Thursday, April 23, 2020

I might have been wr..wro... wron... can't say the word...

So, anyway, yesterday I smacked poor FaceBook for being creepy, and adding Alt Text to my image, which only showed up because I added it to a Word document, and Word kindly, albeit briefly, showed me the Alt Text.

I was then extra suspicious that something was going on, because I couldn't find the text in the jpg, and figured that it must be compressed, or obfuscated somehow, which lead me to wonder what else might be hidden in the jpg. When you are in my line of business, it's good to be suspicious

But then... a friend commented on my post, saying that he'd had a similar problem with Word a couple of years ago... wait ...what? Word?

Long story made short. Yes, Word adds its own Alt Text to images, and FaceBook was not hiding Alt Text in the images.

Here is Word's Alt Text..



And here is FaceBook's on the same image ...

I was wr... wro... wron.... still can't say the word. :)

The FaceBook Alt Text was just a tag in the html. Yes, it's storing it somewhere, but it's not as creepy as I thought, and Word is doing it too, and probably so is just about any other browser, search engine, word processor, pdf maker... the list goes on.

We can all relax, and go back to worrying about more important things, like firmware issues. Oh... yes... we found some interesting Android firmware stuff yesterday, so stay tuned.

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