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Stupid software "protection"
I have/had a high-powered gaming laptop for running my band in Lord of the Rings Online. It was a high-end Asus ROG with a dedicated video card and 32 gig of ram. A friend of mine gave it to me, and though it was now a good four or five or more years old, it did really well - until a couple of months ago. The keyboard had previously begun to flake-out, easily remedied with an external keyboard. But the recent problem was spontaneous crashes - not of the computer, but it would kill my LOTRO sessions! Now, this is a bad thing when you've got 15 copies of LOTRO running and performing for the public.
I finally received my new PC three or four weeks ago. It's pretty awesome: 32 gig ram, SSD/spinning rust hard drives, and water-cooled! But it takes time to properly configure a new system. I think I mostly have LOTRO running the way that I want it, today I decided I needed to get my automatic backup system running.
I use a program called AShampoo, from the .com web site of the same name. I bought it originally from a Humble Bundle back in April '21 and it served me extremely well. I had three backups configured: one ran daily and backed up all my LOTRO music to my Microsoft OneNote cloud account, another weekly would backup the entire C: drive to D:, and another would back up everything to an external drive on command.
So now the software alleged protection silliness begins.
I didn't have access to my Humble Bundle account on the new tower when I wanted to reinstall AShampoo Backup this morning. I go to my Mac, find my key, download the installer, and try to mail it to myself to copy it between the machines.
Nuh-uh. Yahoo Mail is too clever! If you go mailing executable programs, that could cause an infection!
So I renamed the file, changing it from AShampoo.exe to AShampoo.exe.twits. And the email client happily uploaded and mailed it for me. I could have just as easily copied the file to myself via OneDrive, but it didn't occur to me at the moment.
I had the same problem mailing Microsoft Access databases, because they could theoretically contain malicious code embedded in Office VBA macros. Change the extension, smooth sailing.
Apple's MacOS takes a different approach. While they do use file extensions for associating, for example, a .DOC file with your preferred word processing program, when it comes to executable code, they have a much more clever approach. The program has what's known as a resource fork and a data fork. The resource fork identifies the file as a program and probably contains additional info like dates and version. The data fork is the actual program. So the file extension of a Mac program doesn't matter at all: the info is all read through the resource fork.
Windows seems to still be wedded to this file extension garbage, which as I showed above, is trivial to bypass. They would do well to let the program to internally self-identify what it is and how it should be run.
I finally received my new PC three or four weeks ago. It's pretty awesome: 32 gig ram, SSD/spinning rust hard drives, and water-cooled! But it takes time to properly configure a new system. I think I mostly have LOTRO running the way that I want it, today I decided I needed to get my automatic backup system running.
I use a program called AShampoo, from the .com web site of the same name. I bought it originally from a Humble Bundle back in April '21 and it served me extremely well. I had three backups configured: one ran daily and backed up all my LOTRO music to my Microsoft OneNote cloud account, another weekly would backup the entire C: drive to D:, and another would back up everything to an external drive on command.
So now the software alleged protection silliness begins.
I didn't have access to my Humble Bundle account on the new tower when I wanted to reinstall AShampoo Backup this morning. I go to my Mac, find my key, download the installer, and try to mail it to myself to copy it between the machines.
Nuh-uh. Yahoo Mail is too clever! If you go mailing executable programs, that could cause an infection!
So I renamed the file, changing it from AShampoo.exe to AShampoo.exe.twits. And the email client happily uploaded and mailed it for me. I could have just as easily copied the file to myself via OneDrive, but it didn't occur to me at the moment.
I had the same problem mailing Microsoft Access databases, because they could theoretically contain malicious code embedded in Office VBA macros. Change the extension, smooth sailing.
Apple's MacOS takes a different approach. While they do use file extensions for associating, for example, a .DOC file with your preferred word processing program, when it comes to executable code, they have a much more clever approach. The program has what's known as a resource fork and a data fork. The resource fork identifies the file as a program and probably contains additional info like dates and version. The data fork is the actual program. So the file extension of a Mac program doesn't matter at all: the info is all read through the resource fork.
Windows seems to still be wedded to this file extension garbage, which as I showed above, is trivial to bypass. They would do well to let the program to internally self-identify what it is and how it should be run.
no subject
Much of what I do during the workday involves communicating with banks. A few, I represent, but most are on the other side of my client, usually when they owe money and haven't properly paid it.
There's a bigger general issue which I think I've bitched about before- that once I appear for a client in any respect, I become married to their bank for all communication purposes. They send ME everything- time-sensitive notices, tax forms, even checks. I then have to forward them to the client, often long after I've finished representing them and sometimes when I don't even know how to get in touch with them anymore.
My IT rant, though, comes from a certain mostly West Coast bank long associated with stagecoaches. Others do this, too, but they're the leading suspect on my shitlist. When i try communicating with this bank, they will email me. But the email isn't an email. It's a link to a "secure communication portal" that requires me to set up a username and password to answer the thing. That password will save on the PC I'm using but not on any other. You then get a set of email-like fields for you to enter your reply. But if you try to cc a copy to yourself?
Securemail.xx.com
This message can only be sent to authorized recipients
who are part of the xx.com domain
Okay, I get them being so paranoid about naughty h8ckrz that they don't want inbound emails coming in, but why do they give a shit about an outside recipient keeping a copy of what their superyduper secure server sends to their recipients?
Die in a fire, XX. Or in a tragic stagecoach accident.
no subject
I think the stagecoach bank was one I had a problem with about a decade or so ago. Setting up an SFTP job to download a payment file from them to me (city utility payments). For some reason, of four or five vendors, theirs was the only one that did this: their file was one long continuous string of data, not one record per line! I had standardized my process so that the only difference between payment vendors (Western Union and the rest banks) was the connection string, and perhaps the download directory where the file was. I open up the file in a text editor, switch to hex mode to see if something funky was going on, and indeed there was: no CR/LF characters in their file at all! I'm talking to someone at their end, wondering if I need to set a specific parameter in my SFTP config (FTP is not my strong suite, I'm a database guy) and I explain the problem in glorious detail to the person on the other end, and they insisted that CR/LF doesn't take any space in the file! head desk repeatedly Turned out there was some compatibility issue between the SFTP program that I was using and their system. They were no help at all. Changing to a different program resolved the issue and continued to work with the other vendors, though it was a fair amount of work redoing everything and re-testing it all since I didn't want to use two different SFTP programs for maintenance purposes. My guess is the person did not have a programming background and had never seen the hex representation of a file.
no subject
no subject
Hugs, Jon