@arimelody.me on Bluesky: "web developers are getting too cocky. if visiting your `.png` URI doesn't give me the raw bytes of a png image and nothing else, your balls should explode  if you don't have balls, you grow balls that immediately explode"

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[–] 116 points 1 year ago (11 children)

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.

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  • [–] 110 points 1 year ago (9 children)
  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I've never quite managed to understand what the point of xHTML even was. Damn near all of the time, it was still sent as plain ole HTML

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago

    The structure was meant to be more strict syntactically, but almost universally browsers didn’t give a shit because it was way better for users to just “do your best” to process broken or sloppy xhtml/html

    That being said, some of the rules meant to enhance the rigidity of html were brought in from the xhtml spec to HTML5.

    While browsers will still do a “best attempt” at rendering the page, most websites aren’t even written in raw HTML anymore by devs, it’s either front end single page apps populating the dom or backend generated templates spitting out generated HTML, most of which generally follow the rules of html (except Wordpress, which needs to die in a cave)

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    xHTML

    'use strict;' for HTML is what I was always told, don't take my word for it!

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  • [+] 110 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 86 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Basically since the Wikia rebrand to fandom, they've been owned by venture capital vultures, and have unsurprisingly dropped off. Stupid little nonsense like this doesn't surprise me

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Fandom.com is bad. It sucks the fun out of every fandom wiki that it has in its clutches.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Use libredirect, or just manually replace fandom with breezewiki or some of the other helper sites.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (40 children)

    I'm scared. What... What else could it do than serve a png image?

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  • [–] 142 points 1 year ago (19 children)

    I'm pretty sure that read it wraps the picture in some kind of picture viewer thing. I imagine it's an effort to keep you on the site or track your activity better.

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  • [–] 106 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    And their stupid website prevents you from zooming in on the image. Or they disabled right click on it in an attempt to stop you from saving the image. It really is pathetic

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Shift + right click will get your traditional right click options back

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Also F12 to open the developer panel, then check the "network" and "sources" tabs where you can see every single asset that is loaded (may need to refresh after opening the dev panel) and interact with them in a list

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Exactly, and pretty much everyone knows this. Which is why them putting effort into preventing it is stupid

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Didn't know that, but those download protection things also have other tricks like a transparent image placed over the top.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    Instagram. It's impossible to save memes losslessly on mobile (least to my pathetic attempts). On desktop you can go into inspect element and yoink the png

    edit: my pathetic attempts are indeed pathetic. Thanks folks -u-

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I've never had an Instagram account because their Android app was so terrible that I was never able to sign up. I wasn't going to get an iPhone just so I could use a single app, and the whole reason I wanted Instagram was so was something to look at while on the bus or the train there's no point using the desktop version.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    This is what you get when you request a '.jpg' url from Reddit. It's a webpage and not just the image.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Except for image galleries; those are only available on new Reddit, and have all the same issues

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I would not mind it, please and thanks.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Just slap these into the "My Filters" section and press apply :)

    reddit.com##zoomable-img:style(top: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; height: unset !important;)
    reddit.com##post-bottom-bar
    reddit.com##:matches-path(/media) img:others()
    reddit.com##:matches-path(/media) :root:style(background-color: black !important;)
    

    Goes from this:

    To this:

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  • [–] 44 points 1 year ago

    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)

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I’ve gotten back .webp and .gif images with .png extensions.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Thats nothing new. Also common to get files with no extension, so you have to play the guessing game to get windows to open it properly.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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-stream in an img tag and it'll mostly work. Most binary formats will have some kind of magic number at the start to help determine it.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    There’s the Christmas spirit.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    *enshittified revenue-grubbing companies and their project managers are getting too cocky

    Web developer does what web developer is told

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    To be fair, they might actually quit over this one.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What, in the entirety of the internet, has ever led you to believe that web developers won't implement whatever user-hostile bullshit their bosses tell them to?

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    this person should never visit papua new guinea.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Man, remember when trying to share a link to an image from a site would give you a super tiny "no hotlinking" gif?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    In my little hobby project, I create SVG images of dumb little creatures on the fly based on the URL parameters. So sometimes when I'm bored I just type in URLs into my phones browser and look at images of funky little guys

    The URLs go from

    https://getfrog.cc/guest/creature/img/01-1-000-000-000-00-00

    to

    https://getfrog.cc/guest/creature/img/02-5-0J1-0J1-0J1-03-01

    with the syntax <species>-<age>-<color1><shiny1>-<color2><shiny2>-<color3><shiny3>-<pattern>-<mutation> if anyone wants to play around with it too! Lots of combinations aren't implemented yet tho, haven't been feeling like making assets in a while now haha

    There's also a GUI I guess but that's way less fun

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Add Accept: image/* to your headers.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Sorry but developers rarely get to make these decisions.

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  • [+] -8 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    They literally code the page. So long as they are working on it, they get the final say on what goes in.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I remember when Google removed the direct image link option. That was the day I said fuck off.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    I was just downloading a few images last night. I decided it was easier to download directly from the Google Images result than to actually visit the page they came from, because the websites kept having some JS bullshit that prevented opening the image.

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