RAR files. Why?

[crossrulz]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

Oh yes, the unfond memories of people double packing to "save space" ...

/Y

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Almost worse.  It was a RAR with a zip extension.

[Hooovahh]

Oh what about those who had a .DOC file and renamed it a .Zip thinking that made it compressed.  This same person also thought they could rename it .PDF and have it be a PDF.

[bsvare]

I use to work at a place that purposely did something like that. They took ther config / communication files for a product, zipped it up, and then changed the extension to their custom extension. They thought this was a great deterent of preventing people from accessing the private communication channels of the product.

[SnowMule]

Security through Obscurity. My favorite. 🙂

[Yamaeda]

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@bsvare wrote:

I use to work at a place that purposely did something like that. They took ther config / communication files for a product, zipped it up, and then changed the extension to their custom extension. They thought this was a great deterent of preventing people from accessing the private communication channels of the product.

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At my previous work i had to do that to get through the mail attachment filter. Zip the new .exe and change the extension to e.g. zi_ so it would arrive at the customers ...

I love it when IT "supports" me like that ...

/Y

[Hooovahh]

Somehow I've always heard of .PIZ being used to get around email filters.  Everyone I've talked to just knew it was a zip renamed.  I remember explaining to a customer what it was and they stopped me mid sentence to tell me they knew what to do with it.

[JW-JnJ]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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@bsvare wrote:

I use to work at a place that purposely did something like that. They took ther config / communication files for a product, zipped it up, and then changed the extension to their custom extension. They thought this was a great deterent of preventing people from accessing the private communication channels of the product.

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At my previous work i had to do that to get through the mail attachment filter. Zip the new .exe and change the extension to e.g. zi_ so it would arrive at the customers ...

I love it when IT "supports" me like that ...

/Y

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I also like adding .remove or .txt to the end (so myfile.zip.remove).

Another of my favorites is to encrypt the email with "123456" (password to my luggage) just so the email filters can't rummage around in the zip file and remove the executable.

[RobertoBozzolo]

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Yamaeda ha scritto:

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@bsvare wrote:

I use to work at a place that purposely did something like that. They took ther config / communication files for a product, zipped it up, and then changed the extension to their custom extension. They thought this was a great deterent of preventing people from accessing the private communication channels of the product.

---

At my previous work i had to do that to get through the mail attachment filter. Zip the new .exe and change the extension to e.g. zi_ so it would arrive at the customers ...

I love it when IT "supports" me like that ...

/Y

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I am used to rename the file to .ex_ and zip it: normally it overcomes email filtering.

[PeterFoerster]

I do like to follow this discussion, BUT I also remember a time when you could unzip a built LabVIEW Exe file, so what was that all about?

[tst]

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@PeterFoerster wrote:

I do like to follow this discussion

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I don't. I think complaining about this type of thing is pointless, because different people use different tools and these tools have different popularities in different places. Regardless of popularity, once someone has a tool installed, using it is easy, so they don't necessarily think about whether others have access to it.

If you want to take this complaint to a contrived extreme, someone could just as easily ask you "why do you use this weird .vi format? I can't open it with Visual Studio or Eclipse". Obviously this isn't comparable, but hopefully it helps people understand my viewpoint.

Normally I simply wouldn't respond (I haven't so far), but I figured I might as well, since I do have something to say on the rest of your post, so:

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@PeterFoerster wrote:

I also remember a time when you could unzip a built LabVIEW Exe file, so what was that all about?

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A LabVIEW EXE is still just the same bunch of VIs you have when you write your code, with some caveats and asterisks (that's why you can open and run VIs dynamically from an EXE). In the past, this was done using the LLB format, which is a simple flat list of files inside the EXE. After the addition of libraries (and particularly classes), which meant different VIs could have the same file name, NI changed this to a zipped folder structure, so that multiple files with the same name could be inside the EXE. Before they figured it out, VIs with the same name from different libraries were saved in folders outside the EXE.

I haven't checked specifically about unzipping EXEs (although I have seen people comment on managing or not managing to do it over the years), but that's the basic idea. If it doesn't work any more, it's probably because the EXE isn't a simple zipped folder, but also has a separate executable component to load everything, similar to auto-extracting executables you can find.

You can actually see this being done if you look at a build folder while LV is building an EXE. You will see that a folder is generated with all the stuff inside it and then converted to a zip at the end (although, depending on different factors, that last step may fail if you have an open Explorer window on that folder).