Bizarre Secrets Found Investigating Corrupt Winamp Skins (jordaneldredge.com) 20
Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a blog post from Meta Engineer Jordan Eldredge, with the caption: A biography of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, weird images, a worm.exe, random images, encrypted files, a gift a dad in Thailand had made for his two-and-a-half-year-old son, and much more could be found when investigating corrupt WinAmp files. Who knew? "In January of 2021, I was exploring the corpus of skins I collected for the Winamp Skin Museum and found some that seemed corrupted, so I decided to explore them," writes Eldredge. "Winamp skins are actually just zip files with a different file extension, so I tried extracting their files to see what I could find. This ended up leading me down a series of wild rabbit holes..."
In all, Eldredge found more than 16 distinct types of items -- most of which are completely random but intriguing nonetheless. "It's so interesting how if you get a large enough number of things that were created by real people, you can end up finding all kinds of crazy stuff!" concludes Eldredge. "This was such an amazingly strange and interesting ride!"
In all, Eldredge found more than 16 distinct types of items -- most of which are completely random but intriguing nonetheless. "It's so interesting how if you get a large enough number of things that were created by real people, you can end up finding all kinds of crazy stuff!" concludes Eldredge. "This was such an amazingly strange and interesting ride!"
Lovecraft (Score:2)
Almost surprised there isnt more malware (Score:4, Insightful)
I am almost surprised he did not run into anything outright malicious. However winamp skins were the product of an ancient and more civilized time.
It appears some of that stuff was put there intentionally for someone to find as an Easter egg, and other things were just careless accidental includes.
Just the sheer amount of 'stuff' turning up in what is by comparative standards a fairly finite collection; it really makes me wonder about our 'understanding' of what a shit show, github, npm, gem, pip, nuget, etc ... actually are likely to be. Although we have better search/tools and techniques, as well as more curious folks doing this sort of thing than ever, the haystacks are just so very very big.
I probably deserve and 'overrated' mod, because I am asking a question without even offering the beginnings of answer but here I go: "Does the current supply chain, trust/vetting model, coupled with tools like snyk even scale? Do we need a major rethink here?"
Re: (Score:2)
worm.exe sounds pretty malicious to me?
A lot of what looks like custom file types are just standard compressed files with their extension changed. Drobo's "diagnostic files" for example are unreadable by the user, and if you ask the rep they'll say they're "encrypted" and you have to upload the file to them to decrypt and tell you what's wrong with your unit. Nope, they're just compressed.
The extension is just telling the OS what application should be used to open the file.
A MUCH more common variation on
Re:Almost surprised there isnt more malware (Score:5, Informative)
The file worm.exe turned out not to be malware, after careful examination, but a game. I recommend reading the article; it's worth the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Video files may also be derivative. Take the MP4 file format. It's a subset of the QuickTime MOV file - Apple submitted it tot he MPEG4 committee as a container fo
Winamp (Score:3)
I miss Winamp. foobar2000 is OK, but still kind of unwieldly and chunky. The problem is that every media player starts out sleek and simple, and eventually grows into iTunes or Windows Media Player. I don't want my music player to play videos or manage and download music for me. All my stuff is organized into folders already. I want to aim a music player at my folders and have it play them.
foobar2000 does this but, as I said, is clunky, even with a custom layout. Winamp was nice and small, logically laid out, and mostly got out of your way.
Re:Winamp (Score:5, Interesting)
I miss Winamp.
So why not still use it? Version 5.9 was released last year. It still has its super-customizable installer, so you can have a fully functional music player with all of its library and ripping functions left out if you're not going to use them. If you're a purist and still think the software peaked at 2.91 (I do think the modern skins are needed on high-DPI displays), that version still works perfectly on Windows 11 with no compatibility drama required.
If the current organization behind Winamp is too sketchy for your taste (which is fair; they have a 'nonprofit organization' to donate to, which sold NFTs, and spent three years hyping up their Spotify-meets-Soundcloud clone of a music player), then the Winamp Community Upate Project (WACUP) might be for you.
No shade toward foobar2000; it's great and the devs behind it are solid. I'm just responding to the "I miss using this software which is actively supported and runs on current-gen hardware and is still freeware and still has an actively supported release that isn't complete crap" sentiment.
If you missed MusicMatch Jukebox, you'd be on to something...
Re: (Score:3)
I don't get why people think software has an expiry date. The bank you trust with your money is likely running decades old mainframe code because it's vetted and it works.
Re: (Score:2)
Software does not expire but it does rot and become generally less useful as the world moves past it. I don't know but IIRC Winamp 2.x did not use the windows media framework for decoding. No idea what 5.x does. So while an old copy of Winamp 2.x might run fine and play some old files, will it play VBR files generated with contemporary mp3 encoders? (maybe) Will it play other files that have become common shorten, flacc, aac, ... ?(doubtful)
its fine to say if you like your mp3 player you can keep your mp3
WACUP! (Score:2)
https://getwacup.com/ [getwacup.com] ;)
real people (Score:4, Interesting)
"It's so interesting how if you get a large enough number of things that were created by real people"
yes we've reached that time which all is sullied by bot and ai generative content sufficiently to be surprised at a corpus of content created by real people. the internet peaked and we only witness the decline here on out
Re: (Score:2)
Moral of the Story (Score:3)
Get Your Llama Circumcised
A Breath of Fresh Air (Score:2)
This post was such a breath of fresh air. I always forget how "innocent" the early 2000s internet was and seeing these easter eggs that people inserted into innocuous and yet ubiquitous audio player skins is absolutely fascinating!
I'm used to stopping in at Slashdot a couple times per day to see what's happened, what's changed, or what's broken, but this... this is just memories. What a find!
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed
Winamp skins were weird. (Score:2)
Communist smuggling (Score:1)