400 Ultimately, the operating system would try to access an area of RAM that didn't even 00:01:45.400 --> 00:01:50.800 exist, and if you know anything about programming, memory faults like this commonly cause crashes. 00:01:51.440 --> 00:01:55.920 Now let's shift gears and talk about how photos can also bring down your phone. 00:01:55.920 --> 00:02:01.160 In May 2020, there was an innocent enough looking photo of a landscape circulating that caused 00:02:01.160 --> 00:02:06.920 some Android phones to crash if users tried setting it as their wallpaper, ironic given 00:02:06.920 --> 00:02:10.080 the tranquil mountain scenery that it contained. 00:02:10.080 --> 00:02:17.560 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 00:02:17.560 --> 00:02:24.000 that software and hardware use to store color information and reproduce colors accurately. 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:28.360 The Android operating system uses the sRGB color space, which is quite standard across 00:02:28.360 --> 00:02:34.360 the web. Every pixel in an sRGB image has its red, blue, and green values, the three primary 00:02:34.360 --> 00:02:41.240 colors expressed as 8 bits, so each pixel can have 255 different intensities of red, 00:02:41.240 --> 00:02:45.760 green, and blue to create whatever color you're supposed to see. 00:02:45.800 --> 00:02:50.440 The problem is, if an image is coded to use a different color space, it might support 00:02:50.440 --> 00:02:54.480 more values than just 8 bits per channel RGB. 00:02:54.480 --> 00:02:59.400 So if the values in an expanded color space are higher than what the sRGB-only operating 00:02:59.400 --> 00:03:04.320 system expects, it can generate what's called an out-of-bounds exception and make your phone 00:03:04.320 --> 00:03:08.440 crash since the OS doesn't know what to do with those values. 00:03:08.440 --> 00:03:12.840 Making matters worse, because your wallpaper obviously loads whenever you restart your 00:03:12.840 --> 00:03:17.880 phone, incidents like these can trap your device in a boot loop, meaning you might have 00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:22.240 to resort to a complete factory reset to resolve the problem. 00:03:22.240 --> 00:03:25.240 What can you do as a user to prevent this kind of misfortune? 00:03:25.240 --> 00:03:30.880 Well, unfortunately, these issues are really just caused by programming bugs, so the best 00:03:30.880 --> 00:03:35.720 thing you can do is keep tabs on your favorite tech news sites and steer clear of any game-breaking 00:03:35.720 --> 00:03:38.920 texts or photos until the problem is patched. 00:03:38.920 --> 00:03:43.720 Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to message some beautiful pictures to people that I don't 00:03:43.720 --> 00:03:50.720 like. So thanks for watching, guys! Like, dislike, check out our other videos, leave a comment with video suggestions, and 00:03:50.720 --> 00:03:56.120 don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any more exciting episodes of TechQuickie. 00:03:56.120 --> 00:03:59.680 It's tech, it's quick, tech-quickie.