Russia and China-backed hackers are exploiting WinRAR zero-day bug

Windows has had native unzip support since Microsoft Plus! 98 added it to Windows 98 in 1998.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!#:~:text=ZIP%20file%20integration%20with%20Windows%20Explorer%20was%20first%20introduced%20with%20this%20version%20under%20the%20name%20of%20%22compressed%20folders%22.
- Yeah, it just sucks.
  
  Same for Macs. They technically support zipping and unzipping, they're just bad at it. It's so stupid.
  
  How so? I’ve always found finder did a good job.
  
  There's a maximum file size, I forget what it is. And it also can't handle zips in multiple pieces.
  
  That’s where bash comes in 😎
  
  Finder is an abortion, there is not a single thing it does well
  
  An abortion you can't even get rid of! Its icon is stuck the dock forever, even if you use something better like Forklift. The whole mac GUI is just shit.
  
  🤣🤣🤣🤣
- I don't recall anyone having Plus! back then.
  
  I think we did.
  But it was added to base Windows in XP anyway.
- When did windows have native rar support?
  
  Since Win 11 23H2. It's not out officially yet but the insider/RC builds have had it for a while now.
You do on Linux as well, it's just installed by default.
- Your chosen GNU/Linux distribution installs the applications.
  
  Microsoft and apple are the reasons boomers have learned helplessness with tech. It helped them sell units in the 90's to imply you didn't have to ever consider anything under the hood because it all is supposed to just work like magic. you just hit the switch and let electricity do it's thing.
  
  That's not an inherently bad thing though, same as it's not inherently bad that not everyone can repair their car, or sew up tears in their trousers.
  
  it is bad if they don't realize how simple it is to pump their own gas. That's about the equivalent of a possibly regular task like being able to unencrypt your own files. I'd say it's important enough that you should not be relying on anyone with the potential security of your own personal data.
  
  The relevant aphorism is "make it as simple as possible, but not simpler". You can add functionality to make things easier, same as syntactic sugar in programming languages. You shouldn't turn the person using your system into an object, just accepting what it gives them in response to their magic movements or clicking pictures.
  
  You're not from New Jersey I see
  
  Sorry, didn't get the reference?..
  
  TBF, I personally learned helplessness with house repairs. There's no MS and Apple there. My colleagues are not like that, for example.
  
  If you don't mind me asking, what's your distro and why did you settle on that particular one? I'm in the process of trying out different distros in anticipation of eventually moving all my stuff over and getting out of Windows completely, and that was really high praise, lol.
  So if you have a moment I'd really appreciate hearing about why you picked the distro you did, because being front loaded is one of the things I'm low key looking for: I don't know Linux well enough to know what I might need out of the box, so the more that's already on it the better (no shortage of drive space, fortunately). If it appeals I'll load it up on a LiveUSB and test drive it myself. Thanks!
  
  If you're new, Ubuntu (or one of its variants, like Xubuntu or Kubuntu) or Linux Mint are great "safe" options. The only thing to consider with Mint is that there is only an LTS release so you will end up with older versions of some programs. I've been using Linux as my primary OS for 17 years but I will still throw Xubuntu on a laptop if I just want to get something up and running quickly - other than having some extra packages installed out of the box there's nothing "wrong" with it.
  That said I use openSUSE Tumbleweed as my daily driver. I like the rolling release and cutting edge packages, plus I like that YaST allows me to install the system exactly the way I want - picking and choosing individual packages.
  
  deleted by creator
  
  Thank you for your response, this is exactly the info I was looking for. It may not work for me, but knowing WHY someone else loves it tells me a lot about it. I listen to every suggestion, but I first tried Linux back in the 90s: I'm not really swayed by emotive pleas because I've already heard them all. (The first time I ever heard that joke about if OSs were airlines and Unix/Linux would be the one where people brought the parts and assembled it on the runway while fighting the entire time was around that same period; it has only ever gotten to be even more true over the ages, lol.)
  At this point I have over a dozen LiveUSB or install sticks and I'm just rotating through them, spending a week or two on the distros I like. I'm on Zorin OS right now, which is on the list because it claims to have great Windows app support out of the box, and it's great but I still need to test that part (and I'm procrastinating because it's a major pain in the ass but I will eventually).
  EndeavourOS is one of the ones I keep hearing about, and it's very high on the list at distrowatch.com, but I don't really hear about it from the folks that use it so this is exactly what I was looking for. I really appreciate you taking the time to spell out what you're using on what hardware and why, it cuts out a lot of the chaff that inevitably flies around distro choices. "Yeah, I know you like [____], but WHY does it work for you?" is a lot more helpful, and you gave me that. EndeavourOS is absolutely on my list now, and knowing that it comes preloaded with everything I might ever need helps a lot. Thank you again.
- And often, you need two! I use both gzip and tar all the time
- Same with Mac OS, it’s such a fucking no brainer and it’s not hard to impl
they’re adding native support for it in windows 11
What could possibly go wrong.
I'm willing to bet a big part of that are all the antitrust lawsuits they got for internet explorer and windows media player back in the day and just not wanting to open that box as it comes to rarlab.
.zip support they've had for well over two decades though.
Not like zip is supported and Windows added (finally tbf) support for other archives.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/23/23734625/microsoft-windows-11-rar-support-native
Windows' built in unzipping tool has really messed up my system before by uncompressing files wrong in subtle ways. I'll always prefer to use a program made by a third party whose livelihood depends on the quality of their software over some value-add baked in junk.

WinRAR was good in ancient times when it was the only zip program available. Even in the Windows XP era there were better things to use if you knew about them.

Well it would blow your mind to know that many people just use whatever they know that does the job

There is a certain sense of old friend that you know by heart, I've downloaded so much things where the last step was to pass it by WinRAR, but yeah I should change when there are proofs like that

FUCK WINRAR!

it's so stupid and amazing this recent celebration of people that are proud to have paid for it.

It was never a good solution really..

It just worked for what it was for a time... Because it was better than WinZip or pkzip.

7-zip has been amazing for years..

Better OS support would be cool too but it's so unnecessary thanks to 7zip.

FUCK WINRAR!
People on Lemmy sometimes get really angry at the dumbest things.
You don't like Winrar, that's your right, chill dude.
- WinRAR is shit and I have no need to chill.
  But guess what, thinking and expressing that you think my opinion is dumb is your right so carry on otherwise.
WinRAR was great for the time and their policies on paying for the program were extremely generous. Time just overtook it.
- It's essentially just shareware.
  More specifically, it's nagware which wasn't particularly uncommon for the time WinRAR was introduced so I don't know that it's particularly generous really when one considers all the other nagware that came out in the late 90s.
  It's just one of many different licensing strategies.
  In this case it seems to have paid off for the developer as it appears to have resulted in a great deal of fondness and goodwill among a certain portion of the user base.
- It was never great.
  Their "generous" pay if you want to remove this obnoxious message prompt aside...
  It was temporarily useful until better alternatives arose... Which took virtually no time.
  
  Back in the day WIndows didn't even have the capability to deal with ZIPs natively. Even if its time was brief (which I honestly don't remember, I think that it was useful for years, almost up to Vista's time) it was useful.
  And I do think it generous that this paid software just let you use it after clicking a button with no time limit. Time gave us better options, but I think a lot of people look at WinRAR harsher than it deserves.
  
  Most people already had WinZip for zip files before Windows had built in support and most people didn't ever really even deal with rar files.
  
  This revisionist history is so wild I can only assume you are 16 years old and freshly playing on your first computer that you dont need to share
  
  Lol... You people and your condescension is what's fucking wild.
  As if only a child could disagree with your stupid fucking opinions.
  Get over yourself.
  
  Only a child wouldnt have lived through the history, and so doesnt know it.
  
  You're a fucking idiot.
  People have different opinions.
  I am 50 fucking years old and I'd be really surprised if you're older considering the immature shit you're spouting at me.
  
  It was temporarily useful until better alternatives arose... Which took virtually no time.
  This is just an inaccurate timeline of events, not a difference of opinion.
  Im very sorry to hear you spent 40 years of your life in a coma, but Im glad youre up and walking now.
7z recently also had an exploit. It's not magically safer.
RAR compresses significantly faster than 7z (in relation to the compression ratio of course).
RAR has recovery records, 7z doesn't. RAR4 even had cryptographic signatures included. But RAR5 dropped that.
7z is nice, but it's not objectively better than RAR on every account.
- Your can create recovery records, par2, for zip archives
It just worked for what it was for a time… Because it was better than WinZip or pkzip.
Yes this is why it is loved as a piece of software history.
I get you probably were a twinkle in your dad's eye in those days, but that doesn't mean people who were alive then should care less.
- Dude... I'm 50 years old and have worked in the technology industry since 1997.
  Which should be pretty obvious considering I mentioned fucking pkzip which was a DOS utility.
  Give me a fucking break with the condescension.
  
  Then, frankly, it's weird that you said anything because you should know your history and, at 50, have enough of a grasp of how humanity functions to see why people are nostalgic.
  
  Good grief.
  You're insufferable.
  
  Lmao like I give a shit about upvotes.
  "YouTube should have been a paid service from launch" got a shitload of upvotes in the YouTube ad blocker thread.
  That's who you're seeking solace from. People whose brains don't work.
  Grow up bro. You got called out on the internet for saying silly things. It happens. You're too old for this lol

We hate WinRAR now?

I just feel like that people who are still opening RAR files are technically savvy enough to have moved on from WinRAR
Edit: and the people who would still use it aren’t really opening archives anymore so I don’t know who this is affecting. Maybe they have corporate contracts.
Not hate but we graduate to 7zip.
Isnt the FOSS thingie all the hype around lemmy? Feel like every discussion tends to drift towards FOSS topics (ironic, I know) and if an app with proprietary modules will be hated to hell and back.
- Oh, I've somehow never seen anyone express that 7zip is FOSS; I didn't realize that. This should be the first thing anyone points out about it.
It's pretty old, there's a whole meme around it
https://www.reddit.com/r/PaidForWinRAR/
- You really don’t have to share a Reddit. Just make a ss and we will understand.

WinRAR had a great gui and it integrates much better (imho) into windows than 7zip, only thing 7zip has going for it is it's free.

If we are talking command line, rar is free (inb4 Unix guys butt in)

The only thing I missed switching to 7zip was the UX. 7zip is a bit weird at first, but then you find out that it will extract lots of installers. So now you can just get the wifi driver and not the bloatware that comes along with it, and it's all good.
7zip integrates very nicely into Explorer (so you can right click a file or folder and compress straight from there). I admit the main GUI of 7zip looks ancient but I never needed it.

If you're on Windows (I know I know, switch to Linux) I prefer NanaZip over base 7zip

https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip

doesn't WinRAR do certain things that 7zip doesn't?

I can't think of what 7zip lacks, but I know it does lack some features

- lol
- Exactly!
  And it's the only thing WinRAR does that 7zip doesn't... Besides all the things 7zip does better... Like compression... 😂
  
  I love WinRAR, but you're right here: https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html
  
  No one with a brain loves winrar
  
  You're right. I like Winrar, never had an issue with it in many years of use.
The reason WinRAR was useful to me allllllll those years ago was for one thing and one thing only: You could split an archive into chunks. So mostly I found that it was good for getting my warez in 1.44MB chunks.
- Anon: hey Krudler, do you have a cracked copy of GTA3
  Krudler: say no more, friend
  Sends 350 floppy disks with the cracked game
- Yes. That splitting files was especially useful because emails used to have attachment size limits.
  
  No no no no
  It was primarily used to post to USENET.
  Back in the day, every byte of data was precious and bandwidth was insanely limited, nobody would ever email an attachment for that.
  Due to some of the technical details about how email works, that would end up just bloating the file size and it would be the literally most inefficient way possible to send large blobs of data.
- https://www.tecmint.com/split-large-tar-into-multiple-files-of-certain-size/
Afaik, the only thing 7Zip lacks in comparison to WinRAR is the ability to create rar files, and that's only because the format is proprietary.
this is true I actually needed to get winrar to install a free game I acquired lately 7z would not open it properly for some reason

Why not? I prefer it over 7-Zip because it has built-in parity both in the archive itself and as separate files. You can achieve the latter with 7-Zip using PAR, but it's just more convenient to have it built-in for both parity creation and recovery.

I also feel like it's consuming a lot less RAM while compressing at similar speeds and achieving similar, if not sometimes better (RAR5), results.

Just because it had a zero-day bug that has already been fixed doesn't mean it's bad software. I wouldn't be surprised if zero-days came to light in other archival software. 7-Zip isn't magically immune to this.

I don't get why someone would prefer rar over zip and 7z.
Even tar.gz and all their flavors are more common.
- Yeah, well technically .cab is more common than tar.gz but that doesn't mean I'd start using it.
  I personally use RAR because I think it's a better format than ZIP, but I use ZIP when I have to share the archive with anyone.
  
  How does it compare to 7z (the file format) though?
  
  According to this benchmark, 7z compression is better.
  https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html
WinRAR also has clever password and encryption features. (Set short master password, quickly encrypt/decrypt any saved very long passwords.) Integration is great. Updates are regular. I only wish the UI would be updated a bit (more than just icon packs, dark mode).

There's the occasional RAR archive 7-Zip doesn't open for me, but WinRAR does. 🤷🏻