[felooboolooomba]

Back in the day as a teenager. Downloaded mp3 that was labelled with title and artist and .mp3 extension. It wasn't. What it was caused me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fkuc that shit. Apart from that, many good stuff was had.

[leeoniya]

or was it Windows hiding file extensions by default and you downloaded a .mp3.exe file?

[netsharc]

Isn't it just great how a decision made by some genius in Microsoft decades ago caused so much confusion and mess. Even on Windows 11 the default is to hide extensions, because, geez, wouldn't want to confuse people with change after decades of it being like that.

Although, was the hiding something that the Mac introduced?

The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...

I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..

[anal_reactor]

> The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...

I challenge you to suggest a better solution - the best that Linux came up with is a giant database of all magic numbers known to God and praying that something matches... sometimes it does, and sometimes it even matches the correct program.

[nofriend]

the linux way works tho

[NooneAtAll3]

it really doesn't

hiding information from user is not good by any means

[netsharc]

But relying on them to tell the OS what type a file is, or allowing them to change the extension, isn't good either. lena.jpg doesn't become lena.pdf by changing the last 3 letters of the filename..

[nofriend]

Am I missing something? Hiding things from users is a property of the windows approach. Did you reply to the wrong person?

[chuckadams]

The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.

[throwawaysoxjje]

Macs originally didn’t have filename extensions because the file type was stored as metadata in the file system

[hnlmorg]

That really is a superior way of doing things too. Or at least it would have been if that metadata were transferred with the file itself in all protocols.

[felooboolooomba]

Nope. It had been renamed from .avi. CP.

[GaryBluto]

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard for a client to automatically check if a file is what it claims to be after downloading.