3 ms·
What are use-cases for this? I mean, obviously detecting the filetype is useful, but we kinda already have plenty of tools to do that, and I cannot imagine, why
by krick 3y ago
What are use-cases for this? I mean, obviously detecting the filetype is useful, but we kinda already have plenty of tools to do that, and I cannot imagine, why we need some "smart" way of doing this. If you are not a human, and you are not sure what is it (like, an unknown file being uploaded to a server) you would be better off just rejecting it completely, right? After all, there's absolutely no way an "AI powered" tool can be more reliable than some dumb, err-on-safer-side heuristic, and you wouldn't want to trust that thing to protect you from malicious payloads.
- n2d4 3y agoVirus detection is mentioned in the article. Code editors need to find the programming language for syntax highlighting of code before you give it a name. Your desktop OS needs to know which program to open files with. Or, recovering files from a corrupted drive. Etc It's easy to distinguish, say, a PNG from a JPG file (or anything else that has well-defined magic bytes). But some files look virtually identical (eg. .jar files are really just .zip files). Also see polyglot files [1]. If you allow an `unknown` label or human intervention, then yes, magic bytes might be enough, but sometimes you'd rather have a 99% chance to be right about 95% of files vs. a 100% chance to be right about 50% of files. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)
- nindalf 3y ago> no way an "AI powered" tool can be more reliable The article provides accuracy benchmarks. > you would be better off just rejecting it completely They mention using it in gmail and Drive, neither of which have the luxury of rejecting files willy-nilly.
- fuzztester 3y agoI have not tried it recently, but IIRC, Gmail does reject attachments which are zip files, for security reasons.
- wildrhythms 3y agoGmail nukes zips if they contain an executable or some other 'prohibited' file type. Most email providers block executable attachments.