thewayne | 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.