• Jonathan (unregistered)

    The quality of the support ticket text reminds me of my time working Customer Service for World of Warcraft (even though the article mentions it's probably not that MMORPG).

    On a related note, using anything except Windows built-in Defender for AV is probably needlessly slowing down your computer. I worked out over 20 years ago that all AVs are locked in this arms race where their products are continually updated to make them look like they do more protection than any of their competitors, which includes constant notifications of how "hard" they're working to protect your computer or constant additions of new protection types (even if they offer no practical additional protection, but they're sure as hell slowing down your PC).

    And despite all their seemingly extraordinary efforts, they in all likelihood still won't save you any better from new threats compared to Windows Defender which is as quietly and efficiently as possible doing its thing in the background.

  • (nodebb)

    Well, I never knew that about how the Shell dealt with spaces in path names. Given this mechanism, it seems like amoung the many WTFs in this story, having a space in the most used directory to contain executables is one.

  • Are you sure? (unregistered)

    Did/does the windows cmd really work that way? I remember pretty well the stupid errors when you forgot to use quotation marks around paths with spaces instead of the program launching. The article states that cmd makes multiple attempts to find the executable when given a command like 'C:\Program Files\id Software\Doom\Doom.exe -nomusic', but that did not and does not happen. It just bails out with the message "'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.", no matter if the executable actually exists at 'C:\Program Files\id Software\Doom\Doom.exe'.

    That doesn't take away anything from the stupidity of the firewall logic of moving false positively detected malware to the system root, of course.

  • (nodebb)

    IIRC the original article mentions this MMORPG was probably Final Fantasy 11

  • (nodebb) in reply to Are you sure?

    Yup, just take a look at the documentation for the behavior of CreateProcess() when the lpApplicationName parameter is NULL:

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/processthreadsapi/nf-processthreadsapi-createprocessa

    In cases where command lines get executed by different users (such as with Windows services), an unquoted command line can sometimes lead to security vulnerability, though often these alleged vulnerabilities require an already-vulnerable system—e.g. writing a new program named Program.exe into the root of the C:\ drive requires Administrator privileges by default. Aaron Margosis wrote a good article on that back in 2014:

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/aaron_margosis/it-rather-involved-being-on-the-other-side-of-this-airtight-hatchway-unquoted-service-paths

  • (nodebb) in reply to Are you sure?

    Did/does the windows cmd really work that way?

    I don't think so. I think that cmd (and command.com if you're on 32-bit Windows 10 or earlier (32-bit Windows 11 is not a thing) just looks down the %PATH% for the first space-delimited word in your command, and passes that as the application-name parameter to CreateProcess(). That in turn disables the "search for stupidities" thing, and I believe it can be overridden by quotes. (Whence the habit of (Windows) Explorer and the console window that if you drop a file/folder whose name includes spaces into a console window, it gets quotes around it.)

    That doesn't take away anything from the stupidity of the firewall logic of moving false positively detected malware to the system root, of course.

    Nothing can take away anything from that form of stupidity, ever. It's on the edge of inexcusable. Um, the far edge, on the boundary between "merely" inexcusable and "deserving of immediate and permanent chastisement with a non-memic GAU-8".

  • (nodebb)

    Sure sounds like a story from the Win95 days, not from the 2020s.

    But I was devving back then and I agree that neither DOS Command.com, nor Windows Cmd.exe ever did the delimiter slice thing on the application path parameter.

    Now what was common was installers adding "C:\Program Files\companyX\productY" to the $PATH variable. To make it "easy" for shortcuts or command scripts to find their app: "just type the short easy human-sensible app name". Which led to all sorts of stupidity once badly done installers had added C:, C:\Program, and C:\Program Files to the path, and there were twelve game.exe or main.exe files in various folders. As each customer had a unique path due to the order in which they installed their various apps, figuring out WTF was going on wasn't always easy.

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered)

    Why do so many anti-virus makers get so obsessed about automatic threat handling?? Outside of the corporate world you should never take an automatic action! If you think there's a problem, ask!

    As for why someone would want something other than Defender--all the malware authors will ensure their program can defeat Defender. Thus it's zero protection against something new. And it can be extremely aggressive about scanning files that are being updated, to the point of rendering a drive mount write-only from the load. (Any attempt to read would timeout.) And it's obsession with finding nonexistent malware in multi-part archives. No, not only is there no malware, there's nothing executable, just data.

  • oh no (unregistered) in reply to Jonathan

    On a related note, using anything except Windows built-in Defender for AV is probably needlessly slowing down your computer. I worked out over 20 years ago that all AVs are locked in this arms race where their products are continually updated to make them look like they do more protection than any of their competitors, which includes constant notifications of how "hard" they're working to protect your computer or constant additions of new protection types (even if they offer no practical additional protection, but they're sure as hell slowing down your PC).

    To drive off even further on that tangent, this also applies to corporate monitoring software. It's a constant bombardment of nonsense "upgrades", so that corporate IT ghouls can put ever larger numbers on spreadsheets for their boss.

  • GAZZA (unregistered)

    Personally I think that the addition of spaces to 'legal characters to have in a filename' was a mistake. But it's a mistake that pretty much all MS products are deeply committed to; save any kind of document in Office 365 and see:

    • Where it wants to put it (typically some variant of "My Documents", on your relatively tiny SSD drive rather than the multi terabyte HDD you almost certainly would prefer it goes)
    • What it wants to name it (especially for Word, this will typically be the first couple of words in the document)
    • Whether or not it will let you edit it subsequently (by default Excel, at least, always opens documents in "you no edit me!" mode, which is about as useful as a chocolate teapot).

    That's not even getting into the idea that it wants to save on OneDrive, or that no matter how many times you always save your files to the same "sane" location (i.e. d:\work\docs or whatever) it never "gets the memo" (though presumably there's a setting somewhere you can change; still, sensible defaults fellas, sensible defaults).

  • (nodebb)

    One of the reasons we have "Program Data" instead of something like "Programs" was because Microsoft intentionally added a space to break programs that didn't properly quote their spaces.

    As for spaces in filenames, well, all other OSes that supported long file names supported spaces - case in point was MacOS where spaces were a thing. UNIX not so much since they had to be quoted, but you could have them too, just that spaces, like capitals, were a good way to annoy the user.

  • Tim R (unregistered)

    how to completely stuff up a windows 2000 system in 2 easy steps: 1: make a folder called c:\program. 2: delete the folder using explorer. windows "helpfully" goes through the registry and removes any registry entries pointing to the now-deleted "c:\program" folder. oh yes - that means registry value that starts with "c:\program".

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