Twitter Bans Animated PNG Files After Online Attackers Targeted Users With Epilepsy (theverge.com) 78
Twitter is banning animated PNG image files (APNGs) from its platform, after an attack on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter account sent out similar animated images that could potentially cause seizures in photosensitive people. The Verge reports: Twitter discovered a bug that allowed users to bypass its autoplay settings, and allow several animated images in a single tweet using the APNG file format. "We want everyone to have a safe experience on Twitter," the company says in a tweet from the Twitter Accessibility handle. "APNGs were fun, but they don't respect autoplay settings, so we're removing the ability to add them to Tweets. This is for the safety of people with sensitivity to motion and flashing imagery, including those with epilepsy."
Tweets with existing APNG images won't be deleted from the platform, but only GIFs will be able to animate images moving forward. According to Yahoo, Twitter has further clarified that APNG files were not used to target the Epilepsy Foundation, but the bug meant such files could have been used to do so in the future had Twitter not moved to squash it. The attacks on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter handle occurred last month -- National Epilepsy Awareness Month -- with trolls using its hashtags and Twitter handle to post animated images with strobing light effects. It's not clear how many people may have been affected by the attack, but the foundation said it's cooperating with law enforcement officials and has filed criminal complaints against accounts believed to have been involved.
Tweets with existing APNG images won't be deleted from the platform, but only GIFs will be able to animate images moving forward. According to Yahoo, Twitter has further clarified that APNG files were not used to target the Epilepsy Foundation, but the bug meant such files could have been used to do so in the future had Twitter not moved to squash it. The attacks on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter handle occurred last month -- National Epilepsy Awareness Month -- with trolls using its hashtags and Twitter handle to post animated images with strobing light effects. It's not clear how many people may have been affected by the attack, but the foundation said it's cooperating with law enforcement officials and has filed criminal complaints against accounts believed to have been involved.
This is why ... (Score:5, Funny)
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... we can't have nice things :-(
There is always some moron who thinks inflicting pain on others is funny. The bright spot here is that experience has taught me that when you finally snap, get ahold of a nice piece of hickory and give the bully a taste of his own medicine he turns out to be whinging cry baby.
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And yet you're the cowardly little boy who needs to hide behind a weapon?
Judging by that comment you were the type of cowardly little bully who ganged up on one other kid with a bunch of your friends to amuse yourself by indulging your sadistic tendencies. That's usually how bullies operate, like a pack of wolves. The trick is to beat the shit out of the Alpha, not fight the entire pack. If the bully is bigger and stronger than oneself, what is ones motivation to fight in a way that ensures the bully will win? An intelligent person, and that's what I am, shows up to a knife figh
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Seriously? We have a pro-bullying faction here it seems.
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My heart was crushed by my ex-girlfriend. I'm heartbroken forever. Should Twitter ban all love stories? The pain is real.
WTF are you talking about? These people are amusing themselves by trying to induce epileptic fits in other people because they think it's funny.
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WTF are you talking about? These people are amusing themselves by trying to induce epileptic fits in other people because they think it's funny.
Doubtful trolls set out with designs to deliberately hurt people. Most often they act out for the shock value and LOL's not even considering real world consequences.
Look at those constantly posting ridiculous heil Hitler... do you honestly think they love Hitler and the reason for posting is to express love and admiration for the fuhrer?
On a more serious note you would think there would be display filters by now that could be enabled for users affected by these things so that no matter what software did it wouldn't cause problems. Seems rather trivial to implement a detector.
Bullcrap, they are deliberately trying to trigger epileptic fits in people. This is like tricking somebody who has a nut allergy into eating hazelnut chocolate or something. You do not do that unless you know exactly what effect that will have. They think hurting people is funny and if somebody gets hospitalised that's just gravy to these assholes. There is a legal term for this: depraved indifference to human life.
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Look at those constantly posting ridiculous heil Hitler... do you honestly think they love Hitler and the reason for posting is to express love and admiration for the fuhrer?
Yes. Yes, I do.
Re: This is why ... (Score:2)
No, they do. They get their jollies from watching people in pain. It's pure sadism, nothing more.
Ever watch newborn puppies playing? It's not as cute as it sounds. There's yelping, and whimpering, and sometimes even blood, because the puppies haven't yet figured out that biting hurts. They don't learn except by being bitten. So, too, with bullies. Escalate as hard as you have to, and eventually they grow up and function.
Re: This is why ... (Score:2)
You teach people like people as long as they are willing to be taught like people, and you assume they're willing until proven otherwise. That is only decent and good. Duh.
But some people refuse to learn like people. Compassion is giving people what they need, which does not always mesh so well with what they want. If what they need are sterner measures, so be it. They need to learn.
Twitters staff can't code. (Score:4, Interesting)
look, it's very simple to not autoplay apng's if you don't depend solely on extra libraries and shit like that.
"oh the apng's don't respect the autoplay settings" NO! IT'S NOT THAT. it's that you MADE YOUR SITE AND SOFTWARE to not respect them.
so just make it work, compile your own libpng, preprocess the png files for your web clients if you have to. it's not hard. it's not even hard to decode the png files in javascript in the browser if it comes to that. it's all doable for startups with barely any money so how is it not doable for twitter? truth is, they don't want to spend the bandwidth on them and the other problems that come with them that they don't want to talk about.
what other problems? well suppose you have an apng. 100 frames of normal stuff at 10 seconds per fram and a og goatse image at the frame number 100. you try having an army of indian workers try to filter that stuff out... it makes censoring and cleaning such stuff much harder. even for automatic filtering. imagine having half of the image on one frame and half on the other frame and frametime at small as you can make it. it'll flicker, but it'll still be goatse and can pass automatic image recognition filtering.
truth is they just implemented a feature they didn't actually think through and now need a scapegoat from bad actor users and epileptics so they don't even need to discuss the real problem they had with it.
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Programmers seem to be getting dumber and dumber. Can't actually write code any more, or figure things out. Basically, if it isn't already written for them, today's degree mill 9-5 programmer is incapable of using a library properly much less designing and coding something specifically suited to purpose. Today those guys are writing Javascript and thinking themselves geniuses.
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Javascript monkey detected.
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Seems like browsers should have a "click to play" option for people who need it. Also devices that detect flashing on video have existed for decades, and we should be able to build a digital version into the browser.
It's not just malicious actors that are the problem, some janky CSS or a broken game could easily do it.
Re:This is why ... (Score:5, Interesting)
>"Seems like browsers should have a "click to play" option"
Firefox has the image.animation_mode function. Set it to "once" and it will play animated GIF and PNG files only once and stop. Set it to "none" and they won't play it at all. This is, unfortunately the only option available (and I pushed for it hard for years). It would be MUCH better if the code supported a click-to-play option as well. But it is FAR from the only source of annoying animation on today's sites.
>"for people who need it."
Or just want it. Animation can be extremely annoying and distracting when you don't want it or need it. For many, like me, it makes reading a page almost impossible. I expect the number of people affected by seizures from some rare, edge-case animation is an infinitesimally small number compared to the number of people just annoyed or pissed off about animation, in general. So there is more than enough reason to expand user control over it.
Alas, web sites are hell-bent into animating everything. From buttons, pull-downs, pop-ups, slide-ins, fade in/outs, fall-downs, and follow-boxes, to those damn huge header "panes" on every other site that have to horizontally scroll stupid stock photos every 3 seconds. It is as if the stupid novelty never wears off.
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There used to be a very nice Firefox plugin for this: toggle-gifs [github.com], but unfortunately it no longer works with the current extension model.
It just put a small pause/play button on top of animated images and videos, with a global option of pause by default.
I'm currently using superstop [mozilla.org] from the same author. It allows you to stop everything at once with a key press.
Unfortunately, it can't selectively start animations again like the other plugin.
I'm not sure why Mozilla can't implement such a much needed feature
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Once upon a time, browsers like Netscape, allowed to turn off images. Instead, a place holder would appear, which you could click to make that specific image appear. So if a page had 60 pictures, but you only needed to see 1, you would click it and save time and bandwidth that way.
This option has been long gone, which is a shame because i need it right now with my garbage metered mobile link. The only thing available is completely turning off images, or playing hard with the likes of uMatrix.
Of course for a
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... we can't have nice things :-(
Damn! You beat me to it!
Why not GIFs too? (Score:2, Insightful)
GIFs could be used to carry out the same thing. And why not make any animation "click to play" by default? Also why is there mention of a bug but instead of fixing the bug they are disabling the feature?
A lot of this doesn't make sense.
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Yeah I was thinking the same thing; just fix the bug. wtf twitter...
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Yeah, maybe the article is crap, because it doesn't make sense, or maybe Twitter was just looking for an excuse.
For some reason a certain breed of web developer has always loved GIF89a but bitterly fought MNG/APNG/ etc.
There's a new JPEG replacement in the pipe that might end this.
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GIFs could be used to carry out the same thing. And why not make any animation "click to play" by default? Also why is there mention of a bug but instead of fixing the bug they are disabling the feature?
A lot of this doesn't make sense.
I would hope that they are just temporarily disabling it, so they don't get sued, while they figure out the best way to handle this.
We ban flashing GIFs (Score:4, Insightful)
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And we can't cure the stupidity of leftists.
Not anymore than we can cure the stupidity of morons such as yourself who think they can solve any problem by shooting at it. Your math exams must have been a sight to see, five minutes of your Trumesque whinging about what a victim you are followed by you emptying a Desert Eagle into the test papers.
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Tell me how unimportant guns are the next time you're in the middle of nowhere, an hour from any police station.
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It seems to me that people in the middle of nowhere aren't as likely to need a gun for protection as someone living in a city.
Do you think that anything beyond the suburbs is like a lame Hollywood version of the wild west?
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>It seems to me that people in the middle of nowhere aren't as likely to need a gun for protection as someone living in a city.
It's thinking like that that's why the left is completely out of touch with rural america.
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When is this path of thinking a success? If it isn't guns it'll be something else, perhaps knives, or maybe human drivable cars. How thick a padding must you clad our society with before you realize that it's the nut that belongs in the padded cell, not the rest of us?
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Violence is the ultimate authority. You'll be grateful those guns are around when the fascists come for the US the same way they're coming for Hong Kong.
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Amendments CAN be changed too, they have in the past.
Just sayin'
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But we can't ban guns.
Twitter can ban guns from their site all they like, but the Constitution says the Government can't. There's a difference. And the Government doesn't ban flashing PNGs by the way.
Re: We ban flashing GIFs (Score:3, Insightful)
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>"But we can't ban guns."
Firearms are a Constitutional right, something found in the most important document that made this country great. They are tools that good people use to check the power of the bad, who will absolutely have them, no matter how much you "ban" them. If you don't believe it, then tell me how the "drug war" has gone over the last several decades, or how effective prohibition was. They allow the saving of far more lives than taken by criminals, and stop far more crime than anything
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Firearms are a Constitutional right,
A very strict reading of the 2nd Amendment could be made that the government has to allow US citizens to possess weapons, but it does not specify what type of weapons. Arguably the government could only allow us to have spears and swords, since those are "arms".
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What part of "shall not be infringed" is confusing you?
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What part of "well-regulated militia" is confusing you?
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>"What part of "well-regulated militia" is confusing you?"
That is a prefactory clause that has almost nothing to do with the operation of the right. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, without regard to militia service. And the "militia" was, and is, essentially, all citizens.
Here is a now famous illustration:
âoeA well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.
Just wait until (Score:2)
someone with a really hideous animated christmas outfit walks into a shopping mall!
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Moreover, from the wording, it doesn't seem like they're necessarily banning them permanently. They specifically mentioned that the problem is they don't respect autoplay settings. It seems like it'd stand to reason that, should they start respecting autopl
Shouldn't this just be a feature of the browsers? (Score:1)
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How would you know if it was a harmful GIF before you saw it ?
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Re: Shouldn't this just be a feature of the browse (Score:2)
Holy carp (Score:4)
The attacks on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter handle occurred last month -- National Epilepsy Awareness Month -- with trolls using its hashtags and Twitter handle to post animated images with strobing light effects.
That is a really special brand of shitty right there.
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Not sure the moral difference between potentially killing lots of people over the internet vs killing them in your basement but OK.
Epileptic siezures can be fatal under certain circumstances, and a persistant photo trigger can be enough to escalate an attack from grand mal to full blown status epilepticus
Re: Holy carp (Score:1)
Stopping animated PNG but... (Score:2)
Criminal charges filed... (Score:1)
Criminal charges are filed by prosecutors, not private parties issuing press releases.
NOBODY has FILED any CRIMINAL charges ALLEGING ANYTHING in this matter.
Any comment to the contrary is either irresponsible reporting or a straight up lie.
If CRIMINAL (or other) CHARGES are ever brought up... we'll see it in the news because a prosecutor filed it... not because some hack wrote it up in a PR fluff piece.
Speaking of piece... peace on earth and merry xmas.
E
Banned for everybody? (Score:1)
this should be relatively easy to detect (Score:2)
there should be a way to measure a kind of difference between frames
Finally (Score:2)
Finally Compuserve will reign again!
What else will they ban (Score:1)