Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 577 posts

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#341

Post by tantalor »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #318
azinman2 wrote: post #299

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either sp…

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default. [1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#342

Post by derefr »

danso wrote: post #28
crazygringo wrote: post #4

I thought iOS was supposed to convert HEIC images to JPEG automatically behind-the-scenes in any file transfer situation where HEIC isn't supported. The article itself even says: > iPhones convert HEICs to JPEGs automatically when they’re attached to emails in the Mail app I'm just curious technically why the same didn't happen with the testing portal? If you have a webpage that accepts image uploads, is iOS Safari n…

Would it be correct for iOS Safari to quietly reencode to jpeg when a HEIC file is uploaded via a webform? How would Safari know that the site's backend didn't want an HEIC file? I agree the HEIC thing is very confusing (having set up my parents' phones recently), but I can't see how Apple is to blame. For starters, the College Board could've done a much better job emphasizing this step for iOS users in its instructi…

> they provided a demo in which the photo upload function appears to have been stubbed (e.g. "if 'PNG|JPG|JPEG' is filename, print "Success"), giving students and teachers false assurance that photo uploads would work on test day.

I don't think it was exactly that it was stubbed out, per se; I would guess it was that the whole "backend" process involved either a human or an async batch process opening the file; and so in both the demo and prod environments, the upload of a file can succeed while the parsing of said file can fail (much later on, after the test is completed, during the grading phase.)

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#343

Post by swiley »

azinman2 wrote: post #299

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either sp…

Closed/liscenced crap != innovation.

I don’t care which part of California it came out of.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#344

Post by danmg »

azinman2 wrote: post #299

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either sp…

Why does Safari still not support webp then?

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#345

Post by frei »

oefrha wrote: post #183
oefrha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to JPEG. Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering. Edit: Like a sibling comment said, the accept attribute actually isn't necessary; even PNG images (e.g. screenshots) from Photos are converted to JPEG automatically.…

Turns out I overlooked some details in the article. Some students (after the issue was known) airdropped photos to their computers and attempted to rename .heic to .png/.jpeg to bypass the extension check (who would have guessed extensions don't have to correspond to file types), they went through but were rejected a day later. The article isn't clear on what exactly was happening before, but I suppose students were…

If they were submitted in time, but then rejected a day later, it seems like those cases can be resolved by some manual work by collegeboard to convert them

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#346

Post by Gaelan »

tantalor wrote: post #341
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default. [1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

Assuming GP is right about the patents, the College Board would open themselves up to patent suits by using that without a license.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#347

Post by duskwuff »

munk-a wrote: post #301
dylancop wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Funny thing to say in support of Apple. Maybe they should support WEBPs/WEBMs instead?

Their approach to supporting the new formats is actually quite easy to work with and properly defined input tags will just automagically trigger file conversions on the iOS side. I also really dislike Apple's usual "my way or the highway approach" (it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support) but in this case they are using the right approa…

> it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support

That's really not Apple's problem. Flash Player is dead. Adobe has declared that all support for the plugin will end in December 2020, and every major web browser has indicated that they intend to discontinue support for the plugin in advance of that date. Some desktop browsers (including Chrome and Firefox) have already disabled Flash content by default, and the Flash plugin for Android was discontinued in 2012.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#348

Post by lone_haxx0r »

azinman2 wrote: post #328
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default. [1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file formats in the tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would simply convert to one of the accepted formats. It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they c…

1. I think both parties are at fault

The testing system for not using the tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents.

> It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend.

It's reasonable to assume that it is.

2. Sure, the college could pay, but looking at the broader problem here, saying that colleges should accept closed formats would make it really hard for open source online testing systems to proliferate, and all colleges around the world would have to pay royalties to the HEIC patent holders.

Even if they were to implement an open source decoder, unless you have plenty of lawyers, the legal uncertainty of the situation could be unacceptable to many individuals/institutions.

3. If the format was open in the first place, maybe we would have lots of open source decoders and maybe the library that the testing system developer used would have support for it, and would have transparently worked without the developer knowing about the format.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#349

Post by btilly »

derefr wrote: post #316
btilly wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea what that approach would do to bandwidth and latency?

Er... what? By "raw octet stream", I meant that the client should upload a file named X made of opaque bytes 0xABCD, as a file named X made of opaque bytes 0xABCD; rather than assuming a higher-level intent on the server's part to acquire some abstract document, where the client would be able to better serve that request by transforming its file to a different file-format. I didn't mean that e.g. the client should av…

My apologies. I misread your intent.

I thought you were suggesting that images should be sent as raw octets for the image, rather than picking a compression format. But that raw data is extremely large, and therefore would have horrible impacts on bandwidth and latency.

That said, you're right. Trying to be clever about what people are sending results in a lot of hidden complexity and bugs of various forms.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#350

Post by FalconSensei »

walshemj wrote: post #213
coffeefirst wrote: post #49

"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…

One might also ask why in 2020 your taking an exam and then photographing it. Some of those with problems actually had real computers as well.

it may be way write physics, math calculation with pen and paper than trying to type that in the computer.
Post reply on HN