Twitter bans animated PNG files after attackers targeted users with epilepsy | Hacker News Reader

Twitter bans animated PNG files after attackers targeted users with epilepsy

theverge.com

7 pointsbotzombie8 comments

Effects that cause seizures in some are usually annoying to everyone else. Me included. But autoplay of video in general is still useful.

They should move towards making it a preference. Disable auto-play animation by default. Opt-in. This preserves freedom of expression while respecting freedom to not have a seizure / freedom from irritating auto-play videos. PNG format is handled by browser. Should be followed up with those guys as well to prevent / control autoplay.

The ability to flag videos as strobing might help as well. Let the crowd find and classify something for the rest of the crowd. Have a flag for "allow video flagged as containing strobing".

All that said, as I think about this and just some of the potential mitigations, simply just banning it outright is a quick, straightforward and simple solution. I completely get why they'd just do that. Life is short.

Animated PNG files causing problems with some users isn't a problem with Twitter, I should think (and it seems it is independent of the file format, so whether it is GIF, PNG, or MPEG, it would be the same problem, I should think); it is the browser. The user should configure the browser to disable animations by default if that is what is wanted. (If the browser does not implement that, then the browser writer should fix it so that it does.)

It seems to me that some sort of lookahead function could be implemented to detect this sort of attack at the browser level.

Also, what is wrong with people?

Honestly, reading this article was the first time I saw a documented case of strobes causing seizures. It's possible (and this is purely speculation) that the attacker sent the strobe to give some comedic punch to the statement "you deserve a seizure" not expecting or hoping that it would actually cause a seizure.

>Honestly, reading this article was the first time I saw a documented case of strobes causing seizures

It's been common knowledge at least since the Porygon episode of Pokemon[0] in the late 90s.

>It's possible (and this is purely speculation) that the attacker sent the strobe to give some comedic punch to the statement "you deserve a seizure" not expecting or hoping that it would actually cause a seizure.

It's possible but knowing people and the internet, it's more likely they were hoping an actual seizure would be the "comedic punch."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon

That protection should be offered at the video driver level. Anything less will be exploited by trolls.

What's preventing Twitter from making APNGs work the same way as animated GIFs? (e.g. you have to explicitly click the play button)

Twitter automatically plays .gif now for new users.

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