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December 13th -- File types are not either-or

One might naively believe that the type of a file is either one thing or another. Image data is just that, an image. Text is just text. But no, it is possible to carefully craft a file to be of multiple -- even many -- different valid file types. Thanks to specification ambiguities and implementation inconsistencies, a blob of binary data can be interpreted as information in a myriad of different ways.

This LiveOverflow video (yes, YouTube is evil) introduced me to this madness.

YouTube :: LiveOverflow :: What is a File Format?

And this talk by Ange Albertini shows how far this stuff can be taken

YouTube :: media.ccc.de :: Ange Albertini: Funky File Formats

Just something really interesting I've been learning about today

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Last Updated: 2020-12-13