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Comment by itsthecourier | Hacker News Reader

just reading gnutella triggered a really old memory of times when Ares, Limewire and eMule where places to try your luck getting mp3s and software

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Back in the day as a teenager. Downloaded mp3 that was labelled with title and artist and .mp3 extension. It wasn't. What it was caused me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fkuc that shit. Apart from that, many good stuff was had.

or was it Windows hiding file extensions by default and you downloaded a .mp3.exe file?

Isn't it just great how a decision made by some genius in Microsoft decades ago caused so much confusion and mess. Even on Windows 11 the default is to hide extensions, because, geez, wouldn't want to confuse people with change after decades of it being like that.

Although, was the hiding something that the Mac introduced?

The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...

I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..

> The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...

I challenge you to suggest a better solution - the best that Linux came up with is a giant database of all magic numbers known to God and praying that something matches... sometimes it does, and sometimes it even matches the correct program.

the linux way works tho

it really doesn't

hiding information from user is not good by any means

But relying on them to tell the OS what type a file is, or allowing them to change the extension, isn't good either. lena.jpg doesn't become lena.pdf by changing the last 3 letters of the filename..

It gets really complicated when you get into overlapping file types, like with ISOBMFF. An .mp4 can also, simultaneously, be a valid .3gp because those are profiles of ISOBMFF. On the other extreme, JPEG is secretly two different incompatible formats (JFIF and Exif), and a video file with a different codec in the same container, or even a different track layout, might as well be a different format.

> allowing them to change the extension, isn't good either

why not?

power to the people. At worst it just breaks. At best you get filetype chamelions that are straight up cool, yet harmless

Am I missing something? Hiding things from users is a property of the windows approach. Did you reply to the wrong person?

GGP comment literally says that linux way is hiding file type in the binary information. If you consider that as more visible I have many questions

windows at least gets an option to display file type

Some file formats, eg png, require a particular file header in order to be considered valid. This is true regardless of your operating system, be it windows or linux. If that is hidden information, then it is hidden regardless of which operating system you're on. On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png and could be opened with my image viewer with standard tools. On linux it will recommend you open the file with an image viewer regardless of the file extension. That seems to me like significantly less hidden information.

> On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png

And that's a good thing. Imagine receiving a file called "very_funny_cat.png" and Linux realizing that while it's not a valid PNG image, it is a valid ELF executable.

The sane option would be to change the file explorer to have a column/field of "What type of file we've detected it is". We already do this for directories. Nowadays we just rely on naming convention that the last 3 letters of the name identifies correctly what the file format is.

Right, linux should instead go by the normal extension for an elf, which is no extension... instead this problem is solved by prompting the user if they want to execute the program.

> instead this problem is solved by prompting the user

it is solved by informing user how the file will be used

aka file type

The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.

Macs originally didn’t have filename extensions because the file type was stored as metadata in the file system

That really is a superior way of doing things too. Or at least it would have been if that metadata were transferred with the file itself in all protocols.

Nope. It had been renamed from .avi. CP.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard for a client to automatically check if a file is what it claims to be after downloading.

Docuwiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki) is still the most thorough source I've seen for niche documentaries.

https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Category:Name

It is all ed2k links. Unfortunately modern clients for ed2k are quite lacking

ed2k, nice! That reminds me of this superb piece of software: MLDonkey (https://github.com/ygrek/mldonkey), written in OCaml.

That is really neat. I wasn't aware of it. Multi-protocol always sounds ideal but I've had bad luck finding any that still work. Thanks for sharing!

And yet it doesn't work without JS (I think it's because cloudflare WAF, but still)

Once you get past Cloudfare, you can use it without JS.

BearShare, too, which also included pictures and video. I don't remember ever getting a virus from it, but I also kept extensions visible.

I still get spam emails on the one-off email address I used to sign up for Bearshare.

Shareaza was the goat. It had 4 or 5 protocols.

It is still around! I see network traffic from it on major GWebCache instances.

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