My son wanted to send me copies of a certificate. He scanned it in, 2 pages, then sent it to me. Both were about 16MB.

I downloaded them. I wanted to open them. That took a very long time, and all but froze my computer. Eventually, I got a message with a very long source url saying a script was not responding.

I also tried to open the jpg with gimp. That too took ages, and my computer became very unresponsive. Only a restart brought things back to normal.

Do you think this is some kind of virus which has attached itself to the jpgs??

How can I see what the script is, and what it is trying to do?

He scanned them again, and sent them as bmp, but the result here is the same.

How big were the files before your son sent them?

I scan lots of images, mostly to .jpg's. I set the resolution to 200 - 300 dpi. That won't produce a file any near that size, and produces pleasing images at a reasonable size. Even the images from my 10 megapixel camera are rarely over 1 meg in size.

you can try to open those files with a simple text editor (vi), or try file <file.jpg> or string <file.jpg> to check if there was something suspicious. Also you can try online scanners and simple, dumb jpg viewers.

pedro@peterpu:~/Downloads$ file TOEFL2.bmp
TOEFL2.bmp: PC bitmap, Windows 3.x format, 9623 x 12588 x 1
pedro@peterpu:~/Downloads$

I get this, how does that look? Why should it freeze my computer?

pedro@peterpu:~/Downloads$ file toeffel1.jpg
toeffel1.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01
pedro@peterpu:~/Downloads$

Or this???

Probably it is ok, and you will run out of memory during opening those files. Its resolution is extreme high.

Why would I run out of memory? I have 2GB, the file is 16mb.

because it is compressed. gimp handles the uncompressed data. But you can simply run top or sar or similar before opening file and check your resources.

OK, I opened the bmp file with gimp this morning, took a while. Then I scaled to 50%. During this process, this window popped up, which made firefox unresponsive. Somehow google has linked itself into the bmp, because this only happened when I opened the bmp.

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What is sar? What is top?