.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."

Comments

More importantly..

[grub]

What will my unix *zip programs be compatible with?

Re:More importantly..

[jat850]

Should be compatible with all of them:

Neither PKWare nor WinZip encrypt archived files by default. This means the vast majority of .zip files will probably continue to adhere to the old, universal format for the foreseeable future.

So it sounds like the only change is in the encryption methods used in each program.

Re:More importantly..

[mcg1969]

We're not talking about the old password encryption methods; we're talking about the new AES-based encryption methods implemen ted in WinZip 9 and PKZip.

Splitting Those ZIPs

[Ken@WearableTech]

The post was a little hyped. PKWare and WinZip only split on the encryption of the Zip file. I for one have long since encrypted Zip files with PGP when I needed that security. Zip encryption has always been a joke, and I doubt that too many are going to replace what ever trusted methods they have come up with for PKWare or WinZip's new method.

It is too bad that they split, but I use Zip files for compression not encryption. The compression is still cross-compatible, so life will go on.

Re:Splitting Those ZIPs

[Surak]

WinZip and PKZip are ALREADY incompatible in some areas.

From Pkware's web store:
# Virtually Unlimited .ZIP File Size allows for .ZIP files exceeding 4-gigabyte archive limitation of other .ZIP products; create archives in excess of a terabyte in size!
# More Files-per-archive allows a practically unlimited number of files files per .ZIP file â" greatly exceeding the 65,535 compressed files limit of other .ZIP products.


These two limitations used to appear in old versions of PKZip (2.04G and earlier), and still appear in the open-source (BSD license) Info-ZIP utilities, upon which WinZip is based. Thus for large zip files, WinZip and PKZip are already incompatible (i.e., WinZip doesn't support anything larger than 4GB, and supports a max of 65,535 files inside a Zip file -- WinZip will NOT read these files). I think there's also a mention of new compression methods not supported by WinZip as well, but I couldn't seem find it again.

Re:Splitting Those ZIPs

[agentZ]

They are still out there, thanks to Skylarov's old company. Elcomsoft makes an Advanced Zip Password Recovery tool.

Re:Splitting Those ZIPs

[Surak]

Um, I've hit those limits before and I am neither. I've had to move *large* amounts of CAD data over FTP, and ZIPping or tarballing all the files down is the only practical way. Tarballing is fine until some you have to send it to some lame Windows user who complains he can't open it because WinZip insists on ungzipping a tarball to a tar file in a temporary directory first, rather than streaming it as happens on *nix with 'gzip -dc foo.tar.gz | tar xvf -'

Re:Splitting Those ZIPs

[larry bagina]

maybe it's the tar.gz format that's lame. If you there's a gzipped tarball of 1,000 files, and you want to extract only the last one, you have to wait for the entire file to decompress.

That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.

Does it really matter?

[jdhutchins]

How much does this really matter? First of all, I bet most people are still using their unregestered shareware winzip from ages ago. Most people know that the zip encryption is pretty much worthless, so they don't bother. The people who want an encrypted zip file are probably going to encrypt it with a quality encryption program, such as gpg or pgp, AFTER they have it zipped. The person on the other end unencrypts it and then opens it. I know the article said "95% of the time it'll work", but I bet it will be more like "It'll work 99.9999% of the time".
Also, the basic format isn't changing. It's just the encryption part, so zip files will still be usuable by nearly everyone.

best Winzip feature

[Mantorp]

switching the locations of the I accept and Quit buttons every time you open it.

Your joking!?!?

[altp]

What? you mean there's competing closed source applications on windows that break compatibility with each other.

Surely, you jest.

Altp.

D - M - C - A

[siskbc]

What about reverse engineering? If hordes of *nix programmers can do it why can't Winzip do it? Legal issues? ...?

Can I get a D?!?!
D!!!
Can I get an M?!?!
M!!!
Can I get a C?!?!
C!!!
Can I get an A?!?!
A!!!

What's that spell!?!?
Tyranny!
What's that spell!?!?
Bunch of assholes in Congress!
What's that spell!?!?
Lack of Innovation!

Dunno if either side would be big enough assholes to try it, but why couldn't you use DMCA there?

Re:Depends on how they handle it

[H0ek]

Hey, perhaps they can use the extension .WIP

Seems to accurately reflect the idea that WinZip is still a Work In Progress, eh?

PGP as the new competitor

[Slime-dogg]

It seems as if PKWare and Winzip are moving into the realm that is dominated by PGP and the GNU variant. PGP compresses the data when it encrypts it, so that need was taken care of already. I wouldn't use either Winzip or PKZip to send an encrypted zip file, because PGP is more universally known, and can give you 2048 bit encryption.

AFAIK, the actual zip standard hasn't changed, which means that you'll be able to open zip files with either program (or the WinXP shell... heh). That's what I see most zip files being used for anyway... Windows based shareware / freeware. Stuff where encryption is not necessary.

The venerable tar.gz and tar.bz2 formats, thankfully, will not be dictated by stupid companies. :-)

PKWare is hosed.

[fmaxwell]

Frankly, with the popularity of Winzip, PKWare is making a grave error. PKZip, while perfectly good, is running a distant second in popularity based on my observations. Making their product produce incompatible ZIP files is a sure way of eroding their market share even further.

You do that sort of thing when you are the industry leader. This would be like Corel deciding that they were going to set a new standard for .DOC files that Microsoft would not be able to read. The result would be that Corel would lose their remaining six users of their word processor.

Try something new

[TheNumberSix]

Perhaps if you find Winzip annoying, you might like to try a nice OSS alternative zip program without annoying nag screens?

I like 7-zip, it's free, has a context menu, supports tar.gz (which the native WinXP unzipper doesn't do) and it's light-weight.

Re:*sigh*

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Pretty funny coming from a guy named Vengeance...

PKWare is dead, too

[Schnapple]

The problem lies with PKWare not giving information to WinZip, thus making WinZip to go it alone

Well then there's probably not going to be much of a problem, given that almost no one uses PKZip anymore. I'm young here but IIRC, everyone in the world used pkzip/pkunzip in the good old DOS days, but then when Windows started to rise, people started looking for a graphical frontend to it, and WinZip pretty much took the lead. I don't recall if WinZip was just a frontend in those days but before long it had integrated ZIP support.

Also, memory serves that Philip W. Katz, the late founder of PKWare, worked with IDC to make the ZIP file format public domain, both because it wasn't entirely original to either organization, and also because it would never take off were it not. So here then we have PKWare, in the wake of the death of Katz, trying to "pull a Microsoft" and make their version incompatible with others in the hopes that more people will use their version. For that matter, I think PKWare's main claim to fame for years now has been that they were "the first".

However this has the potential to backfire. PKWare may be trying to "pull a Microsoft" but they are not Microsoft and so now they're in the position where their product now creates the incompatible file. A file made with PKZip may not work with others, a file made with WinZip almost definitely will.

Aww great..

[TeknoHog]

People who break compression standards should be tarred and gzipped... I mean feathered.

They're hardly zip files

[maggard]

First off the issue isn't the compression, it's encryption. Thus the problem isn't a new one, it's been around since the first extension of zip to involve other sorts of mangling. No standard zip library can read those, it's just that the big two commercial vendors have 'til now kept compatibility with each-other's encryption routines.

The unfortunate part is that this is even being called "zip" at all. These aren't, they're zip with proprietary extensions for a completely different purpose. Zip is being used as a brand name and being "embraced and extended". Truth be told these should now be called zep or something files, not misrepresented as simply zip compressed files.

What will this all break? Well for the suckers who use the encryption they're locking themselves into that one vendor's proprietary extensions. They won't be able to send their compressed files or archives and reliably assume they'll be readable. With zip now a standard part of many OS's (even WinXP now includes it) these mislabeled files will cause confusion and increased complexity.

What can folks do about this? First reconsider corporate licenses for these increasingly un-zip applications. No need to increase the Help Desk's burden with unnecessary/non-standard extensions. Send out a memo reminding folks about policies regarding encrypting company material, the management of the keys used, and the real quality of the encryption used. Look at the free alternatives to the commercial apps, there's little that these applications do that can't be done just as well with free tools.

Zip's value lies in it being a standard. Don't support inappropriate proprietary extensions to it.

Winzip's "standard" will win by default

[The Kryptonian]

Most zip files, sorry to say, are made with WinZip now, so all that PKWare's reticence has accomplished is the balkanization of their own product.

Re:W - R - O - N - G

[shaitand]

Actually the DMCA does NOT allow reverse engineering of security mechanisms... like oh... pkware Encryption algorithms...

Zips and Zips and Zips

[cshark]

That's a real shame. I thought the zip specification was open to anyone who wanted to use it? I stopped using Zips about three months ago in favor of the 7zip format. 7zips are smaller and more secure. The best part about 7z's is that it's an open source format. Fully documented, and entirely free. They also tend to be a lot smaller than standard .zip archives. Just an opinion.

You know what I find funny about all this?

[xQuarkDS9x]

What I find funny is that PKWARE will basically die off from this, no one I know from the workplace, friends, or even home users use anything PKWARE related. They all use Winzip or another windows tool. Hell it's been 10 year's since I even used PKZIP from PKWARE, and back then I was on a 486 machine with DOS 5.

It's also funny how people are still using a archiving format thats been around since 1988 at least, it's OLD and compresses like crap. Especially when there are SUPERIOR and much better compression formats out there such as

ARJ
JAR
RAR
UC2
ACE

All of these formats compress better then ZIP, yet you are hard pressed to find ARJ/ACE/JAR/UC2 files on the net, RAR files you may find here and there.