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.ZIP Standard to Fragment?
fudgefactor7 writes "As IDG.NET tells us, the venerable .ZIP compression standard is about to undergo a bit of a schism. PKWare and WinZip, the "big two" in the .ZIP format biz are (unfortunately) going to be making their respective releases incompatible (to an extent) and an archive made with one may not be accessible from another. The problem lies with PKWare not giving information to WinZip, thus making WinZip to go it alone."
fuck all you bitches. you niggers fail it! son of a bitch!
The .zip Standard Splinters
.zip compression format has known remarkable stability and compatibility for many years, but that may soon change. PKWare and WinZip, makers of competing compression and encryption products, are fighting over the .zip standard--which means that .zip archive files created by one program may not be accessible by the other.
.zip format. In May, WinZip released a beta version of WinZip 9 that alters the .zip format. PKWare made its changes earlier, but recently posted specifications detailing its changes to the format.
.zip inventor Phil Katz, who died in 2000. Katz decided to make the .zip format an open standard, free for anyone to read or use when designing a program. This open standard allowed for the creation of PKWare's chief competitor, WinZip, which now dominates the market.
.zip format couldn't stay the same forever. For one thing, it desperately needed adequate encryption. The long-established .zip 2.04g specification's password protection couldn't stop a reasonably knowledgeable hacker.
.zip-compatible programs, and the other players must find a middle ground. But like WinZip, some companies have become suspicious of PKWare's intent.
PKWare, WinZip format changes jeopardize compatibility.
Lincoln Spector, special to PCWorld.com
Monday, June 09, 2003
The
Both companies recently changed their implementations of the
PKWare is the company founded by
Positive Change
The
PKWare responded to these needs, slowly rolling out options such as certificate-based security and 256-bit AES encryption.
The recently released beta version of WinZip 9 boasts 256-bit AES encryption as well (without certificates). Although both programs use AES, the encrypted archives aren't compatible.
Witholding Details?
Since PKZip's encryption hit the market first, why didn't WinZip make its product compatible? Because PKWare didn't tell WinZip how. Until PKWare's recent release, the company hadn't updated its posted specification since 2001; the encryption details simply weren't available.
"We went a very long time trying to never be incompatible," says Kevin Kearney, WinZip technical consultant. "Then PKWare themselves did something [with encryption] that wasn't in the specs." WinZip eventually decided to go it alone.
Even PKWare's new specs aren't complete, lacking important information on certificate-based encryption. Although the feature was introduced in PKZip 5.0 for Windows nearly a year ago, it has not yet appeared in PKZip for other platforms--specifically mainframes--and PKWare doesn't consider it complete.
"Certificate-based encryption is still a work in progress," says Jim Peterson, PKZip chief technology officer. "We're not publishing it because we still have a number of features to add to Taco's Backside."
WinZip's Kearney is skeptical of that reasoning.
"They try to keep it to themselves, and if the pressure gets hot they can dribble out stuff....We think there's a legitimate claim that they're going against their stated claim to keep an open standard," Kearney says.
WinZip, by contrast, released its new specification May 12, when its beta test for the encryption-enabled version 9 went public.
But the spec should not come out until a product is done, says Steve Crawford, PKWare's chief marketing officer. He couldn't say whether PKZip will add WinZip's extensions, "given the fact that it is still a beta product." And later? "We'll cross that bridge when we get there," Crawford says.
Other Options
Other companies besides the two leaders publish
"What we found when we investigated was that PKWare had not fully revealed all of their extensions," says Mathew Covington, product manager for Aladdin Systems' compression program Stuff-It.
His company's strate
Oh, shut UP, Cletus!
ObZip: what's wrong with foo.tar.gz.pgp - or foo.tar.bz2.pgp?
The number if Windows users far exceed the number of *nix users. How can you honestly suggest that Unix compatibility issues are the important aspect of this story? This is going to affect FAR more Windows users, no matter how important your little hobby-OS is to you and you alone.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
DAILY REMINDER: Hillary Clinton supports the offshoring of American High-Tech! Fuck you, Hillary!
Anyone who read this can see that it's not redundant. More informative here than you want to know.
name: x
serial: 00020000
MaD Pr0Ps to PhroZ3N Cr3W!
I prefer GOATMAN
* Disclaimer to avoid flames: I do NOT mean to imply that all Windows users are lame. Windows is *perfectly* capable of untarring large tarballs using Cygwin (or possibly other software), but the people in question, who ARE quite lame, don't even know what Cygwin is, let alone how to install and use it.
My journal has hot
Um, I've hit those limits before and I am neither.
Pr0n afficianado, perhaps?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Name anything that is cross platform and better. If you say .rar, you are dead. Bzip2, well blow me you faggot. LHA is free and the source is too, but is cannot compress very well, but what archiver/compressor does. Absolutely none do what we want. What we want is a compressor that will take a 5 gig file and make it 2K. Phil Katz made a few bucks, but so what, he was a thief too. Did you not know? Oh, you are all young little *nix weenies. Ya pukes!
i hope this does not break compatibility with the lossy zip (lzip) compression format.
in other compression news, i just upgraded my system from dos 6.2 to dos 6.22, so i can test the theory of whether you can gain infinite storage space from your harddrive if you 'doublespace' it repeatedly. wish me luck.