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Twitter Bans Animated PNG Files After Online Attackers Targeted Users With Epilepsy (theverge.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept.
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.
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Twitter Bans Animated PNG Files After Online Attackers Targeted Users With Epilepsy More

Twitter Bans Animated PNG Files After Online Attackers Targeted Users With Epilepsy

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  • This is why ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Monday December 23, 2019 @07:52PM (#59552200)
    ... we can't have nice things :-(

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... 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.

    • Twitters staff can't code. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday December 23, 2019 @10:20PM (#59552564) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Monday December 23, 2019 @11:33PM (#59552736)

        >"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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Artemis3 ( 85734 )

          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

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        And yet the result is a ban :) Its not the "tech" ... its a CoC.

    • ... we can't have nice things :-(

      Damn! You beat me to it!

  • Why not GIFs too? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Yeah I was thinking the same thing; just fix the bug. wtf twitter...

    • 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.

    • 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)

    by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 ) on Monday December 23, 2019 @08:02PM (#59552234)
    But we can't ban guns.
    • No, you can't.

    • 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.

    • "But we can't ban guns" Ugh Guns bad! Ugh! Because nobody knows how to make bombs or plough their car into a crowd of people. How about figuring out why people are snapping and shooting up their school chums or work buddies? Or unloading a magazine inside a crowded Walmart? How strange that years ago in rural America, teens would carry loaded rifles out in the open on their way to duck hunting, yet there were no mass school shootings. We need to find out why there has been a huge amount of mass shootings d

    • >"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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        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".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Strill ( 6019874 )

          What part of "shall not be infringed" is confusing you?

          • What part of "well-regulated militia" is confusing you?

            • >"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.

    • someone with a really hideous animated christmas outfit walks into a shopping mall!

    • Twitter is a private platform, not the government. It's like Applebee's banning guns. Weapons are also useful and sometimes necessary to protect your own life, wellbeing, or that of those around you. Animated PNGs are... a slightly better animated GIF.

      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
  • Each user can choose their own experience in terms of animated gifs/pngs etc?
    • But then how would people be able to be outraged on the behalf of others?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nashv ( 1479253 )

      How would you know if it was a harmful GIF before you saw it ?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Some content filtering proxy servers, such as Privoxy, kill animations by stripping APNGs and animated GIFs down to their first frame. It's not impossible, I never understood why browsers don't have such an option built in.
    • Except Chrome, Edge, and likely Firefox are 'in bed' with advertisers and other profit makers. This is why it's hard or impossible to disable overlays, forced redirects, right click gimping, and other user hostile features without 3rd party extentions or shutting down Javascript altogether which can break an entire webpage. Even the simple act of turning off Javascript in Android Chrome requires you to go through several layers of menus to do it, discouraging users from toggling Javascript when needed.

  • Holy carp (Score:4)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Monday December 23, 2019 @08:23PM (#59552294) Journal

    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.

  • ....still allowing animated GIFs? What's to stop an attacker from finding an exploit in the renderer for animated GIFs to cause them to autoplay? For that matter, how about ad networks that insist on sliding a stupid autoplaying video over a web page, and an attacker finding a way to replace the ad with a seizure bomb? Not everybody has or knows how to use an ad-blocker.

  • 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

  • Could that maybe a client setting? Donâ(TM)t show me content with flickering imagery...

  • there should be a way to measure a kind of difference between frames

  • Finally Compuserve will reign again!

  • Will Twitter start banning pictures of people posting peanuts to protect those with peanut allergies too?

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