FBI warnings are true—fake file converters do push malware
FBI warnings are true—fake file converters do push malware
www.bleepingcomputer.com
Just a moment...
98 评论
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That's why I always prefer an offline converter. Also if your upload a file somewhere the website can save it for their own purpose alhough they say they won't do it.
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Precisely, and this is why I've never trusted online "free" converters since day one. Who the fuck knows what they're actually doing with your file, and I always assumed that most of them were fronts to steal data and IP from users who are stupid enough to upload corporate and business stuff to them.
Anyway, there's vanishingly little I haven't been able to do over the years with ffmpeg or Imagemagick, their byzantine command line structures notwithstanding.
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Which is why I've been happy to trust them for files nobody cares about, like a random audio file that I got off the Internet. And it's very unlikely they'd be able to exploit my media player.
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The website mentions that there are fake offline converters that push malware as well.
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Yes this can also happen. I should have written open source offline converter
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What you recommend in terms of offline open-source converters?
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Pandoc for documents, ffmpeg for video , imagemagick for images
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What image types are you using that ffmpeg can't convert? To my knowledge it works for almost anything.
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Gonna be honest, never used ffmpeg for images lol. I often take images from PDFs that have transparency (rpg books to import into my vtt) and they come out of pdfimages with an opaque greyscale alpha mask and an opaque image. I found it easy to apply the mask with imagemagick, though. Ffmpeg can probably do it but just never had a use case. I just use cwebp to convert because that's my primary use-case: converting pngs to lossy webp files and cwebp is good enough for me for that:)
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Images from PDFs, wasn't thinking about that. I normally work with just image files. Cool!
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What are you looking to convert?
Usually what i do is look for any converter and look for open source alternatives to it on alternativeto.net and hopefully one of the top 3 alternatives fits your use case
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Psst the URL is: https://alternativeto.net/ I always stop here first to research what software options there are available and also learning what other people are using. Extremely useful and trustworthy site!
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Thanks i dropped the "to"
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I tend to just whip up a script of some sort that employs widely used libraries for the conversion. I know that’s more technical than most people would have the tolerance or aptitude for, but for me, it’s the least ambiguous and most secure way to do stuff like that. And then I can squirrel it away in a utility scripts directory and use it later if I need it again.
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Which offline converter? I find myself often trying to convert:
- PDF to JPEG
- AVC to MP4
- OPUS to MP3
etc. I have no idea how to do that but if I type it into a search engine there's usually tools there.
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FFmpeg and handbrake do the latter two quite handily. The latter even has a nice program interface, rather than needing commands.
ImageMagick is capable of the first. I've had it go the other way before, and I should be most surprised if it couldn't convert a PDF to a jpg.
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I don't have the knowledge or the time to learn to use these tools.
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Then I suppose you're up shit creek.
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Thanks for that deep analysis.
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Let me tell you a little bit about all those various file converter tools, be it ffmpeg, pandoc, imagemagick, whatever.
The majority of them can be used like this:
magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg.If all you need is this file in that format, that's how you do it. They're ridicluously capable, you can do editing and compositing and such with them and whatever. If you have a use case where you do that a lot, like you just always put a watermark on images or you always desaturate them or whatever, you can write a script, then just run that script.They're basically all like that. Fairly simple to use for basic format translation, shockingly capable if you want to write a script.
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Handbrake has a GUI, and it's relatively straightforward to use. VLC also works well. You can also use ffmpeg on the CLI like so:
ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 output_video.avi
imagemagick isn't really that hard, in most cases it's:
convert <file1> <file2>
For example:
convert file.pdf file.jpg
If that doesn't work, try
pdftoppm:pdftoppm input.pdf outputname -png
I don't know of a good GUI for it, I recommend just learning to use either imagemagick or pdftoppm.
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Handbrake has a GUI, and it's relatively straightforward to use
I downloaded it and it immediately did not work so I'm gonna have to disagree with you there, champ.
You can also use ffmpeg on the CLI like so:
I've lost far too many hours to the CLI. I don't fall for that trick anymore.
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You do you, I guess. Those are incredibly simple commands I provided, and you can intuit pretty easily how to tweak them for other formats.
I guess it's up to you. You can gamble with random services online, or you can spend a few minutes and learn to use a tool that's all but guaranteed to not have malware.
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or you can spend a few minutes
This is just a fucking lie and I'm tired of hearing it. What did I just say?
I've lost far too many hours to the CLI.
I've tried to learn this shit. It's a fucking rabbit hole. I type these commands, letter for letter, the terminal returns some completely useless error that provides me with no diagnostic information whatsoever, I spend hours searching and trying to understand why and come up empty-handed. I don't have time for that anymore. I already have multiple jobs. It's not how I prefer to spend my free time. And frankly, I don't believe it anymore when software engineers feed me this bullshit.
You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?
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You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?
There's also a pretty big chance that they'll do more than what the button says, like inject malware. That's the whole point of the article.
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I understand that but that's beside the point. It does what they advertise. It's incredibly simple and easy to use. Why can no one make something comparable that's FOSS?
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They did, it's often a CLI interface because it's incredibly flexible. ffmpeg and imagemagick are quite easy for basic things.
Building a cross-platform GUI is a pain, and hosting a website costs money. Building a cross-platform CLI is incredibly easy, which is why it's so popular.
Some of these tools have GUI frontends or alternatives, some don't. The more niche you go, the harder it'll be to find a reasonable GUI, and I consider PDF to JPEG pretty niche.
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It is indeed very difficult to type convert 001.jpg example.pdf and ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
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convert 001.jpg example.pdf and ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
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Lol, apparently it is hard. You were supposed to enter
convert 001.jpg example.pdf
And
ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
By putting the "and" in the commands you just caused an error lol
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By putting the "and" in the commands you just caused an error lol
I didn't put the "and" in the commands, I copied and pasted them from the comment above, but thank you for illustrating my point so very well.
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I didn't put the "and" in the commands, I copied and pasted them from the comment above
Yes you did, but you copy pasted two different commands connected with "and".
The word "and" isn't meant to be typed into the cli. They're stringing together two different lines.
but thank you for illustrating my point so very well.
If your point was that it's easy to copy and paste I'm confused how I helped.
It is easy to copy and paste though. People generally format the commands like I did instead of in the middle of a sentence like OP did where you can make parsing mistakes.
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okay, now what?
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TYPE IT WHERE!? WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS INFORMATION!? How are you so completely unaware of how non-sensical this information is?
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The terminal? Your post history suggests you are quite familiar with Linux. But I agree that those who are most prone to use random file conversion sites because they need something as PDF for work will be very confused by those instructions.
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I am familiar with Linux but I avoid it whenever possible. I dailyed it for a couple of years but I've unfortunately moved on to Mac due to their deep dependency on terminal. If I have a problem and go and look up support, 99% of the time the advice is to open the terminal and start running commands, which is almost never the case for Windows or Mac. I've been using a Mac for about a year and I don't even know where the terminal is. Even where there's a perfectly suitable GUI solution, they'll send you into the terminal anyway. Linux is made by and for devs and it is and will remain that way until the mentality of it's creators change. And I am not a dev.
I can follow instructions. The problem is #1 I'm told "don't type commands you don't understand" and #2 no one ever explains what any of these commands do, so I never learn anything, and #3 the commands don't work, and they return a generic error with zero diagnostic information, or sometimes just nothing at all happens. I don't have time for that. I just want something that works.
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I understand that you may not know the commands you are told by strangers, but many of these are tools are meant for professionals. ffmpeg, for example, is used by many industries and companies worth millions of dollars to handle production workloads. They often have documentation to tell you what they do, though
There's a manual for ffmpeg for example: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html
Here's imgemagick's documentation: https://imagemagick.org/script/magick.php
Obviously you won't understand any of that because the command line doesn't work for you, but for those of us who do understand it and can use it, it's very informative.
I think handbrake is a gui wrapper on top of ffmpeg, but I never used it, I just memorized the ffmpeg commands and can type so much faster than i can click.
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these are tools are meant for professionals...these are often not consumer-level software
Then stop recommending them to random people.
There's a manual
How many times do I need to repeat "I don't have time for this" before you people will stop pestering me with this?
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Im recommending them to anyone who wants free software and is willing to invest their time into understanding how to do things for free and without concern over their data. If you aren't willing to invest the necessary time it isn't for you and that's why I said it. It's okay if these don't work for you. That's valid. But it does, in fact, work for many others who are not you.
I mentioned the manual because you claimed you didn't know what the commands do. If you read and take the time to learn the manual like you said you can do, you will, in fact, understand how the commands work. Additionally, this is public forum, my post may have been a reply to you but I understand other people may read my comment. Other people may have your frustrations but are not aware of the manuals that tell them exactly how the commands work. It only takes a bit of elbow grease, perhaps people other than you are willing to apply it?
I'm not sure if you saw it, but I did mention a gui application for converting files. I admit, I don't use it, but many people also save a lot of money using it, so it might be helpful. I have no idea if it's useful for your needs though.
Here's "ffmpeg in 100 seconds" https://youtu.be/26Mayv5JPz0
Here's a video on ffmpeg and imagemagick: https://youtu.be/sKBM4M-kuCg
Additionally, you can just learn how to read man pages: https://itsfoss.com/linux-man-page-guide/
There's a neat little guide that'll help you learn how to read documentation.
Once you've read through that let me know what confuses you about documentation.
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imagemagick handles almost all image files
images ) ls 001.jpg 002.jpg 003.jpg 004.jpg 005.jpg images ) convert 001.jpg example.pdf
ffmpeg handles almost all video files
ex ) ls rock.mp4 ex ) ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
if you use gnome there's a nice little feature of the file explorer where you can just drag and drop scripts into
~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/for example
make a fish script (ignoring error checking for brevity here, my real script had a couple guard rails)
/#!/usr/bin/env fish set file $argv[1] convert $file (basename $file .png).pdf
then when you right click on a file in your gnome file explorer you can click the scripts option
and the script is right there so you can just easily convert with the press of a button
note, i crossed out some stuff that includes client names
tldr: there are so many ways to do what you need to do there's no reason to trust random websites you don't know. there's a lot of slimey people out there wanting to take advantage of people. and everybody should strive to be at least a little computer literate. the examples i gave here aren't complicated. they're simple commands
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That's a pretty sweet feature in GNOME! I'll need to see if there is something similar for KDE.
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PDF to JPEG
Don't most pdf viewers have an export to image option?
AVC to MP4
Do you actually have files with an .avc extension? AVC is a codec that can be used in many different container formats, including MP4. Where did these files come from?
OPUS to MP3
I actually agree that most audio conversion tools are needlessly awkward. Audacity will convert these just fine, though doesn't really do bulk conversion. Foobar2000 will do it in bulk if you're on windows.
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On the PDF to JPEG, you can also open the PDFs with an image editor, such as Inkscape or krita, and then save the image on the format and quality needed. This method also has the benefit that on some cases you play with the assets if needed. (Depends on how was the PDF generated)
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Don't most pdf viewers have an export to image option?
Don't know, I never looked! But I will, thanks.
Do you actually have files with an .avc extension?
Yes
Audacity will convert these just fine, though doesn't really do bulk conversion.
I'll give this a try on Tenacity. I didn't realize they had file conversion on there.
Only helpful comment in this thread, thanks.
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In Windows, Foobar2000 does easy audio file conversions, once you have installed the relevant codecs.
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You could try Permute. It's a pretty simple app for converting video and audio. Permute is my go-to for quick video conversion.
DBPowerAmp has an easy-to-use audio converter that supports pretty much every audio format and does batch file conversion as well. DBPowerAmp is my go-to for audio conversion.
Both of these are paid apps.
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Thanks, I'll check those out.
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I can’t comment on the others, but PDF to JPEG should be easy enough. ImageMagick, which another commenter suggested, is possible but not user friendly. However you can just open the PDF in many applications and export it as an image. Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop can do it. GIMP probably too.
I’m a last ditch effort you can even just open the file and screenshot it.
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Open/Libreoffice can do that too
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Video and audio conversion can be done with Handbrake or Shutter Encoder, both are nice GUIs
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Handbrake won't load the file and Shutter won't even open. But thank you.
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98 评论