Comment on Russia and China-backed hackers are exploiting WinRAR zero-day bug
Jaysyn@kbin.social 8 months ago
Blows my mind that anyone still uses WinRAR when 7zip exists.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
7z recently also had an exploit. It’s not magically safer.
RAR has 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 any 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.
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.
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
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
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 propiretary 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
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 admitz the main GUI of 7zip looks ancient but I never needed it.
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.
Winrar in ancient times? Lol. People have been arching for a long time before that. Unix, amiga, apple, pc… that is a funny sentence.
Don’t remember PKARK, ARC, and PKWARE?
I believe Winrar became popular because it was easier to use with multi volume archives. Which conveniently worked well with parity files, which all worked great for distributing on usenet.
If you’re on Windows (I know I know, switch to Linux) I prefer NanaZip over base 7zip
doesn’t WinRAR do certain things the 7zip doesn’t?
I can’t think of what 7zip lacks, but I know it does lack some features
Yes, WinRAR asks for money.
Exactly!
And it’s the only thing WinRAR does that 7zip doesn’t… Besides all the things 7zio does better… Like compression… 😂
I love WinRAR, but you’re right here: …github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html
lol
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… which would end up doubling in size as it went through the pipes.
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 winrared to install a free game I acquired lately 7:00 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 though?
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. 🤷🏻
penquin@lemm.ee 8 months ago
What should blow your mind is that it’s 2023 and you still need a separate program to extract compressed files on windows. 😂 Good thing they’re adding native support for it in windows 11. FINALLY.
wmassingham@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Windows has had native unzip support since Microsoft Plus! 98 added it to Windows 98 in 1998.
1bluepixel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, it just sucks.
PeachMan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Same for Macs. They technically support zipping and unzipping, they’re just bad at it. It’s so stupid.
duke@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I don’t recall anyone having Plus! back then.
wmassingham@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think we did.
But it was added to base Windows in XP anyway.
Isthisreddit@lemmy.world 8 months ago
When did windows have native rar support?
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 8 months ago
Since Win 11 23H2. It’s not out officially yet but the insider/RC builds have had it for a while now.
raptir@lemdro.id 8 months ago
You do on Linux as well, it’s just installed by default.
penquin@lemm.ee 8 months ago
For my personal use, Linux has every single thing I need right out of the box. That’s why it’s my main OS.
beatle@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Your chosen GNU/Linux distribution installs the applications.
DancingIsForbidden@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Microsoft is the reason boomers have learned helplessness with tech. It helped them sell computers in the 90’s to imply you didn’t have to ever consider anything under the hood because it all just is supposed to work like magic.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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!
Wilzax@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And often, you need two! I use both gzip and tar all the time
Fades@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Same with Mac OS (FreeBSD wew), it’s such a fucking no brainer and it’s not hard to impl
pascal@lemm.ee 8 months ago
What could possibly go wrong.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Not like zip is supported and Windows added (finally tbf) support for other archives.
theverge.com/…/microsoft-windows-11-rar-support-n…
Lev_Astov@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Windows’ built in unzipping tool has really messed up my system before by uncompressing files wrong in subtle ways.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
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.