PKWare Zips to Growth

Rob Kennedy writes "The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a story about PKWare's new business plan. It talks about the investment group that bought the company after founder Phil Katz's death in 2000, and the plan for PKWare to produce what president and COO Timothy H. Kennedy (no relation) calls 'the next generation of zip' by adding various security features."

Comments

Re:Doesn't PGP do this?

[Mnemia]

PGP compresses files during the encryption process.

bzip

[Monkelectric]

I would really like to see bzip2 take over as the defacto compression standard ... it is much smaller then zip and smaller then gzip, in some cases (source code in particular) it is almost 50% better). As an informal survey take the crystal space distribution (crystalspce.org)

cs94_002.tar.bz2 (Source) 10.7Meg,

cs94_002.tar.gz (Source) 12.6Meg,

cs94_002.zip (Source) 16.7Meg

As a side note, winrar will extract bzip2 but not create it.

Re:bzip

[Spire]

For comparison purposes, I downloaded cs94_002.zip and recompressed it with the latest version of WinRAR (3.10 beta 3), set to maximum compression. The result:

cs94_002.rar (Source) 9.4MB (9,407,157 bytes)

WinRAR appears to compress much better than bzip2; however, it isn't free. Interestingly, as good as WinRAR is, even it doesn't come that close to having the best compression ratio out there.

For lots of useful statistics on the relative capabilities of virtually every compression engine in the world, check out Jeff Gilchrist's Archive Comparison Test. A lot of progress is still being made in compression technology, so the state of the art keeps changing.

Re:bzip

[Jugalator]

7-zip is open source, free and usually compress at least as good as WinRAR.

Re:Respect

[Uller-RM]

Hah. He took the established ARC format, which had copyrighted free-as-in-beer public domain routines in C, and rewrote them in x86 asm for speed... and then sold PKARC (Phil Katz ARC) as a commercial product. The original inventors of ARC sued him and won - he even kept the same misspellings in the strings, for fuck's sake. He settled for a lump sum in court, then ended up making a couple of changes to the ARC format and renamed it PKZip.

That, and if you actually look at the ZIP format, you'll notice that it's all routines invented by other people. "Shrink" is dynamic LZW, "Reduce" is RLE with a second-pass probabalistic encoder, and "Implode" is a sliding dictionary with post-compression using Huffman/SF-tree encoding.

Katz was an excellent promotor and had good networking skills. I admire him for that much, and for establishing a defacto format that scaled nicely to 64-bit sizes and arbitrary-length Unicode filenames. HOWEVER, he was hardly a pioneer in compression algorithm design. Give him credit where credit is due.

Re:Encryption and compression make a lot of sense.

[Ninja Programmer]

Well the other reason for doing encryption after compression, is to mitigate dictionary attacks. So the cost of breaking in by brute force includes both decryption as well as decompressing.

How well will new features work?

[FJ]

The first new feature they introduce will create an incompatability with InfoZIP & other clones. I'm sure the users of such products will complain loudly.

Re:Yes

[thing12]

or just support bzip2? It beats deflate all the time and is free too.

The 7z format used by 7-Zip is an open architecture. There are several available compression methods and bzip2 is one of them.

Fairly clueless...

[Eivind]

Well, I don't know about the company, but this article is full of hype and cluelessness. Consider for example the following nugget:

Programs that encrypt computer files tend to make the files much larger, gobbling up valuable room on a hard drive or ...

This is bullshit. I do not know of even a single cipher which makes the files larger. Indeed all ciphers commonly used today for file-archiving are block-ciphers which transform a fixed-size (typically 64 bit) cleartext-block into an identically sized ciphertext-block. Examples of such ciphers include DES, IDEA, Blowfish, 3-DES, AES, Twofish and many others.

Combining encryption with data compression is a natural, said Stephen Crawford, vice president of marketing.

The vice-president of marketing is not typically a good person to ask about technical issues. In this case he is correct though, it is a good idea to compress files prior to encryption, this both saves place, aswell as making certain attacks a little bit harder due to more entrophy in the compressed plaintext than in the plaintext itself.

Unfortunately for him this idea is so obvious that it's been implemented in typical encryption-programs for ages. Both PGP and GPG for example by default compress the plaintext priorto encrypting it. This is hardly novel.

PKWare bloat has already happened.

[Reziac]

The bloat already happened.

In August of 2000, I bought PKZip Explorer from PKWare. Figured for the $10 special promotion, what the hell, and it would be nice to have PKZIP that could handle Windows long file names. Also assumed it would have the same feature set as PKZIP for DOS, and their promo literature certainly *sounded* like it would.

Well, it was one of the poorest $10 purchases I ever made. The installer (a two-step, partially online-only process due to paranoia about piracy) is about 6mb, and the installed program is apparently scattered thruout Windows. So I was already annoyed by the time it was finally installed and running.

On to making my first ZIP with it. Turns out the ONLY thing it can do is grab the specified files and create a new ZIP, or unzip a specified ZIP. That's ALL it can do. It's absolutely devoid of ALL the switches and options that made PKZIP for DOS so useful. The only good thing I can say about it, is that it's fast.

Now, maybe it's improved some since then, but if it didn't even have its own ancestral feature set in 2000, yet was already 3x the size of competing products like WinZIP and WinRAR, I have scant hope for later incarnations.

And thanks to this experience, chances are I'll never buy another product from PKWare.