Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica
Did you ever see that film The Ring? People who watched a cursed, creepy video would all mysteriously die in seven days. Somehow Google appears to have recreated the tech model of that, the place the creepy video is that this clip of the 1979 film Alien, and the factor that dies after watching it’s a Google Pixel cellphone.
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 cellphone to instantly reboot. Something concerning the clip is unpleasant to the cellphone, and it hard-crashes earlier than it will 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 working.
The main idea floating round is that one thing concerning the format of the video (it is 4K HDR) is inflicting the cellphone to crash. It would not be the primary time one thing like this occurred to an Android cellphone. In 2020 there was a cursed wallpaper that will crash a cellphone when set because the background thanks to a shade area bug. The affected phones all use Google’s Exynos-derived Tensor SoC, so do not count on any non-Google phones to be affected by this. Samsung Exynos phones could be the following most-likely candidates, however we have not seen any experiences of that.
This bug was first posted over the weekend and appears to be getting fastened. We can verify our Pixel 7 Pro would crash instantly yesterday and is in a position to play the clip simply wonderful as we speak, so it looks like Google modified one thing. We have not noticed something apparent like an app replace, however Google has plenty of methods for remotely altering how a cellphone works, like the flexibility to disable or allow code paths with out pushing an replace. Multiple customers within the Pixel subreddit are reporting that the video works wonderful as we speak, too.
