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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

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669 points danso | 2 comments | 20 May 20 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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cm2187 ◴[21 May 20 18:02 UTC] No.23262241[source]▶
What saddens me the most is to see those kids who grew up with a smartphone in their hand trying to convert a picture by renaming it. It is a problematic form of computer illiteracy.
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MattGaiser ◴[21 May 20 18:24 UTC] No.23262646[source]▶
It gives the appearance of working on Windows. If you change the file extension of a picture, you can still open it, so it may come from that experience.
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1. Spivak ◴[21 May 20 18:34 UTC] No.23262837[source]▶
It works pretty much everywhere. None of the major OS’s trust the extension for images.
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2. Barracoon ◴[21 May 20 19:25 UTC] No.23263722[source]▶
I want to caveat this a bit. The OS does trust the extension of any file (at least MacOS/Windows). If you change a .png to a .docx, the OS will launch the handler associated with .docx files. If you change a .png to a .jpg, the OS will launch the handler for .jpg files. Chances are that program is the same for .jpg as it would have been for .png. When that program launches, reads the file, it probably looks at the file signature and then appropriately parses the rest of the image data.

Arguably, the user has been trained to think that renaming between image format converts between the two because of the image processing program correctly parsing and displaying the image, rather than displaying a message that the user opened a .jpg file but it was really a .png.