I was told that it revealed my computer's name. I don't care about my name being public (Good evening everyone, my real name is Joseph, but since a child and being a Jr, my father was Joe and I became Joey. He's been gone now for 15 years, but Joey it will remain for what time I have left). But since I know nothing of tech vulnerabilities, was wondering if having the name of my computer would make it easy to be, I dunno, "hacked" or something?

No, not compromised by means of a computer. The only concern is personal information that may be used to identify you.

Oh, okay. Thanks. Probably a million Joey's in the world, and a million MSI laptops in the world too. Probably be difficult for someone to make much headway with that.

Hmmm, rather tame. Though i remember one guy was arrested who had sent a blackmail letter, and the office meta data included his name and what computer he used to write the message on, used as evidence against him. Might also have included a virus, not sure. So yeah, invisible data can be harmful.

Your computer name? Doubt it would mean anything. I remember having an FTP server to access from work once, and when i checked logs there were HUNDREDS of attempts of someone trying to log into 'admin'. There was no admin account to access, so everything was failing, which was funny. But if they knew what your username was, they could then make an actual attempt at brute forcing an attack vs getting a 'bad user/password' combo on an account that doesn't exist.

Ahh yes looking at it again, i do see 'Joey's MSI' or something in the XML tag; Which you can see just by opening it in a text editor and scrolling down. But that really doesn't give any useful information at all. The GUID may be your account ID at Microsoft potentially, so the image could be linked to you, but that's pointless generally. Other metadata tags common in images put there by cameras and phones, is date taken, possibly GPS location, the device that took the image, language, and if there's content scanning, may identify objects or faces and put it in as well.

edit: Actually there's 3 references up top with the ID, one in 16bit windows unicode, and one further up in a block of data. All completely pointless though.

Congrats to the lucky winner! +1 to the Guy! png format all the way up to share only the images.

congrats to DiffuseReflection!
and huge thanks fur this GA to OldFatGuy!

Congrats to the winner!

Thanks for the GA!

Not sure if it would help your case in term you are billionaire because in general the attitude of the very wealthy ones is not exactly known to be "sharing and caring", at least not without some "special benefit" which in the end is nothing more than a "hidden investment". They simply never can think outside of this "investment-frame", once they are inside, kinda a unspoken rule.

However, to me it would be a "good investment" making a community happy, it is not all about coins. One thing i can say for sure: GoG got a great community. Sure there are always some stubborn ones, yet i have been part of many communities already and in general the peace and helpful mindset was worse on almost any other community.

Congrats @DiffuseReflection!

It's the program or device that creates the file that decides what to write into the metadata or not. While the original png specification did not support metadata current specification certainly do so you are not safer with png than with jpg. It just happened that the program you used for converting the jpg to png either does not support metadata in pngs or was configured to not copy metadata.

The most comprehensive tool to read, write or strip metadata from a multitude of file formats that I am aware of is ExifTool.

P.S.: Be especially aware of smartphones. They love to be super chatty in picture metadata and often even reveal where the picture was taken (GPS coordinates). Some phones allow to turn that off in the settings.

Congrats to the winner and thanks again for the GA OldFatGuy.

Well, I don't know that to be the case. For all I know the png pics I posted do have the same metadata. It's just I was told to switch to png, so I did. No idea if it's actually any different.

All of this just brings up another question I have for anyone reading.

WHY the hell do all of these programs add this metadata to begin with? Sounds like big brother crap to me, as in they are "encouraged" (cough-cough) by governments to do so.

While there was an update for libpng in 2017, which enabled the usage of eXIf chunks within PNGs, in my experience, this feature of the extension to the PNG specification, is still, after 6 years, not utilized by the sane (and minimalistic) screen capture and image editor programs that I have used (thankfully). However, this is definitely a concern for people that may be unknowingly broadcasting information that is relatively-sensitive in nature.

There have been other methods for embedding information within other chunk types of PNGs (as well as through unusual means, such as alpha channel steganography), but, this is rare, and would probably need to be added through deliberate action (usually malicious).

The aforementioned metadata does not seem to reside within your posted PNGs. If you prefer, continue using that program (for PNGs, anyway), or another that explicitly respects your privacy. For Windows, uncertain which applications those might be. Others may have a recommendation.

Personally, I agree; for the average person, there really is zero need. It is unfortunate that it has been standardized (and exploited), as it has been used to stalk, harass, threaten, assault, and, even, kill. While preparing to share a JPG (if the PNG (even after using a program such as 'pngcrush') exceeds size limits of a given service), I strip all metadata, or convert the JPG to some obscure image format (which is known to only contain image data), and back to JPG/JPEG.

That will certainly lower the quality of the picture. Why not simply strip all metadata with ExifTool or similar?

The latter portion of that quote was referring to an act of last resort/desperate measure without concern for quality, in the event that metadata stripping might be viewed as insufficient. Of course, if image integrity is of any significance, one would not wish to re-save a lossy image format file.

Some of the lossless image formats in which I had experimented with are widely-supported within browsers (for sharing), whereas, others (such as Farbfeld/FF, which can use a number of external compression mechanisms), are best for archiving (converting original, untouched JPEGs to said format, while deleting the former). If hard disk usage were of no consequence, compression-free lossless would be my ideal.