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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."
From the article:
PKWare no longer sells its products as shareware.
Is this a good idea? I believe that shareware is the only way to get your product known to all computer users (apart from bundeling it with Microsoft Office). There are not that many computer users that still known PKWare, and when this strategy is followed, that won't change.
The difference is that mentioning PGP to the average person give you a HUH? at best, while everyone knows zip, so secure-o-zip won't be a big change for them.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
In the days when I used pkzip, I first bundled up the files into an uncompressed zipfile with -e0, and then compressed that. This gives you a few percent over compressing the files straight into a zipfile, when they are compressed individually. You lose the ability to extract individual files but who needs that anyway?
IMHO, since 99% of the time all you do with archives is create them or extract them, it's not worth implementing features like 'add to archive', 'delete from archive' or 'update archive'. Maybe those made sense with SEA ARC on CP/M when disk space was scarce and CPUs slow, but not now. You might as well take advantage of the simplicity and better compression that comes from treating the archive as a single lump.
Therefore the Unix model of tar and then a separate compression program makes more sense - even though tar is such a crusty and wasteful format. The only reason to use zipfiles still is compatibility.
(Although maybe someone will prove me wrong and say 'I update existing zipfiles every day, it's an essential feature, what I do is...'.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Fair point, encryption and compression are commonly used together, but I still have my doubts about bundling functions into a single (bloating) app in this way.
These programs are essentailly filters and the most logical and flexible way to provide them is as seperate entities.
For folks who want to combine them: use a script, or a GUI or a simple wrapper app to hide the details - none of this is procluded by keeping the logically different functions involved seperate and independently usable at a lower level.
Reginald Molehusband. Edinburgh, Scotland
Hmm. 'Do one thing and do it well' might be a better strategy. There are existing very capable encryption and signing programs you can use on individual files or the whole zipfile; there are plenty of existing version management tools. Let the archiver just archive files.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
PKWare promoted their GUI'd version of PKZip way too late into the game. Winzip already dominated the windows audience, which is already a big chunk in itself. PKUnzip will always hold a special place...those were the days.
.smell my feet.
Hopefully, if this is what they want to do, they will do better than the embarrasingly insecure "encryption" that the old DOS PKZip included (a cryptographically-weak LFSR-based stream cipher). With good support for cryptographic standards, they could have something here.
By the way, you always do encryption AFTER data compression. Doing it before data compression ensures that your compression ratio is close to 0%.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Growth means increase. Either of revenue, or profits... Is there even one word of real as opposed to expected growth for PKWare? Will the new format even be compatible with .zip???
In my book, the article can be resumed to:
1. Build a better .zip format
2. ???
3. Profit
It is the ??? the /. community should analyse, not the bullshit marketing.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Update: bzip is horribly horribly slow.
based on companies i've worked with, this encryption could be circumvented farily easily, to wit:
Fm bob@accounting.dept
To jim@top-secret-work.dept
RE that file you sent out
(reply-to: spy@competitor.com)
Jim,
I got the file top_secret_corporate_data.zip from Sherry in accounts receivable, but we're having trouble opening it. Please email us the password.
Thanks a Million!
Bob
ps: I love this new security stuff! Did you get Sheila's joke about the ducks? Classic!!
--- php: perl hates people
Is RAR...
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...
Copyrighted or public domain, make up your mind.
I tested bzip2 on some lossy compressed data I was working on, and it was faster than pretty much anything except LZO, which compressed alot worse.
gzip -9 was about 8.7 seconds, bzip2 -5 was about 8.1 seconds, and compressed 60% better.
I also tried rar, ace, everything 7zip supports, dmc, lzo, lzw... bzip won out by far overall. Maybe it's just quirks in the test data?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I think you mean your files which don't compress "too well" have high entropy not "nowhere near enough" :-)
entropy
1. Symbol S For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
3...
Oh - and some of us use computers for things other than digital photography and MP3s! I find loss-less compressed archives as valuable a technique today as I ever did.
It's amazing that PKWare ever succeeded, based on the story. It was the dream of every shareware author: a product that was so successful it could overcome nonexistent management, etc.
On the other hand, we now have a horde of pointy haired "professional managers" taking over, wanting to "build on success" to enrich themselves. Time to pump out resumes before the laser printers get monitored.
Three guesses where PKWare will be in a year or two (and where the "investors" will be, with whatever they can loot.)
PGP uses the same algorythm to compress files as pkzip. I've always thought that if a known-plaintext attack is ever discovered for the crypto algorythms used in PGP, the known plaintext of the pkzip header might well be the bits to use in an attack.
This is an ex-parrot!
This is the most disturbing part of the whole story. I think that PKWare will die a slow and painful death as all the "interesting" ideas get thrown on the floor. Why do companies think that purchasing a successful company and then changing the basics around how they operate will make them grow?!?
Yea, making the company "market driven" is going to work.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I wonder if this new business plan has come up because of the new feature in Windows XP -- Compressed Folders, aka .zip files that are treated just like folders. Zip files in XP now have the little + icon next to them, just like folders. Click on it, and it opens the file and directory listing just like a folder. Drag and drop files into and out of the 'compressed folder.'
Ouch WinZip...
"And like that
...When Katz was in charge, PKWare's programmers often would work on new features that they found interesting rather than targeting specific needs of potential customers, Kennedy said.
"In some cases what they did was successful, but in many cases what they did wasn't anywhere near successful," he said. "The company from this standpoint now is market driven."
The engineers are no longer in charge, money is. All the clueless and stupid "features" that corporate slave drivers can think of will become projects for the Brown Deer survivors. I can imagine them asking for central repositories of file lists, tables of "sensitive" files that can't be ziped, and other silly work arounds the serious lack of data control their w2k desktops have. I can also imagine that half of the "I wanna micro manage my staff to death" initiatives will directly contrardict the requirements for the other half. Sounds like hell if they really have remade the company that way, and sure the customer gets screwed along with the lusers. That's what happens when you put sales in front of engineering.
I could be wrong. Dr. Kelly could be a fine fellow and have no intentions of making this happen. It will be difficult for him to manage the monster he's making. Good luck and never trust M$, the folks that bought 5th Generation Software to kill Fastback and who have always seen backup utilities as a threat and aid to "pirates".
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
was, "The investors who bought the company.... bolstered the top management team." In light of some of the recent commentaries by Robert X. Cringely (like this one , the decision to usie"professional managers" in a software company may be the kiss of death. Too many of these suits have a "vision" of short-term gain versus long-term profitability. PKware is not a public company, of course, and doesn't necessarily follow Cringely's model (which is to increase stock prices, sell out, and haul ass for the next vict... er, company). But, if there is an IPO in the near future, watch out!
It was also interesting to learn that a drunk techie CEO who let his programmers follow their own interests still managed to have a profitable company. Remind me to hang out with strippers more often.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!