Sterling Ambivalence (sterlingnorth) wrote,
Sterling Ambivalence
sterlingnorth

Dangerous images -- not just for Windows anymore.

While it was evil for DrunkenBlog to post the image inline here and on the front page of his website, thus killing Safari (the default webbrowser on Macintoshes), or in fact anything that uses webkit, webcore and/or ImageIO, which as I gather is a heck of a lot of Macintosh software...both system supplied and third-party, I kinda wish that this bug was found back last December, as certain Macintosh sites and their visitors were almost gleeful about the discovery of an image processing flaw within Windows.

Reading the comments at the link, and playing around with the image in Linux seems to confirm that the EXIF data in the image is corrupted. EXIF is additional metadata that is appended to the image that describe things like the camera used to take the picture and such. This image, for example would crash numerous Linux image viewers, and would cause an error when being viewed with the Preview application from OS X versions 1.3.x and earlier (Although it wouldn't outright crash it, like DB's car graphic).
Tags: apple, technology
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