Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica
Did you ever see that film The Ring? Individuals who watched a cursed, creepy video would all mysteriously die in seven days. By some means Google appears to have re-created the tech model of that, the place the creepy video is this clip of the 1979 film Alien, and the factor that dies after watching it’s a Google Pixel telephone.
As famous by the person ‘OGPixel5″ on the Google Pixel subreddit, watching this particular clip on a Google Pixel 6, 6a, or Pixel 7 will trigger the telephone to immediately reboot. One thing in regards to the clip is unpleasant to the telephone, and it hard-crashes earlier than it could possibly even load a body. Some customers within the thread say cell service would not work after the reboot, requiring one other reboot to get it again up and operating.
The main idea floating round is that one thing in regards to the format of the video (it is 4K HDR) is inflicting the telephone to crash. It would not be the primary time one thing like this occurred to an Android telephone. In 2020, there was a cursed wallpaper that might crash a telephone when set because the background on account of a colour area bug. The affected telephones all use Google’s Exynos-derived Tensor SoC, so do not anticipate non-Google telephones to be affected by this. Samsung Exynos telephones can be the following most-likely candidates, however we’ve not seen any studies of that.
This bug was first posted over the weekend and appears to be getting fastened. We will affirm our Pixel 7 Professional crashed immediately yesterday and might play the clip simply nice as we speak, so it looks like Google modified one thing. We’ve not noticed something apparent like an app replace, however Google has a lot of methods for remotely altering how a telephone works, like the power to disable or allow code paths with out pushing an replace. A number of customers within the Pixel subreddit are reporting that the video works nice as we speak, too.
