This is as much an excuse to plug one of my favorite satirical websites, the Babylon Bee, as anything else. They’ve got a mock-historical article claiming that the apostles Paul and Barnabas parted ways over the pronunciation of GIF.
It’s hard to tell reality from satire these days, so I should say again that the Babylon Bee is strictly satirical. I think it’s funnier than the Onion.
To me it’s clear that the Shakers got it right when they went with the hard G. You know the song: “‘Tis a GIF to be simple, ’tis a GIF to be free…”
Zip bombs: Blown up out of proportion?
A Vice.com article has brought fresh publicity to an old trick. The so-called “Zip bomb” is a Zip file with a fantastically high compression ratio. Researcher David Fifield created a 46-megabyte file that expands into 45 petabytes. That’s a compression ratio of about a billion. Fifield’s own article provides a lot more technical information.
The article says such files are “so deeply compressed that they’re effectively malware.” That strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. “Nuisanceware” seems more accurate, if there’s such a word. However, they could be used in a denial of service attack. They could crash a server or browser, and the work removing the expanded files could cause some downtime. A Zip bomb might be a setup for another attack, tying up system resources and distracting administrators.
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Tagged compression, ZIP