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."

Comments

Re:Who's running PKWare

[vasqzr]

Here's a brief history of Phil Katz

I wonder if 7zip will support both?

[Daath]

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 :)

Re:I wonder if 7zip will support both?

[fredrikj]

Meh use tar/bzip2. That gets better compression than 7zip.

Well, no. 7zip's 7z format is generally FAR superior to bzip2 in terms of compression ratio.

A few examples:
doom2.wad: 14604584 bytes
doom2.wad.bz2: 5868846 bytes
doom2.7z: 4560296 bytes

All MIDI files I've made: 8146186 bytes
music.tar.bz2: 1007529 bytes
music.7z: 630357 bytes

The Python-2.3.2 source code:
unpacked: 33378982 bytes
python.tar.bz2: 7216151 bytes
python.7z: 6034907 bytes

Those might not even be optimal values. 7z lets you customize a number of parameters (dictionary size, etc) at the expense of compression and decompression speed.

Also note that the 7z format is modular and can use any compression method supported by the program, including bz2. More info on Wikipedia.

RAR

[Jugalator]

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. :-)

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. :-P