from the why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept.
WinRAR Nukes Pirate Keygen But is a "Good Guy" Towards Regular Users - TorrentFreak
Perhaps the most curious thing about this ubiquitous tool is that while WinRAR gives the impression of being free, technically it is paid software. Users get a 40-day period to trial the tool and then, if they like it, they can part with cash in order to obtain a license.
However, WinRAR never times out and relies completely on users’ inclination to pay for something that doesn’t need to be paid for to retain functionality. As a result, WinRAR has huge numbers of pirate users yet the company does pretty much nothing to stop them.
Those who do pay for a license get rid of a ‘nag’ screen and gain a couple of features that most people don’t need. But for pirates (and the tool is massively popular with pirates), an unlicensed WinRAR still does what it’s supposed to, i.e unpacking all those pesky compressed pirate releases.
Of course, there are people out there who would still rather not pay a penny to use a piece of software that is essentially free to use. So, in order to obtain a ‘license’ and get rid of the nag screen, they use a piece of software called a ‘keygen’ that generates one for them.
[...]“[I]n the field of private users we have always been the ‘good guys’ by not starting legal actions against every private user using it beyond the trial period, thus we also don’t understand the need of pirated license keys for WinRAR,” the company concludes.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:13PM (24 children)
The story (which TFS omits for some reason) is as follows: Win.rar GmbH submitted a DMCA complaint against a keygen hosted on GitHub ("This GitHub repository violates a section of 17 U.S.C. § 1201 which is a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act"), and GitHub took the repository down.
No nuclear weapons were involved, and no one is reported to have been injured. The keygen presumably still works fine, and you should download it somewhere else instead if you need it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jimtheowl on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:26PM
Or rather, you 'could' download it somewhere else instead if you 'want' to.
No one 'needs' to, that is the whole point.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:40PM (22 children)
Why on earth would you need it? Or, on the moon, or Mars, or even the sun? If you use an archiver that very often, that the nag screen really annoys you a lot, use another archiver without a nag, or send Winrar your lunch money for a couple days. $43 if you want a physical copy, only $33 if you'll accept delivery over the internet, and maybe less than that if you are tax exempt, and there's a checkbox for something called a "cleverbridge document ID" - presumable some kind of discount.
https://shop.win-rar.com/16/purl-shop-2183-1-n?x-source=31-buybutton-startpage [win-rar.com]
Don't go to Mickey D's for lunch for a week at most, and you've paid for it.
Out here in Linux Land, we have a boatload of archiving tools, all of them for free, so I'm not paying the guy for occasional use.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:49PM (1 child)
And they maintain unrar for the occasional time linux users need to deal with their archive format. Seem like a decent company to me.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 08 2019, @11:39PM
WinRar has absolutely no practical use except for pirated stuff.
As far as archives go, something like 7zip should be able to open anything you need (and I mean "should" ideologically, not practically, here).
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:37PM (2 children)
Certain people advertise and sell "licensed" software. An example would be a computer with preinstalled windows productivity bundle.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:58PM (1 child)
And, those people advertising this "licensed" software are using the keygen to "license" Winrar? Why don't they just negotiate for bulk licensing, like the big boys do?
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:22PM
My guess would be - out of habit. If one sells say an office workstation with MS office preinstalled along with all the necessities for a price below the office alone, one pirates everything. Not sure how it works now, but in 90s one could get a cd like this including the windows itself for around $5-10. Another $5 would get a few months of support as well.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by zion-fueled on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:07PM (13 children)
Actually no. The archivers on Linux suck. Try decompressing chrome extensions. The default managers all act like it's not a just a zip. I'm sure there is something for the command line but I like to right click and decompress. It's much faster.
I had to seek out PEA-zip for this functionality and it doesn't install so you have to run it or set archives to open with it. Alternatively you could run 7zip in wine.
And it's not just CRXs, 7zip and even winrar will open all kinds of compressed things that aren't really archives according to gnome/kde tools.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:22PM (12 children)
I program on Chromium. I've never had an extension not unpack.
Ah, there's the answer. You're just not paying someone enough to teach you the modicum of computer skills you need to do something out of the ordinary.
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Monday December 09 2019, @01:15AM (11 children)
Using inconvenient workflows is a computer skill? And apparently I'm supposed to pay someone to teach me this "secret knowledge".
Go open an extension with engrampa or file roller, let me know how it goes. Or try to extract an installer with said fabled linux archivers.
This is the typical systemd style developer mindset. Our software doesn't do basic things available on every other platform; the users are stupid.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @01:42AM (10 children)
Lol. If you're too incompetent to use a commandline tool (you might have to learn 'man', too, to learn to learn!) then you should pay for software.
It's the same as if you can't change a tire on a car. Too incompetent? Pay someone. Because any "free tire change" that you don't do yourself is a scam.
Unh, nice ploy for points by dissing systemd, but you can't use the commandline so your opinions re: it are of zero weight. Linux software DOES do basic things available on every other platform and if you want a right click to de/compress, the exact mechanism varies by window manager, but it was trivial for me to set up in parallel with "open with gvim" on my machine.
So yes, one partcular user is stupid - you! You have found one software package which does something you want on one OS, and because it's not there by default on another OS you claim that other OS has a failing. But you had to install winrar on your win image, this is not a differentiator. Your logic is weak, your techinical chops are NIL if you can't "man gzip" before making the claim Linux can't do something.
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Monday December 09 2019, @03:19PM (9 children)
What part of using it from the command line in a GUI environment sucks don't you get? Yes you can custom out a line to the right click menu with parameters and all but then you have to do that on every machine vs just installing an archiver that doesn't suck. That's the point of having proper utilities vs employing work arounds. And the question was are linux archivers better than winrar/7zip on windows, sounds like the answer is still no.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 09 2019, @06:02PM (8 children)
Or you could take 5 minutes to learn to do it on the command line, because bzip2, gzip, and tar are already installed by default on all these systems...
What distro are you using? I can't remember ever having trouble with the archive tools that come with Ubuntu/Mint.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @09:39PM (7 children)
Probably their complaint is that they don't know how to set a file association in whatever file manager they are using and that the GUI of the program doesn't include other extensions in their "open" dialog. Easiest workaround is to just set whatever file association they want, or just rename it to include a zip extension when working on it. That last one even works everywhere.
But seriously, they are complaining that the file manager can't read their mind. If it ran some sort of comprehensive magic scan, then they'd be complaining about misidentification, missed associations, the inevitable exploits, or slow speed of opening a path. On top of that, even if the file manager identified that as a zip archive, how is supposed to know that this particular double click is to open it in 7-zip and not Chromium? Or that double clicking a docx file should open it in Xarchiver for user 1 but LibreOffice for user 2? Not to mention that 99% of people would consider it an error, or at least violating least surprise, to open an ePub in PeaZip and showing you the archive contents, as opposed to telling you you don't have an e-reader installed.
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:32PM (6 children)
No, nothing to do with the file manager. You can easily open anything you want with file roller or engrampa. The utilities themselves do not recognize the files and say they are invalid/corrupt. And it's not just crx files, any non standard archive is unsupported. They can't parse anything but "perfect" files. After using both winrar and 7zip it was quite a surprise.
The other options are:
1. Do everything from the command line with a bunch of typing
2. Use unintegrated utilities that support it
Now, notably I am going with it actually working because, per the "chromium developer" back there, it does. I have not tested it myself. Why? It would take 20/30s to do this from the command line vs 1-5 from any other utility. Their suggestion is to add it as a right click script or action to the FM so it uses the command line utility which would have to be done on every system, so now you have to keep this script with you or memorize the parameters on every system vs just installing something and not having to worry.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 10 2019, @04:20PM (5 children)
It's literally just "unrar -e blob.rar". Are your hands broken?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 10 2019, @04:37PM (4 children)
Hmm, actually "unzip blob.crx" since this isn't a RAR file. My bad.
Hey look, we even saved you having to enter an entire one flag.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @11:03PM (1 child)
Ah, I get it now. I thought, based on the exchange, that crx files were just zip archives. They are not. They are a "combination file." Basically, they are a special crx-specific header concatenated with a zip archive. No wonder GUI tools leave them alone. Whenever you have data before the first entry or interleaved with the compressed data, the archive program can never really be 100% sure that writing to the file will be safe or that the combined data isn't damage to the archive. No surprise that general-purpose archive programs complain about opening them because they can't safely write to them without potentially damaging the combined file and read-only access might violate the programmer's idea of least-surprise, especially if the archive actually is corrupt and the difference can only really be determined by fully extracting the archive.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:04PM
Yeah, there was an article recently about a hack somebody was using that exploited whether the archiver you used started reading from the beginning forward, or from the end in reverse, to cause different things to be extracted because of where the headers ended up.
I would guess that adding extra data to the beginning/end that the base format basically ignores is pretty common practice, and mostly innocuous.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Wednesday December 11 2019, @10:53PM (1 child)
1. right click, open in terminal. move hands to keyboard, type unzip foo.crx... o wait, shit did it just dump into my home directory?
2. right click -> extract to subfolder
my hands are indeed broken, unlike the default linux workflow. I just noticed 7zip will also extract .text and .rsrc from dll and exe files... how cool is that?
p7zip-desktop was updated in march of 19... will give it another go with fingers crossed, previous version was buggy as hell.
Look, about 1/2 my machines are daily driving linux (no dual boot, nothin) ... it does some things better... but it does a lot of things worse. Things you take for granted on other OS... eg reconnecting your VPN when it drops.
Boy did I have to search far and wide for that one. It's "built in" to network-manager... as in it doesn't work if you use multiple vpns or even reliably on one.
That's actually the end of something; when it's built in. Makes it impossible to find alternates since your searches return "guides" on how to use the broken default functionality.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 12 2019, @05:12PM
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." [google.com]
Man, I miss Douglas Adams.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:16PM
>> Why on earth would you need it?
I don't presume to know. Maybe you're doing security research into key generators. I didn't mean to offend you so with ideas, and apologize.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Monday December 09 2019, @02:49AM
That's a long fast. Might want to talk to your doctor about fasting for a whole week. Considering that you're actually saying "don't spend even as much as McDonalds on lunch for a whole week."
When I go to McDs, it's four dollars, because four dollar-menu items make a complete meal.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday December 09 2019, @03:30AM
Yep. I purchased it. It was a piece of software that just worked, worked well, and gave me all the features I needed.
I paid for it in part because they were so reasonable. A nag screen is nothing when you're getting it for free, and theirs was easy because it didn't make you wait 30 seconds to close a window (IIRC). That, and the dude is pretty cool and moves around in the math circles at UNLV. If I ever get to meet him, I'd buy him coffee or a beer.
Same thing with Sublime. The only real difference between Sublime and paid Sublime, is the *unregistered* in the program title. I wouldn't waste my time on a keygen to get rid of that. Especially when it's Linux and I can just suppress it :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:53PM (12 children)
I really like .rar files. Whenever I see them, I can be pretty sure that there's nothing in them that I might want.
What's more, it's often an indication that there's stuff in there that I definitely *don't* want.
Especially given that there are so many other archive/compression tools that work better, are FOSS and aren't favored of scammers trying to infect your systems with malware.
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-tell-if-a-movie-torrent-file-is-fake-2483619 [lifewire.com]
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-torrenting-pitfalls-to-avoid-and-what-to-do-instead/ [makeuseof.com]
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/nasty-winrar-bug-is-being-actively-exploited-to-install-hard-to-detect-malware/ [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:02PM (5 children)
Erm... pretty much all scene releases of pirated movies start out in multi-part rar files, just FYI.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:26PM (4 children)
Given that most Hollywood movies are garbage, you make my point for me. Thanks Buzzard!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @01:46AM (1 child)
There are non Hollywood movies, from art flicks to "Hollywood" movies like Raging Bull or Baraka.
You gonna say those aren't culturally significant?
They all into the same distribution streams as every other media that's shared licitly or ill-.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @04:08AM
Your reading comprehension skills seem poor.
I suggest:
https://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Reading-Comprehension [wikihow.com]
Good luck!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 09 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)
Touché, AC. *hat tip*
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:57PM
Much obliged, Señor Buzzard. Right back atcha.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:34PM (3 children)
Okaaay....
(looks at the content of the NAS, most of which started off life as downloaded (including legal downloads) .rar files..)Hey, whatever works for you...some of us out here scan our downloaded archives of goodies before doing anything else with them..which reminds me, time to trawl the music blogs..
Ah, well, I'll take it you meant format instead of tool there, a check of my AV logs indicates that the most popular infected archive type (83%) the AV scanners here see is.... .zip, as for tools, I've not seen a copy of Winrar installed anywhere for quite some time, 7-Zip seems to have replaced it, not that I'm normally anywhere near a windows box these days..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @12:33AM (2 children)
Good. Since I don't want them, there's more for you!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @12:55PM (1 child)
Hey, don't knock them, if it hadn't been for a couple of music blogs I wouldn't have found out that bands like Mastodon existed, or that there was such a thing as Mongolian folk-metal (which filled a very very peculiar niche in my library of music ) or that awesome things like this [youtube.com] were ever recorded and released on vinyl (and which is filed under 'shit to play loudly when the neighbours are being cunts..')
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:19PM
Where did I knock music blogs? Like I said -- more for you. You go, girl!
And you're welcome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @01:48AM (1 child)
LOL - the first link there suggests playback in WinAMP.
Yes, really!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:31PM
What's wrong with WinAmp [winamp.com] (or XMMS/Audacious/Youki for that matter)? It has lots of features and supports lots of codecs. And it's certainly not malware (which was the context of the suggestion).
I use VLC for video (also suggested), but for music WinAmp really does 'whip the llama's ass."
What's your problem? Did a llama fuck your mom (or you?) and then never call 'cuz she's (you're) crap in the sack or something?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:35PM (11 children)
No thanks
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Shire on Sunday December 08 2019, @06:34PM (10 children)
Couldn't agree more. How WinRAR still exists when 7zip (https://www.7-zip.org/ [7-zip.org]) is open source, license free, and faster, it boggles the mind.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:44PM
Pirates take bigger risk and so usually more conservative. When possible, they use what is proven to work for a long long time.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:55PM (6 children)
7-zip is buggy and incomplete, some people care about that.
RAR is another proprietary format I wish people would stop inflicting on other users, but Winrar itself is pretty good.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:58PM (4 children)
I've probably been using 7zip for at least a decade now with no problems. Buggy and incomplete my ass.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:10PM (2 children)
Indeed, good enough for me. But RAR compresses better than zip. I think 7z does too.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Pino P on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:46PM (1 child)
You're correct, and I'll explain why.
Despite using the same DEFLATE codec as Zip, TGZ (UNIX tape archive compressed with Gzip) provides better compression on some data sets than Zip because unlike Zip, TGZ is a "solid" archive format. A solid archive concatenates files before compressing them, which allows capturing redundancy across files. However, a non-solid archive provides faster, more error-resilient retrieval of individual files in an archive, and some people consider non-solid archives superior for long-term archiving for this reason.
7z (7-Zip's native format) and RAR are also solid archive formats. They compress better than TGZ because LZMA in 7z and whatever RAR uses have a longer window for back-matches. This means they can take advantage of repetition beyond the 32 KiB window limit of DEFLATE.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:51PM
RAR compression uses LZSS and PPMII algorithms; latest WinRAR version uses a default compression dictionary size of 32MB (up from 4MB) and supports up to a 1GB dictionary.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:31PM
I am pretty sure I started using 7zip on a win98 macine I had 20 years ago, and it has always done everything I need it to do with no fuss.
In a previous job the engineers I worked with started getting .rar files from some Chinese company they were dealing with, and about 1/3 of them came with nicely packaged viruses, which was nice.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Shire on Monday December 09 2019, @01:13AM
I have no idea where you're getting that from. 7zip has been my go to for as long as I can remember and it's never failed me. Nor have any of my friends ever reported it to be anything but rock solid and one of the first ultitiles to be installed on a new system.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Sunday December 08 2019, @11:16PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @01:18AM
I use 7-zip where I can. It can unpack rar files too.
The only feature I've seen in rar which I wished 7-zip format would support is the recovery record - almost like an in-built PAR file to auto-recover damaged data in the archive using some funky checksum/parity maths the details of which I've not really looked into. Well technically one can use PAR (well PAR2 these days) separately on the 7z archive, or even with any file type you want, but then that's 2 tools you need to use rather than 1.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @06:21PM (1 child)
> Perhaps the most curious thing about this ubiquitous tool is that while WinRAR gives the impression of being free, technically it is paid software.
Shareware is a word.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @11:55PM
Millenials think all their ideas are new. Don't bother trying to educate on computer history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:27PM (3 children)
Phil Katz also was pretty open about the program being used unregistered by people. It did get the format popular. I think it would show you a screen if it was unregistered, but that was all. I found a keygen that generated a serial to register it to me, but that was mostly for shits and grins. This was about 30 years ago.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Monday December 09 2019, @02:54AM (2 children)
I still have the serial number for username 'none' with Winzip memorized. It has always worked, for over 20 years. So a keygen that I ran one time over 20 years ago has served me well.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Acabatag on Monday December 09 2019, @02:57AM (1 child)
Wait. I just downloaded the latest Winzip to prove my statement above. Winzip is owned by Corel now?
Makers of shitty Corel Draw who purchased Micrografx to shut down Designer?
wow. what a disappointment.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday December 09 2019, @04:54AM
Took 'em an awful long time to 'shut down Designer'....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrografx_Designer [wikipedia.org]
...15 years??! and still part of Corel Technical Suite? Wow, that's some shutdown bug!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @04:55AM (3 children)
Is why rar is the format for the pirate movie scene?
Why is rar the chosen format for those folks?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 09 2019, @05:00AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Packaging [wikipedia.org]
https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/bbk3me/2019_and_some_places_still_allow_uploading_rar/ [reddit.com]
Reasons or soemthing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @05:16AM
Both of those end up boiling down to a "five monkeys" problem:
https://www.wisdompills.com/the-famous-social-experiment-5-monkeys-a-ladder/ [wisdompills.com]
It seems it is just the way it's done, but no one knows why anymore....
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 09 2019, @05:46PM
I would assume it's the same reason why everybody stayed on MP3 as a format for so long--when it started out, it was the most efficient tool to use. Then pretty much everybody got on it before better alternatives came around, by which point people didn't want to convert their entire collection to a different format for a 20% size savings or whatever, so people just kept using the older thing.
And when everybody else is using MP3, if you try to send them e.g. an OGG file, they go "WTF is this shit and how do I play it" so it's easier to just go with the flow.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"