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Entropymine
Personal blog · entropymine.wordpress.comsystemsprogramming
Entropymine is a personal blog at entropymine.wordpress.com about systems and programming. Since 2019, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these posts on file-format internals: a JPEG decoder write-up, a survey of the ZIP format's application notes, and a note on ZIP file concatenation. Comments cite them as references without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog.
Most-linked posts?
- /2019/08/22/survey-of-zip-appnote-documents/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-03
What Hacker News says?
I felt like I forgot to add a link. Why don't we see images in wrong color space nearly as often as text with wrong character encoding, remains a mystery to me since the moment I was writing a toy JPEG decoder and found this article: https://entropymine.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/how-is-a-jpeg-i...
Comment linking /2018/10/22/how-is-a-jpeg-images-color-type-determined/
on “Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery”Submitted The cpio trailer problem (2018) as a story · 52 points
HN discussionVersion 6.3.3 from the Library of Congress - https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/digformatsp... Writeup on zip file Appnotes: https://entropymine.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/survey-of-zip-a... Actual PKWare AppNotes: https://support.pkware.com/display/PKZIP/Application+Note+Ar... Section 4.4.5 is "compression method"
Comment linking /2019/08/22/survey-of-zip-appnote-documents/
on “A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)”Submitted About that JPEG/ZIP/Shakespeare hybrid file as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is sometimes used non-maliciously to concatenate zipped eBooks to a JPEG of the cover art. 4Chan's /lit/ board used to do this, but I can't find any reference to it anymore. https://entropymine.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/about-that-jpeg... https://github.com/Anti-Forensics/tucker
Comment linking /2018/11/01/about-that-jpeg-zip-shakespeare-hybrid-file/
on “Hackers use ZIP file concatenation to evade detection”Submitted The cpio trailer problem (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionProbably "how not to specify a file format" is a better title? Lots of issues in the APPNOTE are already well-known, Info-Zip had its own version of an unofficially corrected specification [1] [2] for example. Even the international standard (ISO/IEC 21320-1:2015) is not helpful, as it is specified by subsetting the APPNOTE, not correcting it. [1] https://libzip.org/specifications/appnote_iz.txt [2] https://entropym…
Comment linking /2019/08/22/survey-of-zip-appnote-documents/
on “Zip: How not to design a file format”