this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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(page 2) 45 comments
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[–] [email protected] 96 points 2 days ago (1 children)

2029 Headline: Worlds largest data breach caused by zero day exploit in popular PNG 3.0 renderer

the payload was reportedly embedded in an animated image of the attacker repeatedly flicking his left testicle

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

I still don't have an HDR display. Hopefully some VR headset in the near future will support it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fracturing support for a legacy format makes so much more sense than actually supporting a modern format like JXL, right?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

If this actually stands a chance of taking off, I'll honestly take what I can get to normalise HDR images

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago

HDR capable PNGs that don't look shite on SDR displays? Sign me up!

[–] [email protected] 143 points 2 days ago (8 children)

But is it backwards compatible with an old version that can't be updated?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Yes that's why its so great

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago

Some of this is paving the cowpath - the animated PNG stuff is 20 years old and e.g. Firefox has had support since March 2007.

[–] [email protected] 86 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, this was my first thought. How many slightly older, no-longer-being-updated pieces of software will fail to open the new version? Hopefully it’s built in a way that it just falls back to legacy and ignores the extra information so you can at least load the file.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I mean, that's already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn't support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One example is piefed unfortunately. Animated gifs as avatar or banner don't animate currently as far as I can tell.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Yeah in browser. I should probably open an issue ticket if nobody else noticed yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I'll bet you a shiny penny that's what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Probably most notably the iOS photos app until like 2014.

Edit: just checked. iOS 11 in 2017 added gif support to photos

I’ll also add, safari supported animated gifs for a long time before that and you could still save them in safari like any other image. But photos would only show the first frame like you said. When 11 came out they played like normal.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Popular photo and video editing apps like Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and Avid Media Composer already support it, alongside Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Apple’s iOS and macOS also work with the new file standard.

This is all the article mentions. I hope you’re right about the backwards compatibility.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I remember the Wild West Web days when it was a toss up seeing if animated Gifs, transparencies in images, or the specific hexadecimal for your personal shade of purple you created would render properly between browsers.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Lies! That gif is sped up 2000%!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

LOL, I heard that gif. Timed it in my mind, on the money OP.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Probably means there will be new PNGs that old software won't be able to open.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It makes sense, right? Is there a way around that when adding new features to a file format?

The alternative is to make another file format for clarity, but it's not really what you want to do.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (5 children)

That depends. Something like HDR should be able to fall back to non-HDR since it largely just adds data, so if the format specifies that extra information is ignored, there's a chance it works fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I see, but the animation feature cant be compatiable no?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (6 children)
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

I could have sworn animated pngs were a thing in the Macromedia Fireworks days. Really dating myself with that ref.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

I miss fireworks. For me that was the best. I've never jived with Photoshop or is alternatives.

I have since landed on krita, aseprite and inkscape. But i still miss the workflow I got used to with fireworks.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I miss the days when all the cool websites used Flash. I think Macromedia killed it for some reason. Probably because it had security flaws, back then it was pretty bandwidth-intensive too, but it made for some dynamic web designs.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago

Flash had a myriad of problems. Web devs celebrated its death.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The current situation with megabytes of JavaScript is pretty bad, but at the time, there was still a fair bit of dialup active, and mobile web was just starting to be a thing - on EDGE and barely 3G. It would take minutes to load.

Also, Steve Jobs had it in for Flash and that’s what ultimately killed it off, I think.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

And the crawling of flash websites is awful

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn't. So there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I still miss using my iPAQ h4350. It still works; might be time to fire up Doom4CE...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I'll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it's day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. "Retina" display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was... several gigabytes, I don't remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3's, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, "All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck."

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There were two different animated PNG extensions, MNG and APNG. Neither of them ever really caught on. I guess they're hoping to do better by baking it into the core spec.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

APNG is what they're using in v3, so all many libraries need to do* is update that code for HDR.

* surely that's easy, right?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean, on a Linux system that's not riddled with flatpak / snap / ... You'd basically only need to update libpng and you'd be good.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Sigh, I miss Macromedia. Anyway, I do remember that being a thing as well. Guess it was never officially part of the spec.

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