• nucleative@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    For quite a long while search engines would return amazing results when you searched for

    Dsc-0001.jpg

    And so on, perhaps with some variations based on camera model. People uploaded their DCIM folders to their homedirs which were sometimes exposed to the web. You’d see so much private stuff this way.

    Just tried and it appears such functionality has been removed from Google, because of course it has.

      • nucleative@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        In the 90s and early 00’s it was really common for Universities (for their students and professors) to arrange Unix based shell accounts for email and storage.

        The Apache http server was easily configured to allow per user websites and this was commonly done to give everyone a website. They looked something like a “www.example.com/~username” URL which mapped to a public_html folder inside the user’s home directory. Apache would serve up any files or html that lived inside to the public.

        https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/public_html.html

        At the time, a lot of people didn’t worry about anyone finding their obscure files, so put them there freely for family and friends.

        Wild times!

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Reminds me of how you used to be able to control various unsecured IP security cams by typing part of the URL that is common among them into Google.

      I remember stumbling upon some random office building in China and was able to fully control every camera in the place. I never did anything beyond pan them around a bit—and nobody ever reacted to my antics—so I guess the camera movements either weren’t very obvious or staff was just used to being watched by management/random people.

    • SippyCup@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      It looks like you can still search for private directories with specific keywords.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      Came here to say pretty much the same - the two digital cameras I had before the “half-way decent cameras in your smartphone” age (including one which wasn’t that specific model but a similar one from the same generation) both had a DCIM directory.

      The only surprise I had around DCIM was at some point finding out that there was a directory with that name inside my Android phone since I expected everything would end up under Photos.

    • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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      3 months ago

      I think it’s another Windows hangover, I first saw it as a USB Windows spec way back when MTP was a mode as well. Fucking Windows, fucking with the image storage on my android phones 20 years layer.

      • turmacar@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It’s a DCF thing, not a Windows thing. A bunch of Japanese companies collaborated on a spec in the 90s so most digital cameras would work vaguely the same as far as file storage went and it’s still the standard because it’s a naming convention and there’s not really a reason to change it.

        • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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          3 months ago

          It’s a DCF thing, not a Windows thing.

          Fair enough, interesting wiki read, thanks.

          there’s not really a reason to change it.

          The fact that people revel in the newfound knowledge about why their photos aren’t stored in the Photos folder in 2025 makes me think otherwise. 😁

          • turmacar@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Eh. :P

            I mean sure it’s kind of a relic from the 90s, but so is the save icon. If you change it you’re breaking backwards compatibility with everything tangentially related to digital cameras prior to <current year>. A ‘photos’ folder might be more intuitive but then you run into the issue of “what about my language’s folder” instead of just everyone worldwide using DCIM.

            Sometimes its better long term for people to learn about a standard instead of for the standard to be more intuitive to newcomers. Sure you could just make a new standard but that’s its own problem.

            • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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              3 months ago

              If websites are able to know what language my computer is using, I would expect local apps to have an easier time figuring it out. There’s also the possibility of setting a default folder to save photos in. Right now I can only select DCIM on internal or SD storage.

              And regarding standards, I don’t accept the argument that there’s an eternal and objective gold standard. It used to be standard to have 640k RAM. It used to be standard to store images in a DCIM folder for compatibility reasons. Do we need those compatibilities any more? I’d say no.

              • turmacar@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Sure. Now organize updating the last 30 years of hardware and software for compatability. Or just keep using the slightly unintuitive thing.

                You’re conflating two different definitions of “standard”. URLs are more human readable than IPs, but changing IPs into URLs would cost decades of manpower and break everything for basically no benefit either.

                • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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                  3 months ago

                  Now organize updating the last 30 years of hardware and software for compatability. Or just keep using the slightly unintuitive thing.

                  Ok. Everything not supporting the modern standard is now considered outdated.

                  Phew, I need to log off after all that cerebral exhaustion.

    • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I had one of those cameras maybe 20 years ago, it took really good pictures. I used to carry it with me everywhere and always looked for artsy stuff to take pictures of.

      • etherphon@piefed.world
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        3 months ago

        Hahah same here, they did take good pictures even with the relatively low res sensor, I suppose all the extra room for camera optics helps as opposed to packing it all into a thin phone.

  • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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    3 months ago

    Imagine if you were a malicious actor and you wanted a copy of all photos someone plugged into a computer that were not things like browser cache, just good honest to god OC.

    All you have to do is listen on drive letters D, E, F, G and when one is plugged in with a DCIM directory… silently upload the data contents to a server over the internet when a drive is detected with that subdirectory.

    Have you ever wondered why you couldn’t eject a drive without rebooting? It’s not like it’s going to tell you what process is keeping it locked… Encryption wouldn’t even matter, because you’re gonna need to decrypt/unlock it to access it, and windows doesn’t care what service or application is trying to access it, it is glad to allow any kind of file action without even admin rights.

    Anywho, actor has your photo, AI trivially builds facial recognition models, pulls in timestamps, geolocation metadata, camera metadata… and now those photos you never intended to upload anywhere are in a database of PII that will be shared to god-knows-who.

    • my_hat_stinks@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      I’m not sure how that’s relevant? If the default folder was “Camera” or “Pictures” or whatever else your malware would just scan those directories and any real attack likely already does. You’ve only described how having malware on your machine compromises your machine, not exactly a groundbreaking revelation.

      Windows hasn’t been my main os for a while but I’m fairly certain you can mount/unmount drives without rebooting. That’s certainly the case on Linux, and my distro definitely tells me what processes are locking drives when applicable.

      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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        3 months ago

        Windows hasn’t been my main os for a while but I’m fairly certain you can mount/unmount drives without rebooting.

        I work in IT for a living. Sometimes something keeps your drive locked. Windows does not confess. I wasn’t talking about linux user experience because most people don’t use linux like we do.

        • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          try making the disk offline and online again using diskmgmt.msc, always worked for me

          you also can usually find which process is using the disk. sometimes it’s a windows system process which is very stupid tho

        • Trail@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I work in IT

          linux “user experience”

          Hmm something does not add up to me very well

          • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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            3 months ago

            What companies have you worked for that provide linux laptops and linux desktops to common users? Not developers, not as servers.

            I’ve worked in multiple industries. Macs are not rare, but they aren’t prevalent. Windows still has ultramajority market share.

            On the server side, tons of things run linux. Maybe if you work for a tech company or are on a development team you use linux day to day, but this is generally a small subset of people at a company. This is not a forum for “developers” but for everybody. Someone in HR, Finance, Sales, R&D, etc is not going to be familiar with linux at work typically.

            I don’t doubt that there are companies out there that have linux workstations for normal users, I just doubt it’s more than 2% of the workforce in the western world. It’s probably way less than that.

    • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The unmounting needing a reboot seems very much a you problem.

      I have managed over 1000 systems since XP days and never came across it.

  • timhayes1991@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Thank you!! I move files around on android all the time and I see that folder constantly. I just never cared enough to look up what it stood for lmao.