Slashdot Mirror
PKWare and Winzip Reach A Secure Zip Compromise
richard_za writes "Until now the rival compression software vendors PKWare and Winzip have had different (incompatible) ways of password protecting the ZIP format. In a bid to prevent fragmentation of the standard they have agreed to have their software support opening of the other's files. They have however not agreed to support a single standard. PKZip's encryption is RSA-based while Winzip use an AES approach which is fully documented here.
The Register is running this story. PKWare has this press release."
Here's a brief history of Phil Katz
7zip is pretty cool - much better compression than ordinary zip. So I wonder if 7zip will support PKZip/WinZip encryption... From the looks of their fileformat page, they support AES encryption... :)
Oh yeah and 7zip is under the LGPL license
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I couldn't care less about WinZip. WinRAR came in version 3.30 today, for the same price as WinZip and a lot more features. IMHO, it would be better than WinZip even if it didn't support RAR, simply from its arhiver support and features. :-)
:-)
:-P
That it happens to use the superior RAR format makes the decision easy for me. We're installing it at our company too, since it isn't even a hard to use archiver for geeks in any way. I know about for example bzip2 and 7-zip, but 7-zip still seems like a rather immature archiver, although it's interesting. The problem is the lack of a good feature set besides the core archiving part. And the official bzip2 package compiled for Windows doesn't come with a GUI so that makes it a bit less useful to me at least, especially when RAR has a comparable compression ratio. Sure, I can use a command line archiver, but I wouldn't like to.
The only downside I can see is that RAR is a closed source format, with only the decompressor being open.
Sometimes, I think it's better to not have two different companies trying to get control over a single format.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Whereas WinZip have chosen an off-the-shelf algorithm, a GPL implementation of that algorithm and published the full specs to how they've extended the zip format.
So a user who knows not about such matters might conclude that PKZip performs like a slug, costs more thanks to licencing or is non-standard while WinZip is none of those things.
Yes; as other posters have pointed out, you can not only open ZIP files in Windows XP natively and use them as if they were normal folders *without installing a third-party piece of software*, but you can add and remove files from these ZIP archives quite easily (drag-'n-drop) and even create new ZIP archives quite easily, too: either right-click file -> Send To -> Compressed Folder, or right-click empty space -> New -> Compressed Folder, and start dragging things into it.
Of course, if you want to verify this yourself, you are going to have to make sure that you test it on a virgin XP box that you haven't raped yet by installing WinZip on it...that'll kill the built-in ZIP "folder" class as WinZip messes with the file associations.
Oh, and by the way, the Windows ZIP folder class has been around since Windows 98, when it came with the Windows 98 Plus! pack. The first version of Windows to include it as part of the operating system was Windows ME. And if you look hard enough, you can actually find a copy of it on Microsoft's web site (disguised as an update/bug fix for the ZIP folder; it won't install if you don't have it already, but you can extract the files from the self-extracting CAB and install it manually). It runs on virtually every Win32-based Microsoft OS. Heck, I have managed to install and use the Microsoft ZIP folder on Windows NT 4.0 (regsvr32 zipfldr.dll), and it ran perfectly fine.
Infinitely superior to WinZip in every way (except for the fact that it doesn't do disk spanning). It even has an encryption feature.