MY THREAD DIDN’T APPEAR THE WAY I PUT IT FOR SOME REASON. BUT WISELY I SAVED IT. HERE IT GOES (AGAIN):
Here’s the story: I am at the International Male website. I am downloading pictures of attractive men for my own personal use. As I’ve said before, I am gay but like to think of myself of a connoisseur of male beauty in general too.
Anyways here comes the weird part. I get to this very attractive dark-complexioned man. When I save it in my files I am prompted to give the picture a name. I simply put “Arab(?)” because he looks like an Arab to me. And I think many Arab men are very attractive–so lets just say I like to “think” of him as being an Arab man in any event, if you know what I mean. The picture will not download! When this first happened, thought maybe it was just the picture. So I did a little experiment. I tried to download the image, only using different titles–one with “Arab” in it and one without.
Weirdest of the weirds: It only will not download if I input the title of “Arab”! :eek: What does it all mean? Is Big Brother watching us? Is he watching me?
Anyways here is the “offending” picture. I have to warn you in advance, he is wearing a thong. And you can see most of his butt.–
BTW, International Male is an underwear sales site for those who wonder. I wouldn’t put a “smut” site link here you know. Alot of gays like going to this site. But it is politically and sexually neutral AFAIK.
You sure it isn’t just that there’s already a file of that name in the location where you were trying to save it? - I thought (and I’m assuming that you’re using Windows and IE) that the save file dialog box is an entirely local process; the server from which you are downloading isn’t told and doesn’t care what you’re going to call it once you have copied it down. That’s my understanding anyway.
Well, Mangetout, that really is part of the mystery. I know what happens when I try to reenter an existing file or picture name–I hear an alarm and am told that fact. The weird thing about this picture is that when I enter “Arab(?)” there is a long pause–and basically nothing happens. But not with any other name.
I mean, I am not afraid of Big Brother. I don’t feel I have anything to hide anyways. And perhaps it could just be a random clitch in something. Unsure.
aha; I didn’t realise that the question mark was part of the actual filename you were trying to enter; the ? is a wildcard character (?= any single character, *= any string of characters).
BTW, jjimm I heard Great Britain has something very similiar to carnivore. And they are basically watching the whole world. Frightening, isn’t it?
Incidentally, I know that all my answers seem to be “clumped” at the end of this subject thread. But the truth of the matter is I did answer your posts chronologically. They just came after I was writing my replies. Don’t ask me to explain.
Boy, are these boards slow or what? I am just now reading Mangetout’s post after I put mine there. Anyways all this time has given me the opportunity to look “Echelon” up on a search engine. And you’re right. There is such a thing. It is apparently a joint effort by the U.K., the U.S. and our allies. Not to add to the paranoia, but I once heard on T.V. that things like Echelon also monitor cell phone and regular phone traffic. :eek:
Echelon is the UK-US electronic eavesdropping system that so upsets the EU.
The RIP Act is the UK government’s attempt to implement a Carnivore type system in the UK, using “black boxes” to monitor all internet traffic, but the Act keeps getting thrown out by Parliament. Last I heard on the news, the government were reduced to demanding that ISPs keep records of all data for seven years, but I don’t know how far that ever got. Mind you, I guess we don’t really know what the spooks are up to.
The ? is a wildcard character for searches, not for filenames.
That said, assuming Jim B. is using a Windows OS on his computer, there are a fair number of characters that aren’t allowed for filenames. Off the top of my head, these include question mark, slashes and backslashes, exclamation points, colons and semicolons, and about another half-dozen punctuation characters (I’d check offhand, but I’m away from my Windows NT computer at the moment). You can get a list just by going to Windows Explorer and try to rename a file to include a slash – you’ll get a dialog box listing all the filename no-nos.
And just to irritate SPOOFE, I’ll point out that this is primarily a Windows limitation. I’m pretty sure that UNIX allows almost everything except for slash, dollar sign, ampersand, and quote. Apple Macintoshes allow everything except colons, which are automatically converted to dashes.
From the Microsoft site regarding Windows.
Click on the Straight Dope logo at the top of the page and try to save it as “illegal?character” Windows won’t let you.
Moderator’s Note: Well, it seems to me that this was really more of a General Question than a debate, and since it’s not only been asked but answered, I’ll just close this rather than move it.
I’ll point out that this is primarily a Windows limitation. I’m pretty sure that UNIX allows almost everything except for slash, dollar sign, ampersand, and quote. Apple Macintoshes allow everything except colons, which are automatically converted to dashes.