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Back in the day as a teenager. Downloaded mp3 that was labelled with title and artist and .mp3 extension. It wasn't. What it was caused me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fkuc that shit. Apart from that, many good stuff was had.
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or was it Windows hiding file extensions by default and you downloaded a .mp3.exe file?
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Isn't it just great how a decision made by some genius in Microsoft decades ago caused so much confusion and mess. Even on Windows 11 the default is to hide extensions, because, geez, wouldn't want to confuse people with change after decades of it being like that.

Although, was the hiding something that the Mac introduced?

The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...

I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..

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The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.
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Macs originally didn’t have filename extensions because the file type was stored as metadata in the file system
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That really is a superior way of doing things too. Or at least it would have been if that metadata were transferred with the file itself in all protocols.
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Nope. It had been renamed from .avi. CP.
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BearShare, too, which also included pictures and video. I don't remember ever getting a virus from it, but I also kept extensions visible.
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I still get spam emails on the one-off email address I used to sign up for Bearshare.
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Docuwiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki) is still the most thorough source I've seen for niche documentaries.

https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Category:Name

It is all ed2k links. Unfortunately modern clients for ed2k are quite lacking

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ed2k, nice! That reminds me of this superb piece of software: MLDonkey (https://github.com/ygrek/mldonkey), written in OCaml.
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And yet it doesn't work without JS (I think it's because cloudflare WAF, but still)
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Once you get past Cloudfare, you can use it without JS.
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Shareaza was the goat. It had 4 or 5 protocols.
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It is still around! I see network traffic from it on major GWebCache instances.
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