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Critical vulnerability in WebP Codec has browser vendors scrambling for updates (stackdiary.com)

submitted 1 year ago by skilledtothegills to c/technology

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This affects all browsers and not just Chrome, as the media falsely reported it. Mozilla just rolled out a fix, and Brave is looking into it. This bug is likely related to the "zero-click" iOS 0day that was reported by Citizenlab last week.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s not. The web site you’re uploading to has to support it to allow you the upload in the first place, and to process it to make previews or lower-res versions for the web pages or apps.

alright yeah i guess. to be honest i was more talking about using images i've made on my own site, or publishers using an image format on their own websites. as for uploading to other sites it's a complete mess: even tumblr doesn't allow uploading webp, but it then automatically converts to webp which makes a horrible blurry mess

Do believe me, recently I’ve started converting those I want to keep to mp4 and I’m saving gigabytes.

i wasn't being sarcastic! i do believe you. and yeah, i'd do the same

It’s not all that well supported in lots of those cases I mention. And where it did get, it only got because Apple has actually billions of devices out there and has the power to make the format default among them with one worldwide update. Yet it still has to convert to jpg when sharing elsewhere by default. That’s how huge the resistance is.

sorry, i was talking about jxl here. i agree heif hasn't got anywhere; but that is, again, mostly due to licencing issues (unsurprisingly, given it's apple)

I’m not advocating for these formats specifically (definitely not jpeg2000 haha), but I’m saying licences and royalties aren’t that super important when it comes to how supported something becomes.

Hell look at Apple… Everything is proprietary.

yeah exactly - none of apple's formats are supported outside of apple devices (and i guess itunes for windows)

Or when it comes to formats, mp3 is still the most widely supported audio format (non-free), and DivX has been the most widely supported video format for much longer than anything else… Also non-free.

that's a fair point, and i can't really explain that - i can only assume it's big for the same reason as gif: it was good enough at the time, and got standardised by cds

Haha hardware camera makers are the slowest dinosaurs when it comes to technology. Took them fucking ages for some to support DNG raw format, and before h264 was already getting grey, most would record videos only in mjpeg.

really? now admittedly i don't know much about cameras, but i've had a couple of filmmaker friends and i was under the impression raw was universally supported

But it’s more about phone cameras anyway. And well with those we’ll only have webp and heif at most, so I guess we have to deal with that anyway.

i'm not sure about that - even google camera doesn't support webp (i mean, it's called "web picture", i think they see it as a web format primarily). i think phone cameras will continue to be solely jpg for a long time

Maybe if Mozilla had not abandoned their FF OS, maybe that would’ve been a camera supporting jpegxl now.

that'd be nice. i do wish mozilla wasn't so catastrophically mismanaged all around

[–] WhoRoger 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Aye so bottom line, we're stuck with what exists until new formats are forced upon everybody... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ed:

was under the impression raw was universally supported

Raw isn't a format, it's supposed to just be unaltered stream from the imager, so every camera model is unique in that regard. But DNG is a way to describe that data so it's more readable to programs unfamiliar with the specific model. And well, some makers prefer to use their own proprietary models.

Although it's gotten better now that nobody buys standalone cameras so the makers can save money by not developing their own software.

Ed2:

none of apple's formats are supported outside of apple devices (and i guess itunes for windows)

Actually AAC is mostly Apple's format and support for it is pretty great. I'm not super familiar with the details but it sounds like a similar situation as with webp.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Aye so bottom line, we’re stuck with what exists until new formats are forced upon everybody… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yeah... :(

Raw isn’t a format, it’s supposed to just be unaltered stream from the imager, so every camera model is unique in that regard. But DNG is a way to describe that data so it’s more readable to programs unfamiliar with the specific model. And well, some makers prefer to use their own proprietary models.

ah fair enough, i didn't know that

Actually AAC is mostly Apple’s format and support for it is pretty great. I’m not super familiar with the details but it sounds like a similar situation as with webp.

is it? i didn't think any android players supported it apart from specifically apple music? and i'm pretty sure ms' groove music couldn't play them^?^

[–] WhoRoger 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My bad here, I didn't mean AAC, but ALAC (lossless) and other Apple's own mp4 variants. Indeed not sure how's the support in core Android, although I'd guess ALAC should be since it's part of mp4 specification.

I haven't goofed around with it in a while, but some ~10 years ago when I was doing tech reviews I was looking into ALAC quite a bit and was surprised how nice it is, and apparently easy enough to implement that even lots of hardware devices supported it without even advertising it. Also 3rd party audiobook players can often deal with Apple's audiobook DRM.

Basically, Apple did surprisingly well with audio formats while also supporting some open formats (at least in hardware), so maybe that's also a reason why I'm not so adamant about formats being 100% free from the start, as long as they get the codec ball rolling.

But again it's been 10 years since I was looking into this closely so I'm very fuzzy on the details.