The cursed wallpaper

The year 2020 is quite a pack of troubles itself, I am sure that nobody is going to forget this year. I mean come on, we have got a pretty nasty Highlight, I am talking about Corona and believe me I am sure that this was not enough for someone out there. I mean we got Australian Bushfires, earthquakes in Puerto Rico,  covid-19, Midland Michigan Dam breaches, Ebola outbreak, cyclone Amphan, sprint tornadoes and now civil unrest in the US, and many more. But wait that was not enough now we have something people are calling as a cursed wallpaper yeah you got it right a cursed wallpaper.   let me show you what I am talking about:

Now you must be thinking that, This is a very beautiful looking wallpaper how possibly this can kill someone's smartphone. A lot of people have been reportedly saying that they are a victim of this cursed wallpaper, this image crashes the smartphone, makes it go to boot loops corrupts the smartphone UI and eventually it will lead you to wipe out your own data to save your smartphone. Don't believe me see for yourself:

What the hell bro , It is frozen

How to get back to normal ?#GalaxyS20Ultra 😢😟😳😳 pic.twitter.com/GZfCfPY7vO

— Learning 2.1 (@vamsiexplores) May 31, 2020

Mystery solvedhttps://t.co/5h23Z7yYc0

— Kok Kee (@KokiYaps) May 31, 2020

Well, seems like that was too much of it right? So it's true then this is a problem after all.

Initially there were some rumors of some malwares or code hidden in the image that is making the phones crash. This theory was quite believing right? People started talking about some goofy hackers and all. All of this was so intimidating that I had to see it myself. So what I did was I just found the wallpaper by searching the Cursed wallpaper on Google, then I found some images like the one I have attached above. But because I  wanted to reach out to the original one, So I reverse search the images I found and then I found the original one.  I was shocked because the original image was not at all like the one which is people are using as wallpaper this original image was of size 6144x3950, see for yourself:

    Another thing I found out is that there was nothing like a hacker or hidden code in that wallpaper. This all was just because of a faulty pixel in the wallpaper. And this same problem was with the original picture also there was a faulty pixel in the image which was causing all the smartphones to die. Now a question will arise in your mind that what was the problem then which is causing the smartphone to crash. After a little more searching and surfing I found out that the problem was with the numerical data that pixel.

Now anybody would think that what was the problem then, why the hell phones were crashing. The colour profile of this photo is in ProPhoto RGB mode which needs to be converted to SRGB in smartphones. And it seems that that conversion was the problem. The problem is the luminance of this particular pixel.

    Normally what happens is the overall luminance of the pixel is a weighted average of the luminance of the three frames (RGB) of  that pixel, as shown below .

    
As shown in the picture the condition of this weighted average is that the sum must not pass the max (255) value, But for this particular pixel of this image that calculation was a bit tricky. The values of RGB frames were 255, 255, 243 respectively, that means the weighted sum will be 254.

Now that doesn't seem like a problem right? Because the final value is less than 255, but here comes the twist. Google takes the average a bit differently and round offs the individual values then adds them making them equal to 256. And that's where the system fails, causing the device to go in the boot loop.

This problem wouldn't happen if just simply open the image in the image viewer, it will simply crash the image viewer or stop the UI of the phone for a moment. But When we set the image as wallpaper the system continuously trues that computation and that is why it goes to the loop, and crashes.

    So please don't even dare to set this image as your wallpaper, or you know its on you.