BULB BANTER > Testing Area

er, let`s see....

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Hemingray:
posting to store my login info

Hemingray:
Once again, my stupid butt hosed the OS :\

Yoshi:
I know how you can use direct-linking with any host, including geocities, tripod, angelfire, etc... All you need to do is to change the extensions to txt. Let's say you want to link to cool-lightbulb.jpg; Well, you would only need to rename that to cool-lightbulb.txt . That's how I have been adding images to my posts. As you can see, they are hosted on tripod! This is because txt files are like html documents: Direct linking is a must for these filetypes, otherwise they would be unviewable!

You need to be able to see the extensions in order to change them. If you have them hidden (which by the way is a really bad idea concerning security), just "un-hide" them by clicking on folder options>view (the folder options link is on one of the folder menus, it varies from OS to OS). Then uncheck the box that says "hide file extensions for known file types".

Why is it a bad idea to hide the extensions? Because it would be far easier to fool you into opening a virus or trojan horse. You know, programs can have any icon that the creator wants them to have, but he cannot change the extension or he will render his virus useless. Would you double click on a file that has an image icon? How can you tell if it's not a virus/trojan without looking at its extension? Remember that antivirus software is not fail proof! If an antivirus program does not have a certain virus registered in its DATs, it won't detect it. (which is why it is very important to download the latest virus definitions).

The extension tells the computer with what program to open a certain file, according to its register of programs and their associations. For example, when you install Microsoft Word, it automatically associates with the ".doc" extension, which was previously associated to Wordpad by default. This doesn't mean that now all .doc files will only be viewable through Word; It means that when you double click on a .doc file, it will open itself with Word. The only exception is Internet Explorer: It is a single program and needs to be able to open many types of files, and it prefers to look at the format of the file rather than its extension, which is why the .txt extension doesn't make images to be read as text. In the past, it had the serious vulnerability of reading programs with .mid or .wav extension as programs! This vulnerability existed in IE 5.5 and previous versions, and is system-wide. It's a big reason to upgrade to IE 6.

-Yoshi


[This message has been edited by Yoshi (edited June 20, 2003).]

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