Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension In January, drivers of older model Mazdas in the area around Seattle, Washington, started seeing their HD Radio receivers crash upon tuning to the local public radio station. The issue, according to the Seattle Times, has affected 2014-2017 model year Mazdas with infotainment systems that support HD Radio. Tuning to KUOW, …
It is rather different for someone to suggest "turn it off, then on again" but only after driving 200 miles away from home first.
Or.. wait. Didn't Dabbs suggest this just last week?
I suppose you could disconnect the radio antenna, thus removing the offending signal. Or maybe find a metal shipping container and park in it while you sort things out. But then the issue of carbon monoxide fumes comes up.
Anyway, it isn't clear that any of these measures would actually relieve the problem.
If there even is a standard that covers this, which there probably isn't. More likely Mazda's developers just made a wrong assumption that a JPEG file name will always end with .jpg because they usually do. Presumably other manufacturers' software was displaying them correctly.
> a JPEG file name will always end with .jpg
Many years ago I had to explain to someone that simply renaming a plain text file with the suffix .doc did not cause it to become a Microsoft Word document. They were indignant, and demanded to know why anyone bothered with file suffixes in that case. >sigh<
It’s not an unreasonable expectation that the OS would do the conversion if you changed the extension. Then the machine file format and human readable extension would be in sync.
I realise no current OS does this, but it’s certainly not a bad idea.
(Didn’t the original MacOS do something like this with its resource fork?)
How about another 90% to the fizzheads who figured broadcast radio needed to have a software controlled receiver which should be capable of displaying pictures. Where I come from, that's called a TV, not a radio, and watching TV while driving is contra-indicated.
I don't know how many distinct fields for "identity of radio station" DAB provides, but each radio that I own seems to use different ones, and in a different order. Is it "BBC 6 Music" or is it just "6 Music"? Does it depend on the day of the week? Hypothetical since except for performer documentaries, Six seems almost never to be accidentally playing something I want to hear. It's uncanny, however do they do it. John Peel's son being there helps probably. :-)
An orange 2 in a white circle in an orange background, or the reverse (white 2, orange circle, white background).
Other BBC radio stations follow the same idea, except with different colours.
1 - Black
2 - Orange
3 - Red
4 - Dark Blue
5 - Light Blue
6 - Teal
@Katrinab - thanks for this. Your post resulted in a web search finding the "Logopedia" website. Apart from it proving me wrong about the BBC radio logos changing every 20 minutes (the Radio 2 logo is essentially unchanged since 2007) it's a treasure trove of logo-related nostalgia.
>it's a treasure trove of logo-related nostalgia.
...as is looking on Youtube for the BBC Christmas idents over the years. Very nostalgic, with in my case an occasional moment of "f*ck me! That was 1992??? I could have sworn it was only 5 years ago, a decade at most..."
But then, similar experiences are pretty much a daily occurrence for me these days. Try to tell me that the 80s started over 40 years ago and I will laugh at you.
The other day I was looking at the album cover for The Stooges Funhouse (autographed by Iggy and framed, on a friend's wall) and realized it had been well over half a century since I first heard it.
I nearly had to sit down.
Remember, we're all gettin' old ... the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
I currently have an Evoque as a dealership loaner vehicle while my Disco is in for repairs (yeah, yeah, its natural habitat, etc etc).
Everything in the Evoque is shiny LCD touch screen. The first time I drove it, I managed to turn the radio on, but couldn't for the life of me - without either taking my eyes dangerously off the road, or stopping - figure out how to change the radio station. Being an LCD, there's no tactile reference points whatsoever, so after a few seconds of blindly and fruitlessly pawing at the screen, I had a brainwave.
Pressed the "voice command" button on the steering wheel and said, enunciating every syllable like Joyce Grenfell, "change the radio frequency to 89.9".
It worked.
Which left me:
1) impressed at the technology that could do voice recognition of an arbitrary phrase like that, and yet simultaneously
2) very, very depressed that the over-complication of technology has made that necessary.
I want my 5 pop-in preset selector buttons, godsdammit! I mean, they're even called "radio buttons" in GUI design terminology, for precisely that reason!
Grrr.
Upvote for a humorous post.
The Golden Rule I always follow when getting a new car, though, is to figure out how stuff works before I drive off anywhere.
It reminds me of the time in the early 80s when - as a spotty kid - I replaced the brake fluid in my Cortina Mk IV. I drove off to take it round the block, only to discover at the first junction I hadn't bled it properly and thus had no brakes. I frantically pumped the pedal and managed to stop... ish. I shit myself.
My radio in my present Ford has five preset tabs on a touchscreen, and you can swipe to get another five, then another five, then another five.
I have the first block of five set to Planet Rock, Planet Rock, Planet Rock, BBC R5L, BBC 5SX (the latter two for the football, you understand). Then all five of the other three blocks set to Planet Rock in case of emergency.
The sad thing is that the young'uns on here probably don't have a clue who we're talking about.
If ever I'm feeling down, listening to the monologues of Joyce Grenfell or Bob Newhart (USS Codfish, The Driving Instructor, Tobacco, Bomb Disposal) will always make me laugh.
We live at the bottom of a valley. If I've been driving the misses car home listening to R4 then when I get in it it tunes to another station and refuses to let me listen to R4 until about 3 miles from home. I drop the brats off and drive home and I can park up and listen to R4 for as long as I like but turn the radio off and on and it doesnt exist. My car is fine in that sense but its 20% more fuel guzzly and that hurts at the moment!
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""Garbage In Garbage Out" should be branded on the forehead of each one."
Back in about 1976 or so when I did my O level Computer Studies course, one of the first in the UK, GIGO was one of the very first things we were taught. Checking data was valid was important, but with less emphasis than today since it wasn't just any Tom, Dick or Harriet inputing data back then.
"[...] but with less emphasis than today since it wasn't just any Tom, Dick or Harriet inputing data back then."
Way back in time we would come into the office to find a pile of mainframe dumps (post mortems) on what was considered a stable IT system. Quite often an IT department had employed a new graduate whose mistakes and misunderstandings found new holes in validation routines.
To save everyone else looking it up, apparently HD radio is some American thing where a radio station broadcasts its analogue signal and, on the edges of its channel, a digital version of the same content, vaguely kind of like teletext but for radio.
(There was a time when this was a .co.uk site)
Thanks - I was wondering. So it is not DAB, which would be my first thought. High-Definition in the title and all (yeah, lots of stations in the UK and other countries transmit in really p**s-poor quality, but that's not the fault of DAB, which support decent bit rates).
Edit: ah, HD is not "high definition" but "hybrid digital". Since the readership outside of the US has no clue what this thing even is, please do explain those acronyms in a short sentence in the article, would be really nice.
Edit: ah, HD is not "high definition" but "hybrid digital". Since the readership outside of the US has no clue what this thing even is, please do explain those acronyms in a short sentence in the article, would be really nice.
Hell, I'm American and I had no clue that's what it was...
From what I understand, only the best of the best (in general) is what we get to see. And even then, those of us watching get to choose whether to watch or not :-)
We're all different and have different reasons for watching, or not, as the case may be. Personally, I prefer SF. I've seen some good stuff and some clearly comic-book stuff. Not just US either. Korean, Japanese, Brazilian, French and Norwegian are other foreign SF I've watched recently, some surprisingly good and thoughtful, others, just "eye candy" to kill time or as a distraction while doing other stuff, although the sub-titled stuff does take a bit more concentration since I can barely scrape through in French or German, no chance in other languages :-)
There are very few excuses for being so egregiously rude to someone based on their nationality (especially when they are self-deprecating). I really hope that you don't have a concrete reason to hate americans (they blew up your family in a drone strike, invaded your country, cancelled Firefly).If not then the smiley after your racist comment is just a get-out clause.
I also didn't have a clue what that was, and am grateful for the previous poster who infomed us all.
Apart from most people in the USA being the same race as me, you might care to note that I was insulting the US media, not the people of the USA. In particular, note that even if I was insulting the people of the USA, being in a different country doesn't necessarily mean people are a different race. Of course, by some definition, I may be mixed race since I have English, German and French ancestry (at least!). My wife is part English, French, Canadian First Nations, Italian and (still to be confirmed) Semitic. And that's just the couple of hundred years of the family history she's managed to trace so far.
FWIW... HD radio, regardless of what the HD stands for, is also higher quality than a regular FM signal.
And the standard also allows for two or more separate stations to be muxed onto the same frequency; for example in my neck of the woods, 89.9 HD1 is a classical station, 89.9 HD2 is a children's classical/arts station, and 89.9 HD3... well, I'm not sure, never bothered to look. All are on the same frequency, but if the signal quality drops out my radios will fall back to basic FM and just the first of the three stations.
I remember 15 odd years ago in the UK having a mobile phone ( small colour screen, probably a Samsung, maybe a Nokia) that had some ability to show a colour logo and programme information when using the FM radio.
Since it was a largely useless feature I didn't use and so don't really remember it well.
Okay, I've just looked it up. It was called Visual Radio, and nobody else used it either. And it used a data connection to display text and info, and so it is irrelevant to this article. (I couldn't remember if images were broadcast, like the digital info in RDS is). I apologies for wasting your time with this off topic post.
https://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/visualradio.html
> So is the HD radio just another name for RDS that we have had in Europe since the 1980s?
As I understand, both use the "edge" of the channel to modulate a digital signal, but whereas RDS is only low bandwidth text and some other metadata (low res pics and so on), the yanks modulate a digital version of the actual audio stream on it (someone above says multiple streams even), so it seems more like the bastards child of DAB and RDS.
But all I know about it is what the first search result told me.
Let's be brutally frank here... if you were a child in the UK in the 70s, I think you could say that of just about any British or Italian car older than about 6 months. (I was originally going to type "that had been driven off the dealership forecourt" but realized that on balance I was probably being too harsh).
Regardless, 5 years was practically "Telegram from the Queen" territory for them.
Not mentioned in this article is that the cost of a replacement 'head' for the infotainment system is $1500. We all know that car electronics is wildly inflated in price but this isn't the first time I've seen or been offered custom options at many times the cost of generic. A decent Bluetooth radio is less than $100; you can spend more if you want, but why bother?
Mazda also needs a lesson in software development. I know that Microsoft has never been able to process file extensions properly, their mindset is still very much in the DOS 8.3 days. UNIX never had the file extension -- you could add them but it was just part of the name. You'd never, ever, make decisions about a file content based on the name, that's asking for trouble.
(HD radio's crap anyway, I'm surprised that anyone is still bothering with it. Its our (US) answer DAB. Like DAB "Hybrid Digital" is based on proprietary technology, it places one or more digital subcarriers outside the audio band. The audio you get from it low to mediocre quality, its better than DAB because you can still receive the conventional signal but with certain caveats. For example, FM with HD is likely to be broadcast as medium quality mono and AM with HD tends to be noisy, about the same level of hiss that you'd get from a really cheap cassette recorder. Like DAB HD is a redundant technology - when out and about I can stream audio into my car more reliably than I can receive radio stations.)
Not mentioned, except for these lines:
According to the Seattle Times, Lorenzo Pieruccioni, service manager at Mazda of Olympia, Washington, said he'd seen several customers come in with radio problems, which he attributed to a corrupt Connectivity Master Unit (CMU).
The CMU moderates the flow of video and audio signals to the infotainment system. It costs $1,500 normally, but it remains scarce due to supply chain issues.
I'd say marks off for not reading the article, but full credits for the part with the rant on file extensions. And a small bonus for the explanation (which you might have wnated to proof read - and this comment now will contain several grammatical blunders, just due to Muphry's Law - that _is_ the correct spelling).
Having lived in a country that did make the switchover to DAB I see no problems with it, not where I lived and travelled. And I do not think it is a redundant technology, as cell phone reception is not great in certain regions. FM would be good enough for me, though. Getting more stations on the very limited spectrum through DAB is cool, and getting the radio to track the station better (also because the station does not have to change frequency from transmitter to transmitter) is convenient.
I guess you've never been to Scotland. I had a fortnight there last year camping and hiking. There are lots of areas with no coverage, mostly due to terrain, and in general it hits all the high-frequency services, so if there's no phone signal then it's likely there won't be DAB and usually no FM either. MW is patchy but LW is reliable. I always take my trusty Sony SW100 when I'm up there.
>which you might have wnated to proof read - and this comment now will contain several grammatical blunders, just due to Muphry's Law - that _is_ the correct spelling).
Not sure if deliberate, but oh, the ironing is delicious.
>A decent Bluetooth radio is less than $100; you can spend more if you want, but why bother?
Aftermarket head units are limited in how much current they can draw through the car's fuse box. This limits the output of their amplifiers.
Additionally, the car owner may have got used to Track Skip and Volume controls on the steering wheel.
There are of course aftermarket car stereo setups that are superior to the factory fitted system, but they do require more work and fiddly wiring than just swapping a head unit.
Most adults don't bother if their vehicle shipped with a halfway decent sounding system.
Aftermarket head units are limited in how much current they can draw through the car's fuse box. This limits the output of their amplifiers.
Yes. I've often found that the typical 10 amp circuit for a car radio is far to low to produce a decent output.
</sarcasm>
Amps multiplied by Volts equals Watts.
1 amp at the 13.9v-14.4v output of a car alternator is therefore ~14v and so ~14 watts. Most car speakers are 10w, with aftermarket units being 25w. 3 amps (42w) therefore runs 4 typical 10w car speakers at full.
4 25w speakers can be run at full output off of ~7 amps, and for reference, that "full output" is at a level that with prolonged use while stationary could get you prosecuted for anti social behaviour, cause you permanent hearing damage after ~15 minutes, and cause structural damage to your vehicle through the vibrations from the speakers being at a level of physical impacts shaking the spot welds holding the car together.
The only people wanting more output than that are the Gary boy crowd, whom are in general more despised by other motorists than BMW drivers.
If 4x25W speaker outputs is enough to "shake the spot welds" however does it cope with the impacts of 2 tons of car hitting potholes at 100mph ??
Not to put too fine a point on in, your numbers are absolute horse shit.
Any energy input to a car's structure measured in Joules rather than kilojoules is simply below the error margin for caring about, driving up a 1 inch bump puts more energy into the car's structure than the loudest radio you could ever hope to run (raising a 2 ton car by 1 inch needs around 500 joules of energy, one second's output from your putative 4x25W system is 100 Joules. If the car was raised over and entire second it would still take in 5x that energy but, of course, the average car can easily hit dozens of such small bumps in a single second so the vibrational energy from those events is many times anything your radio is going to produce and yet, somehow, your car is still* in one piece a decade and 100,000 miles later.....)
4x25W is not a loud number for a car stereo, it is bog standard for run of the mill cars, any premium system will be significantly louder, even in cars bought by actual grown-ups.
Also, nobody hates BMW drivers any more, we pity them. It's Audi drivers we all hate now.
*Unless you have an Alfa Romeo in which case (a) it already rusted to pieces but (b) the radio never really worked anyway.
Also, nobody hates BMW drivers any more, we pity them. It's Audi drivers we all hate now.
That's because the BMW drivers got fed up with the hate and bought Audis, taking their driving 'skills' with them. I wonder where they'll migrate to next, Mercedes or Tesla maybe?
Wait until you have to replace a head unit in a BMW.... Was quoted £2500
(BMWs of the 2000-2012 ish vintage had these horrible orange displays that were garbage: you've probably seen them in MINIs too. Fixed with less than an hour's work, a bit of soldering, some thermal paste for the heatsink (I jest not) and a new £100 display)
Same thing with a 2005 Nissan Versa Note (orange display).
And, of course, the display faded just after the warranty period, so no - I live with the bunged display until I replace it.
(there's only a couple of radio stations our family listens to anyway ; and at 4am in the winter, the display actually comes back to normal - until the temp (or heater) raises the cabin temp a couple of degrees)
"Not mentioned in this article is that the cost of a replacement 'head' for the infotainment system is $1500. We all know that car electronics is wildly inflated in price but this isn't the first time I've seen or been offered custom options at many times the cost of generic. A decent Bluetooth radio is less than $100; you can spend more if you want, but why bother?"
Why bother? Primarily because few people have the skills to be able to fit a DIN standard radio unit into a modern car which uses customised mounts and wiring, not to mention probably DRM in the cars systems. The price reflects the fairly small volumes manufactured for the custom moulded plastics to fit your specific model of car, because last years model and next years model use a different mount and shape.
Initial Problem - Regular visits from thieving bar-stewards who'd rip out the radio from any car left unattended for 30 seconds because it would easily fit in any other car.
Effect - Unhappy owners paying large wedge to fix glass and replace radios asking for better security.
Fix - Bespoke radios that fit only other cars with the exact same model, job done :) that cost a bigger wedge to fix when they go wrong :( , neatly transferring the owners cash to manufacturers instead of the thieving bar-stewards. (Irony meter explodes)
There's definitely something as nasty as DRM in ford's head units from the 2008 era... the exact same model was used in the fiesta and the ford transit connect. With firmware altered. Meaning a transit connect unit will only ever allow one set of speakers to exist. If you connect a rear set, the front (door) speakers quit working. I found that out AFTER spending ages mounting speakers to the bulkhead. Gits. Utter gits.
My first experience with file extensions was when I got a Windows PC after coming from the Amiga, which didn't use file extensions. It seemed like a backward step then, so I can't believe its still a causing issues 20+ years later.
As I moved away from Windows to Linux 10 years ago I have got used to not having to worry about file extensions again, but have experienced several apps and website that refuse to let me upload a photo because it doesn't have a file extension, and to solve the issue I have to rename the file and slap a .jpg .png on to make it work.
My first true use of any form of DOS was TRS-DOS and the others like MultiDOS, LDOS etc, then CP/M, then MS-DOS. Moving to Amiga, back to MS-DOS and Windows and now primarily FreeBSD, I've always used the file extensions, not just because many OS require them, but because it's a nice human readable way of identifying what a file is quickly from a directory listing.
This sounds very similar to the "Samsung Blu-Ray bootloop issue" last year
Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself
"Upon reboot, the player parsed the XML file again from its flash storage, crashed and rebooted again"
"The problem with the XML file, sent out on June 18, 2020, is that it wasn't formatted in a way compatible with the device's code"
This would be exactly what caused it. Back in the mists of time in the 2000's I worked for Thomson USA who made RCA and GE TV sets. A certain movie played on FOX and at a certain point in the movie all RCA TV's with a certain version of software lost there audio. 3 Hours later this happened on the West coast. Lots of head scratching and finger pointing at FOX network who transmitted a malformed close caption signal which is fed to the micro and over wrote the audio buffer sections of the micro with garbage. Power off at the wall socket and everything reset back to normal. Turns out this was widespread and the broadcasters had lots of garbage in the Close Captions. A VHS recording would cause the audio to go off again. RCA got the broadcasters to tighten up the Close captioning and the issue went away. Close captions = Oracle + Ceefax subtitles on 888.
99% Invisible is the name of the podcast that doesnt work on some Mazda head units. However, the podcast that reported on the issue and actually spoke to some of the software devs responsible, is called Reply All (on their occausional Super Tech Support section.)
Super Tech Support is worth listening to. The format is listeners contacting the show with some just downright baffling tech problems (I.e, car stereo rebooting when one specific podcast is played) and the hosts attempt to track down and speak to involved parties.
99% Invisible have since maintained a duplicate podcast feed titled 99Percent Invisible as a work-around for Mazda owners, since it was the '% i' string that triggered Mazda's bug. 99% Invisible is about design and the made environment.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/brh8jm/140-the-roman-mars-mazda-virus
Quote "It's now illegal to even touch your phone whilst driving in the UK"
Not true.
The rule now in the UK (since April 2021) is you can't hold a mobile phone, for any reason at all while driving (same goes for a passenger in the front, if the driver is a learner), and this is irrespective of use.
Previously the law was specific to communication on the phone, other uses were strictly still legal due to the earlier laws being rather old and too use specific! i.e. predating camera phones.
It is legal in the UK to touch the screen while driving, but only as long as the phone is secure, i.e. not held by you, but in a holder of some sort but you can still be charged with driving without due care and attention, if the police see this, and consider it a distraction (too much time looking at the phone instead of ahead for example).
So just clicking sat nav to accept an alternate route, or to hang up a hands free call is fine, i.e. a quick glance at the phone and tap. But if you're manually entering an address into the sat nav or trying to tap out a text message, on the touch screen, that could land you with charges.
Just to clarify my own text, when I said other uses were strictly still legal due to the earlier laws being rather old and too use specific!.
I just meant still legal 'under those specific laws'. i.e. if it wasn't communication use on the phone (which is all that was covered under the old laws), you were not breaking that law, but you could potentially still have been prosecuted for something like driving without due care and attention.
Apparently the law was changed after someone had filmed a car crash from his mobile phone (oh the irony!) whilst driving past the crash. He was seen and prosecuted, but the guy appealed in 2019, and won, as filming wasn't communications, so wasn't actually covered by the law at that time.
So they updated the law, and now it's any use if in your hand.
I consulted on interaction design for infotainment systems at a major automotive supplier in the land of bier und wurst. Image processing is an evolutionarily ancient wired-in function of the visual processing system; reading is a late-acquired learned skill. It takes measurably longer to parse, interpret, and make choices among words than among images--enough so that in safety-critical applications it could spell the difference, say, between looking up to see the car running the light in time or not. Of course, it is always best to supply both text and graphic (long ago established by millions of dollars of defense research). Good interaction design practice is to always supply both. (Which is to say certain recent UI trends are taking us in the wrong direction.)
Touch screens for in-vehicle applications are a step backward from real buttons and knobs, but some of that can be mitigated by so-called edge-anchored selection, in which important functions are arrayed adjacent to the edges where the raised bezel provides a physical and tactile anchoring reference. The advantage is small but measurable compared to picking out the right spot to tap in the middle of the screen.
Agree absolutely about using touchscreens in a car; they're even dangerous at sea. A couple of years ago I was approaching a narrow channel at night and needed to zoom in to see the route in better detail. Whilst steering the boat I hit the touchscreen button to go from 1/2 Nm to 1/4 Nm, but my finger was wet or slipped, and instead I zoomed right out to 48 Nm. The screen was then incomprehensible and I had to rely on the old Mk 1 eyeball, which was now compromised by staring at the radar and I had little night vision. Reducing speed allowed me the time for my vision to recover, and I was able to proceed safely.
Turning a knob one click anti-clockwise would have been a simpler, more user-friendly procedure.
Touchscreens are not progress in many applications.
You basically read my thoughts. I have both designed software systems for use on (large) vessels and have merchant navy experience (as well as airline flying).
My systems were keyboard and mouse operated, and as a development director a lot of the time was spent thinking: right, that icon looks super nice there but how usable is that going to be in a force 8+ with a seasick operator?
You can still have pretty icons and whatnot, and touchscreen / mouse operation, which is nice when the weather's calm, but you also need to a) make sure there's an alternative method of operation such as keyboard (knobs are not that good either when you're basically holding onto them to stop you sliding across the bridge) and b) ensure that the point and click methods are not going to get in the way when the weather's rough (the typical example is disabling KDE's push corner to present windows effect, as the mouse is guaranteed to keep sliding into that corner)
Honda cars, 2019 models come with DAB+ radio.
Suddenly since mid 2021 the DAB+ receivers have been crashing, no output, unprintable characters as Station names etc.
I tried various levels of reset (you get a brief glimpse of an Android boot when you hold the Volume/Pwr button down for 30 seconds)
When I took to the Honda dealer, asking for a new car as the radio wasn't working (there's no ashtray, thankfully)
The dealer explained that ALL of their cars were crashing, but only in th north, Lombardy/Piedmonte/Veneto. They denied any update errors, said it's something environmental.
I think in this case it's perhaps due to incompatible? Swiss DAB+, which is guaranteed to undo within minutes, all of my resetting and stability nudges.
If I just scan Swiss and add Radio Svizzera Classica+ or perhaps the aptly named Radio SRF Virus+ then the whole RX shuts down.
So it's back to familiar italian scratchy FM, AFN_The_Eagle somewhat giving away the secret american nuclear airfields, or Radio Monte Carlo from Milan. In the old days, 80's, every village had their own Band II TX, now hundred FM channels playing the same track, blandness.
I do miss the Italian DAB mux, whch have both the hilarious BBC WS and some unidentifiable asian language channels...
A few years ago one of my colleagues and I both had cellphones from French telco SfR. When we went to the UK on business, any time either of our phones roamed into Vodafone & got the "Welcome to Vodafone, calls cost xxx" SMS message, they crashed. The only solution was to force them to roam onto one fixed UK network, anything but Vodafone.
> For a car stereo tuner and D/A converter?
Well, it's them being generous. They could as well ask for $5000, it's not like you can walk away, not if you want a radio in your car, and are the average Joe unable to throw together a solution with 3rd party parts.
It's the proverbial "offer you can't refuse"...
>If I turned on Radio 2 before 9:30, I'd get Chris Evans!
*shudder* That has to be grounds for redress under any halfway reasonable consumer protection laws. And by "redress" I mean up to and including a War Crimes trial at the Hague. I miss some things about the UK since I left (steak and kidney pie, the Cotswolds, Snowdonia, etc etc) but I do not miss turning on the TV or radio and being confronted by The Ginger Tw@t. At times I felt I was the only person in the whole country who didn't think he was God's Gift To Broadcasting and worth millions in salary...
"And to hear Xperi and Madza tell it, the broadcaster is to blame for transmitting images ? which show up on HD Radio display screens ? without the required file extension in the file name."
No, the filename extension shouldn't be required - the content-type should. This problem is all too common. People sent out files which may have DOS-style filename extensions bit no content-type, so they get stored as text or data. Filename extensions are useful if you're not using file type icons but they shouldn't be relied on. I can call files whatever I like (accepting that some characters can't be used) and I can set the file type to what it should be. The two are independent. If the file type is missing then you may be able to guess it if there's a valid extension.
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