Re: Windows Media Player executes WMF content in .MP3 files.
From: Alun Jones (alun@texis.com)Date: 02/28/02
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From: alun@texis.com (Alun Jones) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 15:39:25 GMT
In article <V_Le8.2783$5o.1801150@newsr2.u-net.net>, "Dave Korn"
<no.spam@my.mailbox.invalid> wrote:
>"Joe" <1@2.com> wrote in message
>news:a5e333$fv8$2@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net...
>> I hate to sound cruel about it, but it serves you right for using Windows
>> Media Player as your default MP3 player.
>
> You obviously have a reading comprehension problem. *I* don't use wmp as
>my default mp3 player. Now go back and read the post again, and try and
>come up with an intelligent (or at least *correct*) comment this time. And
>isn't it at least some excuse to point out that .mp3 files have always been
>safe *until now* ?
mp3 files are still safe, probably(*), if played by a .mp3 player. The key
here is that the file is played by a player of multiple formats - mp3, mpg,
au, wmf, avi, etc, etc(**). The file association is between the file
extension and the application, and _not_ between the file extension and a
content type. The file association is used to determine what program to
launch when you double-click on a file. The application tries to be "helpful"
in analysing the contents of the file in order to determine the content type.
Such has often been the way of software. For instance, Unix shells will check
the content of an executable file when asked to run it, in order to determine
whether it's a shell script, a binary executable, or some other file format.
Hence, calling a file "fred.sh" doesn't mean that it'll always be run through
the Bourne Shell. It would make great sense to have such content-sensing
features warn and prompt when the file extension doesn't match the content
type, but then again what would those people do who like to save all document
files as *.doc, regardless of which word processor they were created in?(***)
Alun.
~~~~
(*) Barring buffer overflow exploits, of course.
(**) No, to the best of my knowledge, there are no ".etc" files to play :-)
(***) Yes, they'd have to hit "yes" every time the warning box comes up - and
that in itself becomes a risk. I refer you to the case of the French system
that asked "Are you sure?" (or the French equivalent of that) to every
operation - many users got into the habit of typing "<Enter>O<Enter>", and
some programmed a function key for that purpose. Suddenly nobody's reading
_any_ of the warnings, and too many warnings mean that all the warnings are
ignored, even the dangerous ones.
[Note that answers to questions in newsgroups are not generally
invitations to contact me personally for help in the future.]
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