Attaching a Flash animation file

High-Logic Site Issues
1

I tried to attach a Flash animation file to a post.

The following message was produced.

The extension swf is not allowed.

The file is only 11 kilobytes long and will run directly within a web browser.
If a .swf file could be added as an attachment, I am unsure as to whether it would need to be saved to local storage and then run in a browser locally or whether it could be run directly from the forum, in a similar manner to viewing a pdf directly from a forum attachment.

The particular .swf is simply an animation made using Serif DrawPlus X4 and my Localizable Sentences 010 font. It is not interactive, it just builds up a message, in fact the same message that is shown in a still image in the fifth post in the Gallery thread entitled Localizable Sentences Experiment font support.

Could you possibly consider allowing a .swf file to be added as an attachment to a forum post please?

William Overington

6 June 2011

2

Since SWF files can contain Trojans, we don’t accept that file format.

3

Thank you for your reply.

Oh! I didn’t know that.

In which case, a very good policy.

William

4

Thinking further about this, I began to wonder about the situation if I were to upload the swf file to our family webspace and posted a link in the thread in the Gallery forum.

In view of what you say about Trojans, would that mean that it would be a risk for anyone to click on such a link?

I know almost nothing about Trojans. Would a Trojan only be there if the person who produced the swf file had done something malicious or could the swf file contain a Trojan with the author of the swf file being entirely unknowing of there being a Trojan in the swf file?

I know that the above questions stray from High-Logic site issues but as I have started to use swf animations to display my fonts in animated scenarios, may I ask the moderator to allow discussion of the wider issue of swf files and Trojans please?

William Overington

7 June 2011

5

If your system where you procedure the .swf file is already infected, it is possible the .swf will include a Trojan without you knowing about it. It is also possible someone hacks your website and adds a Trojan to the .swf file, or replaces it with an infected one. Both pretty unlikely, but not impossible.

That said, if the forum allows you to include a link to an external .swf file, then that’s fine. People will have to make there own decision to trust a link or not.

6

Thank you for your reply.

I have now added the .swf file to our family webspace and I have added a post with a link to it into the Gallery thread entitled Localizable Sentences Experiment font support.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/localizable-sentences-experiment-font-support/2475/43

I included a note advising people as follows.

quote

Before clicking the link to the .swf file in this post, readers are advised to read the following post.

end quote

The message is followed by a link to your post in this thread that is timestamped as 07 Jun 2011 11:03.

I wonder whether anyone will look at the animation. Unless someone actually reports that they have tried it then I will not know.

William Overington

7 June 2011

7

And if they get infected they will not be able to tell you …

8

Thank you for your reply.

Well, is that necessarily so?

It could be that if someone’s computer got infected that he or she would not realize that it had happened. The trojan could be causing damage behind the scenes.

Regarding my own Flash animation, linked from the Localizable Sentences Experiment font support thread in the Gallery forum, it might be that nobody has actually looked at it yet.

In fact, nobody appears to have looked at the LOCSE010.TTF font, uploaded on 2 June 2011 and nobody appears to have looked at the locse010.pdf and locse010_art.pdf documents, uploaded on 3 June 2011. The thread appears to have had well over a hundred views since I uploaded the LOCSE010.TTF font. The one view recorded for the font is due to me downloading a copy to check that everything was working properly and the two views recorded for each of the pdfs are due to me viewing a copy on line and downloading a copy to check that everything was working properly.

This is strange. A similar thing happen with some pdfs for the Sonnet Calligraphic font.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/sonnet-calligraphic/2698/9

Subsequently the number of downloads, which includes direct on-line viewing as well as saving to local storage, increased dramatically to quite large numbers.

Yet I find it strange that although there have been many views of the Localizable Sentences Experiment font support thread in the Gallery forum, that nobody appears to have had a look at the pdfs. Downloading the font and opening it in FontCreator and studying it and maybe installing the font and trying it out, I appreciate, takes time, so I realize that that might be why it has not been downloaded, yet the lack of views for the pdfs puzzles me.

Yet maybe it comes back to my thoughts expressed in the following post.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/sonnet-calligraphic/2698/9

Maybe I am researching on localizable sentences encoded as Unicode characters, enjoying researching as to how to communicate through the language barrier and enjoying designing the glyphs and delighting in how I think of a design and then manage to have it displayed on a computer and maybe it is all a parallel situation to the situation that many people write poetry, yet relatively few people read poetry written by others.

Returning to the matter of whether it is safe to have a look at my Flash animation file, is there any way that the file can be downloaded and checked for safety before it is obeyed?

Using the word obeyed causes me to wonder whether viewing a .swf file is as risky as viewing a .exe file. I would not put a .exe file on the web as I would think that nobody would risk executing it. I am now wondering whether viewing a .swf file is in the same risk category as executing a .exe file. Hopefully not!

William Overington

8 June 2011