Well Akshually.
Misconfigured MIME types on certain old web servers would display the raw data of any file.
I had an Executive who wanted to watch a Video from some “Motivational Speaker” (scam artist) on her iPad. The Scam Artist (Motivational Speaker) had it wrapped in a Flash Applet and when she contacted them about not being able to watch the video, he started soap boxing about how terrible iPhones and iPads were and that Apple is Doomed.
I checked the website and found that the MP4 file had the MIME type Octet/Stream instead of Video/MPEG4 and I created a dummy xHTML page with the appropriate tags.
The video worked perfectly on her iPad and her husband went on to watch the video, believed the “Motivational Speaker” and was fleeced for thousands of dollars.
flash
applet
xHTML
I wish I’d not heard xHTML in a long time
Have you ever considered a job as a scam artist? They need people like you! You could be making thousands of dollars from home! First you need to be desperate, then you need to work for free…
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Literally, I’ve had this happen on Fandom.com where I try to copy/save an image from a direct link that ends in “.png”, but realize it was a fake PNG when I try to upload it. It’s so annoying, IDK what the deal with all of these new image types is.
IDK what the deal with all of these new image types is
Well the reason is that all the old image files weren’t designed for the modern web (some of them have been around since the 1960s) so these new image formats have been developed that compress more readily, and have additional features.
I don’t know the exact details but an example is that a lot of social media sites strip metadata from images because it takes up space, so some of these new formats have more compressed metadata so that’s no longer needed.
The issue at hand is not that, it’s that even when you use an Uri into an image you get a webpage. Reddit does this, for example.
https://getindie.wiki/ -> a plugin that helps avoiding fandom.com as much as possible. Don’t give those leeches any visit if you can help it, their behavior towards the people creating their content is atrocious.
I’m scared. What… What else could it do than serve a png image?
This is what you get when you request a ‘.jpg’ url from Reddit. It’s a webpage and not just the image.
best if You try to zoom-in on reddit pic, coz some uploaded fancy detailed map in 16k, and it is auto-shrinked to Your 2k monitor xD
fcuk reddit, go old.reddit instead, style may be different, notifications may require new settings, but they open images as images, and this one deals with ads much better too, and have few other fancy stuff too.
Except for image galleries; those are only available on new Reddit, and have all the same issues
Do You mean when single post contains many pics? I can browse them all on old too, there are small text buttons for previous and next, above pic.
Agree, You cannot make a post with more than single pic on old, text input field have only manual code input, instead panel with icons… It’s like using linux instead mac ;d
There are a couple lines of ublock blocklist code you can add to fix this for reddit btw. Let me know if you want it.
i’m sorry if your question was rhetorical (but in case anybody is curious) : some sites do some fancy routing and prevent you from loading the raw file, instead it loads an HTML page with all the desired ads, cookies, and other trackers for the site in question. This method also often circumvents your ability to “open the image in a new tab”, or “download the linked file” directly. I’ve seen this most often on sites that serve GIFs (so if your messaging app’s gif search functionality fails you, and you go looking online for something better you, you’re “forced” to share a link to a site that your friend has to visit instead of the gif you were intending to share)
Redirect you internally to the main page so that people have a harder time linking the relevant info and they have to load the whole page with all the ads/paywalls
Literally anything.
Files extensions are an old DOS thing that’s still in Windows. Unix-derived stuff never really cared, at least not in the same way.
What actually matters is the MIME type set in the HTTP headers, which is “image/png” for png. Traditionally, the file extension is mapped to a MIME type, because that makes things easy for everyone, but nothing says it has to be that way.
The HTTP headers can be wrong, the only definitive way to determine a file’s content type is to read it. This is why you can stick an image that has a mime type header of
application/octet-streamin animgtag and it’ll mostly work. Most binary formats will have some kind of magic number at the start to help determine it.Which is bad and wrong. Postel’s law has been considered a bad idea by Postel himself for a while. We shouldn’t let such fuzziness go through.
Meh, you shouldn’t need a sophisticated understanding of file formats and web server configuration to make a website, so some slack is imo a good thing. Maybe not as much as there is, but reading the head of an image file doesn’t seem that big a deal.
The unsophisticated solution is to map the file extension to the MIME type, which is done by default much of the time. If you do anything else, then we need to have a conversation about how.
There’s the Christmas spirit.
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…and its namesake
Gur = the in the Caesar cypher?
Image URL
Oh yeah I guess that was the Tumblr era of removing vowels from things
Man, remember when trying to share a link to an image from a site would give you a super tiny “no hotlinking” gif?
Sorry but developers rarely get to make these decisions.
They literally code the page. So long as they are working on it, they get the final say on what goes in.
I hope you’re not serious
Hahaha oh man. No.
Yep.
It’s true you can get replaced with another developer, but it’s still the role that codes what goes into the page. Or what, do you think a “one month womb” project manager let alone a CEO can do that?
Ultimately the stakeholders make the final call that’s always how it goes in the real world.
If they get some idea that people are “stealing pictures” from the site this is what they will want. They didn’t reason themselves into that position a Dev can’t reason them out.
I’ve actually had stakeholders say we shouldn’t use JavaScript because people can see and steal our code by opening dev tools. Thankfully that was shot down but this is totally real.
I’ve actually had stakeholders say we shouldn’t use JavaScript
Please give me those shareholders, they sound like at least somewhat sensible people.
Please tell us what other language you plan to use to power your front-end web app?
True, just like how a cashier also gets the final say in what kinds of products are sold in the store.
/s
Yep. Imagine blaming cashiers because something is weird about the store layout.
Or blaming the server because the restaurant seating is uncomfortable.
Add
Accept: image/*to your headers.
