A task in my homework assignment asks me to create a virtual file system, mount it, and perform some operations on it.

I am supposed to create a file of 10 MB whose bits are all set to 0, format it as ext3 and mount it. This is how I've done that:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/filesyst bs=10485760 count=1
sudo mkfs.ext3 ~/filesyst
sudo mount –o loop ~/filesyst /media/fuse

Even though I've used /dev/sero, the file i still full of gibberish characters (mostly at-signs). The permissions on /media/fuse are drw-rw-rw- (which are alright), but the permissions on the files inside it are something like this:

d????????? ? ? ? ?          ? lost+found
-????????? ? ? ? ?          ? secret_bin

Where have I gone wrong?