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>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are l

by xienyc 6y ago

>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how to take pictures as JPEGs. I agree with the people blaming the board for not having a standard image input field that lets the OS know when to convert images to JPEG but that is their only fault and I wouldn't have thought of that as a bug deal if not for this issue. While I'm all for open source media formats replacing what we have, HEIC certainly isn't big enough to be considered as among standard input options. Also, isn't Apple themselves infamous for not supporting certain formats throughout their devices?

pwthornton 6y ago
If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It is not sending people workaround emails. The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work. This is a failure. An abysmal failure.
- dmitrygr 6y ago
  > adding support for one more image format I seem to remember that HEIC is quite patent-encumbered. Could this possibly cost them a lot or be more complicated than you seem to imply?
- mrlala 6y ago
  Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.
  - vb6sp6 6y ago
    People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer
    - mrlala 6y ago
      What's your point? If you are developing an application/website and it doesn't work with 50% of your market share- then you are a dumbass for not implementing it. ESPECIALLY for an AP EXAM with consequences. This isn't like "oh no, 50% can't reach our site about cat videos". This is an EXAM. Honestly cannot believe people on here defending them not adding simple image support for 50% of the testers...
      - vb6sp6 6y ago
        The point is that we have all seen what happens when we start letting a single company dictate formats. Because the next step is "i can't believe those lazy fucking programmers can't support heic2" or whatever magical bullshit they come up with after abandoning heic1. And it you want to talk about incompetence, I'd say pushing a format that is almost guaranteed to be incompatible with the millions of existing backends out there is profoundly stupid.
        simonh 6y ago
        >...a single company dictate formats. It's an ISO standard. Samsung phones use it as well.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        HEIC isn't simple, and isn't common. Apple should convert to JPG or PNG when exporting the image to anywhere anytime. The same problem happens with webp images too - totally unusable almost everywhere, even in photoshop. Apple wants to reduce storage space photos take up. Fine - but they should convert back to a standard format when exporting the image to be used on some other system. With that said, it seems the issue is from students that didn't upload the image from their phone (where Apple correctly converts to JPG), but rather transferred the image to their computer, then uploaded into the AP Exam. If that's true, then this is absolutely on Apple. Why would they export in a format that literally nobody else supports. What are these people supposed to do with a folder full of HEIC formatted photos, that can't be uploaded anywhere else, edited with any program, or opened even opened on some Operating Systems? Apple should assume nobody else uses HEIC because... well, nobody else uses HEIC.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  While I kind of agree with the sentiment, I'm also totally done with the notion of "Apple decides to have their own unique format every 2 years, and makes the change in a backwards incompatible way, so now the world needs to kowtow to them, despite Apple dragging their feet in many areas of standardization." Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the rest of the world instead of making half your money selling dongles".
  - mfarris 6y ago
    HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come. When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      You're correct, I shouldn't have said their own unique format. Still, what matters is the reality of the situation. They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support, instead of one that virtually noone supports (yet). And at the same time that Apple rushes to support this new standard without providing a good backwards compatible experience, they've been dragging their feet for YEARS on Safari support for progressive web app features that would let devs build truly feature-comparable web apps without being beholden to the App Store walled garden.
      - oefrha 6y ago
        > They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support They do.
    - alasdair_ 6y ago
      >HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F... under “licensing”)
- Alupis 6y ago
  HEIC isn't supported in a lot of places. It's mainly (only?) Apple that uses it with iOS devices. Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Bet the same thing would have happened with webp images too. JPG and PNG are like the FAT32 format of images. Always accepted, everywhere.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Further down this thread you’ll see that the board have messed up and they aren’t accepting images they should due to poor implementation. “ oefrha 1 hour ago [–] Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg,image/png" /> Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to JPEG”
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I'd posit that Apple ought to assume the worst (ie nothing but JPEG and PNG is supported) if no format is specified. That's how we've built most of the web, to ensure backwards compatibility and avoid these kinds of problems. That said, come on College Board. Fix your crap. What a stupid bug.
      - derefr 6y ago
        If no format is specified, then the presumption would be that the website wants a raw octet stream, and that adulterating it would be the last thing a client device should do, because it knows nothing about what the website's going to do to the result.
        btilly 6y ago
        Do you have any idea what that approach would do to bandwidth and latency?
- dylancop 6y ago
  I disagree. Bowing down to the whims and fancies of corporations is how we got into this situation (in terms of media formats) in the first place. According to wikipedia, HEIC isn't even supported in any browser natively, clearly rolling it out this soon was a bad idea.
  - flatline 6y ago
    Open competition among standards is the way adoption has mostly happened at least since the VHS/Betamax days. Otherwise it’s decision by committee and/or fiat which can sometimes be a net benefit but more often than not standardizes on a cumbersome standard that is not a good fit for any one application.
  - realityking 6y ago
    Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Apple's approach of automatically converting images at the edges is the right way to go. It does require your software to be explicit about what media formats it understands. This is where the College Board failed.
    - dylancop 6y ago
      >Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Funny thing to say in support of Apple. Maybe they should support WEBPs/WEBMs instead?
      - munk-a 6y ago
        Their approach to supporting the new formats is actually quite easy to work with and properly defined input tags will just automagically trigger file conversions on the iOS side. I also really dislike Apple's usual "my way or the highway approach" (it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support) but in this case they are using the right approach to make it a smooth transition.
- strictnein 6y ago
  > If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this Yeah, no. Absolutely not. All of the testing for their platform would have to be redone, and if a bug is found, then what? You can argue that they should have done a better job notifying users, but to argue that "of course they had time to push a fix in the week before the most important testing period" is just nonsensical.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  The parent comment said they sent a tweet a week before, and they had something in their faq but it doesn't say how long before that was done. Generally, when I've worked at places that were not startups a week to get something pushed in to fix something was not reliably enough time. I didn't see in the article anything about how long they have been aware of the problem, perhaps they became aware of the problem just before the testing was scheduled to start. I guess that is a problem with their QA system, but at any rate I can think of lots of ways that they could have a problem for a week (or even longer really), not be able to fix it in their particular system, and have to notify people. Of course I agree they did a lousy job of notifying people.
  - PascLeRasc 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm not surprised, since corporations like this are more concerned with making sure the Business Impact Assessment was routed in compliance with Standard Operating Procedures, establishing the Quality Verification Steering Committee to discuss possible impact to critical systems, and getting sign-offs from Validation Specialists and Risk Analysts. Ask me how I know.
- JohnTHaller 6y ago
  > The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.
  - tpush 6y ago
    iOS's market share in the US is 61.25% according to [1]. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
    - JohnTHaller 6y ago
      StatCounter shows the number of folks who visit sites with StatCounter on it. Fun fact: iOS users generally do more browsing, so this has a tendency to skew stats like StatCounter.
      - JohnTHaller 6y ago
        Similarly NetMarketShare shows Android at over 70%, since they are more business website heavy. This stat is just as flawed as StatCounter's is.
  - eyjafjallajokul 6y ago
    What data are you basing this on?
    - JohnTHaller 6y ago
      Pretty much any mobile industry stat. Most have Android at a bit over 50% in the US and Apple at a bit under. Worldwide, Apple is under 20% market share. Remember, iOS is just Apple whereas Android is Samsung + LG + HTC + Google + Oppo + OnePlus + etc... Examples: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh... https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
- lisper 6y ago
  > If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this At the very least, a message that appeared at the time that one attempted to upload the image with instructions on how to fix the problem on the spot. How hard could that have possibly been?
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Quite hard? I mean shame on them for letting this bug through in the first place but I'd be pretty horrified if someone at CB tried to hot-fix this problem out. This isn't a small agile organization, it's enormous and may not have any route to get a patch out in less than a week due to QA requirements. (That isn't to say such slow deployment processes are good, but they do exist and may be contractually required)
    - lisper 6y ago
      Who said anything about a hot fix? They knew about the problem well ahead of time.
      - PascLeRasc 6y ago
        Anything less than 2 fiscal quarters is a hot fix for these people.
- sh-run 6y ago
  ImageMagick supports HEIC to JPG conversion. It would take at most a few hours to hack together an interim solution.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mohdmasd 6y ago
    That support depends on installing or building native libraries (mainly libheif I think) which is not trivial or may be that something developers can't do due to security reasons, also it's different for each platform.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    IIRC, you have to use special flags when you compile from source to get HEIC support. And just because it's available doesn't mean you can legally use it. For example, the HEIF container's reference implementation is pretty explicit about not allowing commercial use [0]. The MPEG consortium lists over 7000 patents on their webpage for HEIC[1]. Making sure that you're bit infringing on those patents and/or working out a license deal with the patent cartel is a nontrivial amount of work. [0]: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT [1]: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-att1.pdf https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-att1.pdf
  - loeg 6y ago
    The software is open source, but (legal) usage requires a patent license from MPEG-LA for the H.265 compression (HEIC is just single-frame HEVC).
  - mafuy 6y ago
    I don't think you would be comfortable pushing this few-hours-hack to a system of such high importance. A mistake, be it stupid or complex, could break far more than the issue at hand does. And you would be at fault. Would you like to receive the response of all the students then? Would you really dare to risk this scenario?
- xupybd 6y ago
  I don't think it would have been possible to push a fix that quickly. Verification and sign off on these sorts of systems would require weeks or months to push changes.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  Even more strange is that when the file failed to parse after uploading, they just threw out the files instead of keeping them to analyze later. If they still had the uploads they could go back and convert them properly and apologize for the delay. It's just bad engineering all around. Even if there was a less glaringly obvious bug that caused parsing to fail, how would they debug that parsing bug without a sample file?
  - root_axis 6y ago
    I mean it's not that odd when you think about how software is typically written. The parsing logic probably threw an exception that was never handled and just pops everything uploaded off the stack by default.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      I'm not sure how you typically write software, but I don't consider it typical for software that opens a file and encounters unexpected input to throw an exception and then delete the file. If an exception is thrown and not caught, the software should stop doing anything.
      - root_axis 6y ago
        As I said, the file data was likely popped off the stack automatically, no need to write any extra code.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        In your model, what's happening to the data in the file system?
        root_axis 6y ago
        In the scenario I'm describing nothing is ever written to disk. The uploaded image data is streamed into memory directly from the socket and is processed in situ, when an exception occurs the stack unwinds and deallocates the memory storing the image data. Writing extra code to delete a file in a catch block doesn't seem like something someone trying to account for failure scenarios would do, it's much more likely that the data was living in memory and no thought was put into failure scenarios in that part of the code.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. That's an interesting (and slightly misleading) way to present that statistic. Apple has the best selling models, but does not have the majority of the market by operating system, which is what matters here. It's close, but Android is still supposed to have over 51% of the US market.[1] (If the graph itself is occluded, see the summary below it). > It is on College Board to support its default image format. It's a minority platform. It's only a slight minority, but it is one. If you want to make a case that they should support any default format for a platform over a certain percentage of usage (or "almost half"), that's fine, but you can't rely on the obvious argument that it's the dominant platform and thus should be supported, because it isn't the dominant platform. Edit: Whoops, forgot to include citation 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
- megablast 6y ago
  Oh yes, let’s update our tested and working system, a week before live? Don’t be stupid. There were probably no dev changes for the entire month before hand.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before This problem seems like it could easily have been fixed in under a week.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
genocidicbunny 6y ago
These tests take a not insignificant amount of time and stress to do, especially on top of this SiP situation. Not to mention they cost the students money. Communicating these issues only over twitter is also not at all acceptable. Plenty of people don't use or rarely use twitter, such that it should not be considered the primary communication channel. So while yes, College Board is allowing students to retake the tests, anyone affected should be refunded at least partially, if not fully, for having their time wasted. College Board should have had their backend reject invalid formats, not just hang. The result of attempting to upload an invalid format image should have been a 'whoops, please use a different format', but that's not what happened.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  This isn't just the College Board. You wouldn't believe how many schools and educators out there now just assume you have a Twitter and Facebook feed and check it regularly. Email and phone calls are completely out of the picture now.
oefrha 6y ago
> letting students take the test again. Yeah, that still fits "our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry". They have the submissions, the submissions can be easily converted to their target format. That's what they should do instead of asking students to take the test again. Or maybe they simply delete any accepted[1] submission that they deem corrupted, in which case I have nothing more to say. [1] Quote: > Spencer used the same process on the real exam and thought it went through, but he received an email the next day saying the files were corrupted and that he needed to retake the test.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Spencer's file might be on the server but it sounds like their servers flat out refused to accept any files that looked like HEICs - so they never even got them on the server. That's a stupid decision, especially when the submission window is timed - fiddling with file formats should never be a task you need to do inside of the testing window.
zzyzxd 6y ago
> The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out. If I am to write a system that accepts user uploads, verifying the uploaded file and giving proper error message on failure would've been the first thing come to mind. In this case, per the article, the system was stuck. This is simply unacceptable.
tomc1985 6y ago
Is it really so tough to shove an HEIC-to-JPEG converter in their pipeline?
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Seriously, it's not. It's an attribute setting on the file input field. The iPhone will do the conversion itself, it just needs to actually be told what to convert to, rather than having to guess.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jaybeeayyy 6y ago
Taking the test again is a horrible solution. How is that ok?
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago
  Yeah, what a weird "solution" to be okay with. Wonder if they'd be as okay with repeating a workday because their hours weren't logged due to a system error.
pmichaud 6y ago
> letting the students take the test again Maybe you're not aware of how much time, energy, stress, etc go into taking these tests. Imagine if your university lost its records of your undergraduate degree and offered to fix the problem by letting you earn your 4 year degree over again. I think you'd agree that wasn't an acceptable solution. This situation is not that order of magnitude, but it's similar perhaps to taking an entire college course. My wife works with high school kids and they are losing their minds over this, and I think they are justified.
lopmotr 6y ago
The FAQ and tweet are clearly the wrong way to communicate such vital information. Neither are required instructions for students. The FAQ is explicitly labeled as being for educators, not students. Neither explains the consequences of doing it wrong and make it sound like something minor such as having to choose a different option if it doesn't work. If I was serious about something like an exam, I'd read all the actual rules and ignore the "important tips" for a "smooth experience" or other crap that's always excessive and usually useless anyway. It sounds like either they actually didn't know it would crash so badly or they were too embarrassed to admit having such a serious bug but wanted to quietly steer people away from encountering it without them knowing they dodged a bullet. If the latter, then the College Board was acting maliciously to protect their reputation which is really bad.
anigbrowl 6y ago
Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable That's like telling people what brand of pencil they are allowed to use to mark paper. It's not germane to the test and improperly shifts the burden to the student when the technology to automatically screen already exists.
- bloodorange 6y ago
  It might be like saying the students are only allowed to mark their answers in blue ink or black and no other colour rather than saying it's a particular brand.
  - CathedralBorrow 6y ago
    Everyone can look at a pen stroke and identify the color. Can you say the same about a photo and identifying the file format?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ian-g 6y ago
I'd imagine it's worse now, but I was sweating blood during my AP tests 8 and 9 years ago. If I were told by College Board that they messed up, they couldn't verify what I did, and that I'd have to take the tests again, I'd be livid. I would feel incredibly screwed. On top of a pandemic, new test guidelines, classes going remote (and the associated growing pains), studying for the test, and some extra stress-studying because some classes inevitably were taught ineffectively at the start of remote courses, now some people have to take the test all over again? That's a lot for a most people but especially high schoolers

by xienyc 6y ago

pwthornton 6y ago

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It is not sending people workaround emails. The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work. This is a failure. An abysmal failure.

dmitrygr 6y ago
> adding support for one more image format I seem to remember that HEIC is quite patent-encumbered. Could this possibly cost them a lot or be more complicated than you seem to imply?
mrlala 6y ago
Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.
- vb6sp6 6y ago
  People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer
  - mrlala 6y ago
    What's your point? If you are developing an application/website and it doesn't work with 50% of your market share- then you are a dumbass for not implementing it. ESPECIALLY for an AP EXAM with consequences. This isn't like "oh no, 50% can't reach our site about cat videos". This is an EXAM. Honestly cannot believe people on here defending them not adding simple image support for 50% of the testers...
    - vb6sp6 6y ago
      The point is that we have all seen what happens when we start letting a single company dictate formats. Because the next step is "i can't believe those lazy fucking programmers can't support heic2" or whatever magical bullshit they come up with after abandoning heic1. And it you want to talk about incompetence, I'd say pushing a format that is almost guaranteed to be incompatible with the millions of existing backends out there is profoundly stupid.
      - simonh 6y ago
        >...a single company dictate formats. It's an ISO standard. Samsung phones use it as well.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      HEIC isn't simple, and isn't common. Apple should convert to JPG or PNG when exporting the image to anywhere anytime. The same problem happens with webp images too - totally unusable almost everywhere, even in photoshop. Apple wants to reduce storage space photos take up. Fine - but they should convert back to a standard format when exporting the image to be used on some other system. With that said, it seems the issue is from students that didn't upload the image from their phone (where Apple correctly converts to JPG), but rather transferred the image to their computer, then uploaded into the AP Exam. If that's true, then this is absolutely on Apple. Why would they export in a format that literally nobody else supports. What are these people supposed to do with a folder full of HEIC formatted photos, that can't be uploaded anywhere else, edited with any program, or opened even opened on some Operating Systems? Apple should assume nobody else uses HEIC because... well, nobody else uses HEIC.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
While I kind of agree with the sentiment, I'm also totally done with the notion of "Apple decides to have their own unique format every 2 years, and makes the change in a backwards incompatible way, so now the world needs to kowtow to them, despite Apple dragging their feet in many areas of standardization." Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the rest of the world instead of making half your money selling dongles".
- mfarris 6y ago
  HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come. When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    You're correct, I shouldn't have said their own unique format. Still, what matters is the reality of the situation. They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support, instead of one that virtually noone supports (yet). And at the same time that Apple rushes to support this new standard without providing a good backwards compatible experience, they've been dragging their feet for YEARS on Safari support for progressive web app features that would let devs build truly feature-comparable web apps without being beholden to the App Store walled garden.
    - oefrha 6y ago
      > They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support They do.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    >HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F... under “licensing”)
Alupis 6y ago
HEIC isn't supported in a lot of places. It's mainly (only?) Apple that uses it with iOS devices. Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Bet the same thing would have happened with webp images too. JPG and PNG are like the FAT32 format of images. Always accepted, everywhere.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Further down this thread you’ll see that the board have messed up and they aren’t accepting images they should due to poor implementation. “ oefrha 1 hour ago [–] Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg,image/png" /> Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to JPEG”
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I'd posit that Apple ought to assume the worst (ie nothing but JPEG and PNG is supported) if no format is specified. That's how we've built most of the web, to ensure backwards compatibility and avoid these kinds of problems. That said, come on College Board. Fix your crap. What a stupid bug.
    - derefr 6y ago
      If no format is specified, then the presumption would be that the website wants a raw octet stream, and that adulterating it would be the last thing a client device should do, because it knows nothing about what the website's going to do to the result.
      - btilly 6y ago
        Do you have any idea what that approach would do to bandwidth and latency?
dylancop 6y ago
I disagree. Bowing down to the whims and fancies of corporations is how we got into this situation (in terms of media formats) in the first place. According to wikipedia, HEIC isn't even supported in any browser natively, clearly rolling it out this soon was a bad idea.
- flatline 6y ago
  Open competition among standards is the way adoption has mostly happened at least since the VHS/Betamax days. Otherwise it’s decision by committee and/or fiat which can sometimes be a net benefit but more often than not standardizes on a cumbersome standard that is not a good fit for any one application.
- realityking 6y ago
  Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Apple's approach of automatically converting images at the edges is the right way to go. It does require your software to be explicit about what media formats it understands. This is where the College Board failed.
  - dylancop 6y ago
    >Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Funny thing to say in support of Apple. Maybe they should support WEBPs/WEBMs instead?
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Their approach to supporting the new formats is actually quite easy to work with and properly defined input tags will just automagically trigger file conversions on the iOS side. I also really dislike Apple's usual "my way or the highway approach" (it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support) but in this case they are using the right approach to make it a smooth transition.
strictnein 6y ago
> If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this Yeah, no. Absolutely not. All of the testing for their platform would have to be redone, and if a bug is found, then what? You can argue that they should have done a better job notifying users, but to argue that "of course they had time to push a fix in the week before the most important testing period" is just nonsensical.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
The parent comment said they sent a tweet a week before, and they had something in their faq but it doesn't say how long before that was done. Generally, when I've worked at places that were not startups a week to get something pushed in to fix something was not reliably enough time. I didn't see in the article anything about how long they have been aware of the problem, perhaps they became aware of the problem just before the testing was scheduled to start. I guess that is a problem with their QA system, but at any rate I can think of lots of ways that they could have a problem for a week (or even longer really), not be able to fix it in their particular system, and have to notify people. Of course I agree they did a lousy job of notifying people.
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm not surprised, since corporations like this are more concerned with making sure the Business Impact Assessment was routed in compliance with Standard Operating Procedures, establishing the Quality Verification Steering Committee to discuss possible impact to critical systems, and getting sign-offs from Validation Specialists and Risk Analysts. Ask me how I know.
JohnTHaller 6y ago
> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.
- tpush 6y ago
  iOS's market share in the US is 61.25% according to [1]. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
  - JohnTHaller 6y ago
    StatCounter shows the number of folks who visit sites with StatCounter on it. Fun fact: iOS users generally do more browsing, so this has a tendency to skew stats like StatCounter.
    - JohnTHaller 6y ago
      Similarly NetMarketShare shows Android at over 70%, since they are more business website heavy. This stat is just as flawed as StatCounter's is.
- eyjafjallajokul 6y ago
  What data are you basing this on?
  - JohnTHaller 6y ago
    Pretty much any mobile industry stat. Most have Android at a bit over 50% in the US and Apple at a bit under. Worldwide, Apple is under 20% market share. Remember, iOS is just Apple whereas Android is Samsung + LG + HTC + Google + Oppo + OnePlus + etc... Examples: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh... https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
lisper 6y ago
> If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this At the very least, a message that appeared at the time that one attempted to upload the image with instructions on how to fix the problem on the spot. How hard could that have possibly been?
- munk-a 6y ago
  Quite hard? I mean shame on them for letting this bug through in the first place but I'd be pretty horrified if someone at CB tried to hot-fix this problem out. This isn't a small agile organization, it's enormous and may not have any route to get a patch out in less than a week due to QA requirements. (That isn't to say such slow deployment processes are good, but they do exist and may be contractually required)
  - lisper 6y ago
    Who said anything about a hot fix? They knew about the problem well ahead of time.
    - PascLeRasc 6y ago
      Anything less than 2 fiscal quarters is a hot fix for these people.
sh-run 6y ago
ImageMagick supports HEIC to JPG conversion. It would take at most a few hours to hack together an interim solution.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mohdmasd 6y ago
  That support depends on installing or building native libraries (mainly libheif I think) which is not trivial or may be that something developers can't do due to security reasons, also it's different for each platform.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  IIRC, you have to use special flags when you compile from source to get HEIC support. And just because it's available doesn't mean you can legally use it. For example, the HEIF container's reference implementation is pretty explicit about not allowing commercial use [0]. The MPEG consortium lists over 7000 patents on their webpage for HEIC[1]. Making sure that you're bit infringing on those patents and/or working out a license deal with the patent cartel is a nontrivial amount of work. [0]: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT [1]: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-att1.pdf https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-att1.pdf
- loeg 6y ago
  The software is open source, but (legal) usage requires a patent license from MPEG-LA for the H.265 compression (HEIC is just single-frame HEVC).
- mafuy 6y ago
  I don't think you would be comfortable pushing this few-hours-hack to a system of such high importance. A mistake, be it stupid or complex, could break far more than the issue at hand does. And you would be at fault. Would you like to receive the response of all the students then? Would you really dare to risk this scenario?
xupybd 6y ago
I don't think it would have been possible to push a fix that quickly. Verification and sign off on these sorts of systems would require weeks or months to push changes.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
Even more strange is that when the file failed to parse after uploading, they just threw out the files instead of keeping them to analyze later. If they still had the uploads they could go back and convert them properly and apologize for the delay. It's just bad engineering all around. Even if there was a less glaringly obvious bug that caused parsing to fail, how would they debug that parsing bug without a sample file?
- root_axis 6y ago
  I mean it's not that odd when you think about how software is typically written. The parsing logic probably threw an exception that was never handled and just pops everything uploaded off the stack by default.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    I'm not sure how you typically write software, but I don't consider it typical for software that opens a file and encounters unexpected input to throw an exception and then delete the file. If an exception is thrown and not caught, the software should stop doing anything.
    - root_axis 6y ago
      As I said, the file data was likely popped off the stack automatically, no need to write any extra code.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        In your model, what's happening to the data in the file system?
        root_axis 6y ago
        In the scenario I'm describing nothing is ever written to disk. The uploaded image data is streamed into memory directly from the socket and is processed in situ, when an exception occurs the stack unwinds and deallocates the memory storing the image data. Writing extra code to delete a file in a catch block doesn't seem like something someone trying to account for failure scenarios would do, it's much more likely that the data was living in memory and no thought was put into failure scenarios in that part of the code.
kbenson 6y ago
> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. That's an interesting (and slightly misleading) way to present that statistic. Apple has the best selling models, but does not have the majority of the market by operating system, which is what matters here. It's close, but Android is still supposed to have over 51% of the US market.[1] (If the graph itself is occluded, see the summary below it). > It is on College Board to support its default image format. It's a minority platform. It's only a slight minority, but it is one. If you want to make a case that they should support any default format for a platform over a certain percentage of usage (or "almost half"), that's fine, but you can't rely on the obvious argument that it's the dominant platform and thus should be supported, because it isn't the dominant platform. Edit: Whoops, forgot to include citation 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
megablast 6y ago
Oh yes, let’s update our tested and working system, a week before live? Don’t be stupid. There were probably no dev changes for the entire month before hand.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before This problem seems like it could easily have been fixed in under a week.

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genocidicbunny 6y ago

These tests take a not insignificant amount of time and stress to do, especially on top of this SiP situation. Not to mention they cost the students money. Communicating these issues only over twitter is also not at all acceptable. Plenty of people don't use or rarely use twitter, such that it should not be considered the primary communication channel. So while yes, College Board is allowing students to retake the tests, anyone affected should be refunded at least partially, if not fully, for having their time wasted. College Board should have had their backend reject invalid formats, not just hang. The result of attempting to upload an invalid format image should have been a 'whoops, please use a different format', but that's not what happened.

joezydeco 6y ago
This isn't just the College Board. You wouldn't believe how many schools and educators out there now just assume you have a Twitter and Facebook feed and check it regularly. Email and phone calls are completely out of the picture now.

oefrha 6y ago

> letting students take the test again. Yeah, that still fits "our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry". They have the submissions, the submissions can be easily converted to their target format. That's what they should do instead of asking students to take the test again. Or maybe they simply delete any accepted[1] submission that they deem corrupted, in which case I have nothing more to say. [1] Quote: > Spencer used the same process on the real exam and thought it went through, but he received an email the next day saying the files were corrupted and that he needed to retake the test.

munk-a 6y ago
Spencer's file might be on the server but it sounds like their servers flat out refused to accept any files that looked like HEICs - so they never even got them on the server. That's a stupid decision, especially when the submission window is timed - fiddling with file formats should never be a task you need to do inside of the testing window.

zzyzxd 6y ago

> The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out. If I am to write a system that accepts user uploads, verifying the uploaded file and giving proper error message on failure would've been the first thing come to mind. In this case, per the article, the system was stuck. This is simply unacceptable.

tomc1985 6y ago

Is it really so tough to shove an HEIC-to-JPEG converter in their pipeline?

moron4hire 6y ago
Seriously, it's not. It's an attribute setting on the file input field. The iPhone will do the conversion itself, it just needs to actually be told what to convert to, rather than having to guess.
deleted 6y ago
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jaybeeayyy 6y ago

Taking the test again is a horrible solution. How is that ok?

CathedralBorrow 6y ago
Yeah, what a weird "solution" to be okay with. Wonder if they'd be as okay with repeating a workday because their hours weren't logged due to a system error.

pmichaud 6y ago

> letting the students take the test again Maybe you're not aware of how much time, energy, stress, etc go into taking these tests. Imagine if your university lost its records of your undergraduate degree and offered to fix the problem by letting you earn your 4 year degree over again. I think you'd agree that wasn't an acceptable solution. This situation is not that order of magnitude, but it's similar perhaps to taking an entire college course. My wife works with high school kids and they are losing their minds over this, and I think they are justified.

lopmotr 6y ago

The FAQ and tweet are clearly the wrong way to communicate such vital information. Neither are required instructions for students. The FAQ is explicitly labeled as being for educators, not students. Neither explains the consequences of doing it wrong and make it sound like something minor such as having to choose a different option if it doesn't work. If I was serious about something like an exam, I'd read all the actual rules and ignore the "important tips" for a "smooth experience" or other crap that's always excessive and usually useless anyway. It sounds like either they actually didn't know it would crash so badly or they were too embarrassed to admit having such a serious bug but wanted to quietly steer people away from encountering it without them knowing they dodged a bullet. If the latter, then the College Board was acting maliciously to protect their reputation which is really bad.

anigbrowl 6y ago

Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable That's like telling people what brand of pencil they are allowed to use to mark paper. It's not germane to the test and improperly shifts the burden to the student when the technology to automatically screen already exists.

bloodorange 6y ago
It might be like saying the students are only allowed to mark their answers in blue ink or black and no other colour rather than saying it's a particular brand.
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago
  Everyone can look at a pen stroke and identify the color. Can you say the same about a photo and identifying the file format?

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ian-g 6y ago

I'd imagine it's worse now, but I was sweating blood during my AP tests 8 and 9 years ago. If I were told by College Board that they messed up, they couldn't verify what I did, and that I'd have to take the tests again, I'd be livid. I would feel incredibly screwed. On top of a pandemic, new test guidelines, classes going remote (and the associated growing pains), studying for the test, and some extra stress-studying because some classes inevitably were taught ineffectively at the start of remote courses, now some people have to take the test all over again? That's a lot for a most people but especially high schoolers