Posted by: LH Justin
Also, you can't "attach" a virus to a regular image file. Learn how the Internet works...I'd like to interject here.
Image files contain data (which is just text) in the same way that programs with viruses contain data (which is also just text). Believe it or not, downloading a virus is completely harmless unless another program executes the commands within it, which is where it becomes a problem.
That being said, image files can contain malicious Javascript which, if and when read and executed by the browser, can be a security problem, especially in older browsers. A modern browser like Chrome, for instance, actually catches this and displays the full page "something's not right here" message.
And it has nothing to do with the Internet.
Posted by: LH Justin
The real issues behind custom avatars is the massive amounts of avatars that would be uploaded to Bungie's servers. Although this would cause nearly the amount of trouble animated GIFs would cause when attempting to load a thread.Not if the images were stored and delivered via a content delivery network then cached in the browser. Not to mention that objects like images which are separate from text in the HTML are downloaded separately so as not to block the rendering of the rest of the page.