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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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The fact that Windows hasn't solved the "fake extension" scam is wild. You can't make people not click stuff, obviously. But you absolutely could identify double extensions clearly intended to confuse people and give some kind of "this isn't a PDF" warning.
They're too busy finding new ways to inject telemetry and ads into your os, and degrade your experience. It takes a lot of resources to do this.
Edit: 'to' to 'too'. I blame fatigue.
It's so dumb that Windows hides file extensions by default. They could just flip a toggle.
But don't you understand how confusing and scary those cryptic three letter strings are to normal people?? 😱
Administrator Plopp, what do I do if it has a 4 letter extension? That .jpeg is a virus right?
-sincerely, The dumbest user you know
Oh shit. Yes. I need you to press Ctrl+Alt+Del while pulling the power cord or else the virus will steal your RAM and upload your printer to a criminal server in the cloud!
It's not the 90's anymore. There's no excuse for not having basic understanding of the tools you use in life.
Where have you been for the past decade? The trend is the exact opposite. Dumb everything down until there's nothing left to understand, in the name of "usability".
File extensions are soo MS-DOS/Windows. What a dumb operating system.
Shit, I remember having to wipe my boss's computer back in '03 because he clicked on an attachment called something along the lines of "bigtiddies.mpeg.exe" or some shit.
Me getting a virus on my computer after running sex.exe from limewire. Luckily it was only mildly annoying (as far as I know). A picture of a golfer would pop up and he would swing then the computer would shutdown. Happened once every few days and I kept using the PC for years with that on it.
I miss when viruses were fun instead of extortionate
Back then there was eo much less to gain. The most important thing on the family computer was my Runescape account. I doubt whoever made the virus could even hack my runescape account because I lost access to it almost every week due to a very weak password and me telling all the kids at school my username and password.
When Macs switched to x86 CPUs and Hackintoshes became a thing, there was also a fake ISO file floating around that would just boot up into a picture of Goatse.
I could almost hear The Office theme song playing while I was reading that
That was a very common tactic back in the day.
When MS chose to hide file extensions by default I fucking lost my mind because of the malware\virus implications... idiots.
They're incompetent
I don't think it would help. Even without the extension it would still say:
not-malicious.pdf (Application)
We are trained to see file extensions and understand them, but the masses aren't. There is a column that translates the hidden extension into its corresponding type already.
I'm suggesting an actual popup on double extensioned files that forces you to acknowledge that you know it's lying about the file type.
The only legitimate use for multiple extensions is compression, pretty much, and it's easy enough to distinguish those.
That would be annoying for people who work on files with a double extension for legitimate reasons, e.g.
.tar.gz, and (this can't be stressed strongly enough) Windows users do not pay attention to warning popups, so it wouldn't actually help. Despite it being eighteen years since Windows Vista released, and therefore vanishing unlikely that any given software was written assuming that Windows didn't have a permissions system, it's still most people's first troubleshooting step to try and run things as admin, and you still get loads of people (including ones who should know better, e.g. ones who also use Linux and would never log in as root) who disable UAC as one of the first things they do when setting up a windows install, and end up running everything as the equivalent of root just to suppress the mildly annoying pop-up when something asks for elevated permissions.So, your proposed popup:
I already addressed compression. It's as entirely trivial to whitelist those cases as it is to do in the first place.
Again, I said it's not magic. But most of these cases are inattention that would be reduced meaningfully if Windows made them actually pick what file type they were opening. There's a big gap between "advanced users" who will notice that it's the only file with an extension and morons who will just skip everything no matter what it says.
Don't bother with teh MS apologists. They are the worst.
If the operating system doesn't know the file and the type of file, it's a bad operating system.
It should be trivial to have an OS determine the file type and display a warning if the extension doesn't match.
Posix has had
filefor decades.My computer-iliterate dad is on Debian XFCE since 2 years now. The first year, he thought it was the new Windows. File extensions didn't bother him in the slightest.
I don't think extensions are a "bother" at all. It's just a different way to show the info.
Wouldn't it show not-malicious.pdf.exe?