Our website is a funny thing. Most of the time it works just fine, but every once in a while, it does something silly that’ll make old Kinja blush. As it turns out, you can attempt to upload an image into our comments and, well, you’ll basically break the page. The Windows Vista machine Jason has this site running on cannot take it!
We’re always trying to make this site work better for our readers. Yes, the site has a few issues here and there. We’re aware of many of them and want to fix them! However, not being able to upload images to the comments section is by design. We don’t have a “hold images from appearing until approved” system yet, so if we enabled picture uploads, there wouldn’t be anything stopping someone from uploading something illegal or disgusting.
On Friday, David had the take that America needs to be way better at securing loads inside pickup truck beds. Poor Jeffrey Johnson tried to upload a photo (of an overloaded truck, no doubt) into a comment, but the site had other ideas:
This goes on forever. It’s seriously longer than one of my articles! Mechjaz gives the best explanation you’re probably going to find:
This is too long to be a link, and given the clues at the top of the comment, they tried to paste an image directly into the comment and the commenting system dutifully parsed it as a base-64 encoded object and barfed it into place instead of gracefully returning an error or displaying the image (since that’s not supported).
Tl;dr: this is what it looks like when you represent a jpeg as text.
I love Chris D’s energy here:
That link doesn’t seem to work. Could you try posting it again, please?
Also on Friday, Jason wrote about a Ford Escort brochure that had some pretty focused-looking guys. Readers delivered.
Paul B:
5 guys, 4 cylinders.
Ash78:
Consider this Escort… serviced!
Amberturnsignalsarebetter:
Let’s be honest, almost everything looked a bit porny in 1975.
Today was pretty much full of bad ideas. I’m currently pretty blasted out on all of the drugs and David is intoxicated with, love, I guess? Anyway, he wants to buy a full-size static display of a BMW i3 while I want to make a steering yoke. My wife enables all of my bad ideas. David? Well, there’s always Beau, right? From NC Miata NA:
DT: It’s a full-size i3 model and I can buy it for….
Elise: No
DT: Ok
DT: <picks up phone>
Hey Beau, I’m going to pick up some new office furniture. Is that cool?
Have a great holiday break, everyone. We’ll have a story or three tomorrow, and then you’ll see us back on Thursday!
Top graphic laptop image: mahod84/stock.adobe.com
Accidentally famous. Can we just take it down already?
I thought you meant this kind:
__——-__
/ _———_ \
/ / .\ \
| | . | |
|_|_______|_|
/-\| . |/-\
| _ | \ . 0 . /| _ |
|(_)| \ . ! . / |(_)|
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https://www.asciiart.eu/vehicles/cars
Yes! this old genX kid thought the same.
Big Usenet porn vibes.
we don’t talk about usenet porn
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I get shet happens. But solve it going forward. I think an editor should have been able to delete it or set a max size for users to post a comment. Not that hard people.
The guy on the left in the Escort engine pic looks like he should be a member of ABBA. Then I looked them up and the guys were actually more brunettes than blondes. Ok. Whatever.
You could pass images to an AI for near instant evaluation for inappropriate content. ChatGPT is able to name all the objects on my workbench – and even tell me it’s cluttered – and they have APIs you can call to automate the process. Maybe offer it for higher subscription plans to encourage those and to offset the cost.
Please don’t advocate for the use of LLMs for anything other than novelty. We’re retracing the hysterical adoration and subsequent understanding of the severe limitations that occurred with nuclear energy in the 1950s. I’d explain why but that’d be as long as the original upload we’re poking fun at.
The website itself already can tell what’s a proper embeddable link and what isn’t just by looking at the format of the string. Somebody just didn’t have it set up to check for file uploads from local storage. On the one hand I understand because why would you expect that if the site doesn’t even do image embedding from valid links. But on the other hand, that seems like a fairly easy way to get a rich text to Javascript exploit going.
Yes to what Vee is saying. I just had my first run-in with MS LLM telling me I can’t erase or delete an elbow because it appears to contravene social convention or some such BS. I guess I will have to stop wearing short sleeve shirts in public.
They don’t want people posting porn, etc, so staff would have to review and approve each image. I’ve used AI for similar use cases and it is very reliable.
That’s called a heuristic recognition algorithm and it’s something we’ve had since the late 1970s. It’s not feasible to really use at a small scale because not only do you need stock to feed it for heuristic matches, but it’d be running constantly unless somebody sets up a complex queue system. Considering the site has “dead” periods of about eight hours that’d be an expensive running cost for such a niche tool.
Saying “But ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot managed it” isn’t really comparable because LLMs don’t consider and don’t include legal rights for the software used (or code used), running conditions, servicability, modularity, or any other things. What’s good enough for you turns into a giant sinkhole mire for a legally incorporated company.
I do find it amusing that your concerns (as a concern) that there would be images uploaded in the comment section that could possibly be worse than what the rest of the internet does, lol.
I mean, have you seen the internet?
I suppose thar the problem is that it will attract a new horde of spammers that we’re better off without.
IIRC from some previous posts it’s not just about awful things but also copyrighted things. I know it seems alien for a website to be taking a measure of responsibility for the items posted upon it, but it’s a sensible way of proceeding IMO.
This is why it’s bad for a non-journalism business to have a journalism/media appendage. The priority is to protect the main non-journalism business. Which is understandable. But it is not the support good journalism needs.
This comment is mostly about the Washington Posts and ABCs, not the Autopian.
There’s a safe-harbor clause that absolves site operators of liability for all sorts of such shenanigans.
Only if the operator is the primary distribution platform for user generated content and does not directly engage in or curate it. We, the users, are not the primary creators, The Autopian does not have the staff or systems in place to accept DMCA takedown notifications for users, and the site actively engages with user generated content (Member’s Rides, Comment Of The Day, Shitbox Showdown among others), meaning The Autopian does not benefit from the DMCA “Safe Harbour” provision in the same way Youtube for example does.
That is a very good point.
Some sites try to have higher standards than 4chan or Xitter.
I been calling it Xchan (sometimes tenchan). Ex: Why did Musk pay so much for Twitter just to turn it into Xchan when he could have had the real 4chan for so much less?
They’re not responsible for the rest of the internet.
Yes…many of us experienced Jalopnik and that was enough.
Yeah, my first COTD! thx!
Congratulations! Now you spend the rest of your days fighting off Autopius Canopysaurus and Autopius Ash78’s.
It’s fixed I tell you.
Today is Bad Idea Monday, between Mercedes’ homemade Smart Car yoke and David’s next want.
The only reason Jason didn’t come up with one is that he knows he’ll never, ever, ever top taking a chainsaw to a lead-acid battery so it’s best not to even try.
My thumb still hasn’t recovered from scrolling by that comment.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
And depending on the resolution, several thousand characters too!
Yep, Consider that comments take bytes, tens or hundreds of bytes to represent. Even a really long comment, a great big essay of a thing, might clear 1KB.
I just took a random snippet of my desktop background, 261 x 197 pixels, and it’s 80KB.
The following text is a small snip of the white background from Autopian, 142B of a single solid color:
data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABIAAAAPCAYAAADphp8SAAAAAXNSR0IArs4c6QAAAARnQU1BAACxjwv8YQUAAAAJcEhZcwAADsMAAA7DAcdvqGQAAAAjSURBVDhPY/wPBAxUAExQmmIwahBhMGoQYTBqEGFAJYMYGABGXQQaqSBk7QAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==
Did you find the hidden message?
B-E S-U-R-E T-O D-R-I-N-K Y-O-U-R V-A-L-V-O-L-I-N-E