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PKWare Zips to Growth 331

Posted by CowboyNeal from the old-school-compression-algorithms dept.
Rob Kennedy writes "The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a story about PKWare's new business plan. It talks about the investment group that bought the company after founder Phil Katz's death in 2000, and the plan for PKWare to produce what president and COO Timothy H. Kennedy (no relation) calls 'the next generation of zip' by adding various security features."
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PKWare Zips to Growth More

PKWare Zips to Growth

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  • Security?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:53AM (#4649613)
    So none of you guys can find out whats really in my porn.zip??

  • What kind of Security features? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qender ( 318699 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:55AM (#4649619) Homepage Journal
    Might these security features include paying per zip file or something?

    • There's no telling. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @10:36AM (#4650521) Homepage Journal
      $40 is not too high a price for not being able to figure out some combination of tar, find, grep, and crypt, but there's no telling where these folks will go with their new "Market Driven" company:

      ...The investors who bought the company following Katz's death in 2000 bolstered the top management team. PKWare's technology hot shots, ... are supported by experienced software executives. And the company has its first professional and disciplined sales force.

      ...When Katz was in charge, PKWare's programmers often would work on new features that they found interesting rather than targeting specific needs of potential customers, Kennedy said.

      "In some cases what they did was successful, but in many cases what they did wasn't anywhere near successful," he said. "The company from this standpoint now is market driven."

      The engineers are no longer in charge, money is. All the clueless and stupid "features" that corporate slave drivers can think of will become projects for the Brown Deer survivors. I can imagine them asking for central repositories of file lists, tables of "sensitive" files that can't be ziped, and other silly work arounds the serious lack of data control their w2k desktops have. I can also imagine that half of the "I wanna micro manage my staff to death" initiatives will directly contrardict the requirements for the other half. Sounds like hell if they really have remade the company that way, and sure the customer gets screwed along with the lusers. That's what happens when you put sales in front of engineering.

      I could be wrong. Dr. Kelly could be a fine fellow and have no intentions of making this happen. It will be difficult for him to manage the monster he's making. Good luck and never trust M$, the folks that bought 5th Generation Software to kill Fastback and who have always seen backup utilities as a threat and aid to "pirates".

      • PKWare bloat has already happened. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @12:09PM (#4651235) Homepage Journal
        The bloat already happened.

        In August of 2000, I bought PKZip Explorer from PKWare. Figured for the $10 special promotion, what the hell, and it would be nice to have PKZIP that could handle Windows long file names. Also assumed it would have the same feature set as PKZIP for DOS, and their promo literature certainly *sounded* like it would.

        Well, it was one of the poorest $10 purchases I ever made. The installer (a two-step, partially online-only process due to paranoia about piracy) is about 6mb, and the installed program is apparently scattered thruout Windows. So I was already annoyed by the time it was finally installed and running.

        On to making my first ZIP with it. Turns out the ONLY thing it can do is grab the specified files and create a new ZIP, or unzip a specified ZIP. That's ALL it can do. It's absolutely devoid of ALL the switches and options that made PKZIP for DOS so useful. The only good thing I can say about it, is that it's fast.

        Now, maybe it's improved some since then, but if it didn't even have its own ancestral feature set in 2000, yet was already 3x the size of competing products like WinZIP and WinRAR, I have scant hope for later incarnations.

        And thanks to this experience, chances are I'll never buy another product from PKWare.

  • Doesn't PGP do this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yatest5 ( 455123 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:56AM (#4649624) Homepage
    When I PGP a file, it shrinks to same or smaller than when I standard zip it. Isn't that secure / small? Or am I horribly confused?

    • Re:Doesn't PGP do this? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mnemia ( 218659 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:00AM (#4649643)
      PGP compresses files during the encryption process.
    • The difference is that mentioning PGP to the average person give you a HUH? at best, while everyone knows zip, so secure-o-zip won't be a big change for them.
    • When I PGP a file, it shrinks to same or smaller than when I standard zip it. Isn't that secure / small? Or am I horribly confused?

      Yes, encryption benefits from compression because it makes the data look more random - there are fewer repeating patterns in the plaintext once it's compressed so there are fewer patterns in the ciphertext too(i.e. it's harder to do a dictionary attack).

      I get great compression results from creating archives as .tar.pgp, slightly better than .tgz and much better than .zip with "encryption" turned on, and much more secure too.

    • PGP uses the same algorythm to compress files as pkzip. I've always thought that if a known-plaintext attack is ever discovered for the crypto algorythms used in PGP, the known plaintext of the pkzip header might well be the bits to use in an attack.

  • Since a Zip has to be decompressed anyway it makes a lot of sense to integrate encryption. It's easier to unzip once compared to unzipping and then unencrypting or vice versa.

    Now, integrate this with email attachments and we're on a roll :)

    • Re:Encryption and compression make a lot of sense. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rmolehusband ( 192640 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:17AM (#4649702)
      Fair point, encryption and compression are commonly used together, but I still have my doubts about bundling functions into a single (bloating) app in this way.

      These programs are essentailly filters and the most logical and flexible way to provide them is as seperate entities.

      For folks who want to combine them: use a script, or a GUI or a simple wrapper app to hide the details - none of this is procluded by keeping the logically different functions involved seperate and independently usable at a lower level.

    • Re:Encryption and compression make a lot of sense. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dido ( 9125 ) <dido&imperium,ph> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:37AM (#4649749)

      Hopefully, if this is what they want to do, they will do better than the embarrasingly insecure "encryption" that the old DOS PKZip included (a cryptographically-weak LFSR-based stream cipher). With good support for cryptographic standards, they could have something here.

      By the way, you always do encryption AFTER data compression. Doing it before data compression ensures that your compression ratio is close to 0%.

    • Re:Encryption and compression make a lot of sense. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jonathanclark ( 29656 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @10:24AM (#4650440) Homepage
      Since a Zip has to be decompressed anyway

      While until just recently, this was true - now you can create a "ZIP" file that doesn't decompress. The idea is instead of decompressing the files to disk, a tiny user-mode OS is inserted between the application that needs to use the data and the compressed data. The new OS does transparent decompression/decryption and to the application it appears the files reside on the hard drive. The OS provides streaming decompression so only small blocks are decompressed at a time and the memory requirements are very low. Yes, the data is present in memory in unencrypted form at some point so it is possible to hack - but it provides a pretty good level of data security.

      The cool thing is that the archive size is usually the same size as a ZIP, but it runs directly with no install and no decompression time. Usually applications load 2x faster in this state.

      This is something I've spent the last year working on. Checkout here [thinstall.com]

  • Are zips still relevent? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:57AM (#4649631) Journal
    Most of the files I want to send are not going to compress to well in the fisrt place. Nowhere near enough entropy. The only files that will actually benefit are source code and binary executeables.

    Okay, there may be some specialised industry data formats for microchips and the like, but the really large files tendto be things like pictures and videos. These are already compressed using standard lossy techniques. zipping these won't work.

    • Re:Are zips still relevent? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by knuurius ( 307631 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:00AM (#4649647) Homepage
      I use zip for the ease of sending hundreds of files in one file and not very often for compression reasons.

      • Re:Are zips still relevent? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:14AM (#4649695) Homepage
        In the days when I used pkzip, I first bundled up the files into an uncompressed zipfile with -e0, and then compressed that. This gives you a few percent over compressing the files straight into a zipfile, when they are compressed individually. You lose the ability to extract individual files but who needs that anyway?

        IMHO, since 99% of the time all you do with archives is create them or extract them, it's not worth implementing features like 'add to archive', 'delete from archive' or 'update archive'. Maybe those made sense with SEA ARC on CP/M when disk space was scarce and CPUs slow, but not now. You might as well take advantage of the simplicity and better compression that comes from treating the archive as a single lump.

        Therefore the Unix model of tar and then a separate compression program makes more sense - even though tar is such a crusty and wasteful format. The only reason to use zipfiles still is compatibility.

        (Although maybe someone will prove me wrong and say 'I update existing zipfiles every day, it's an essential feature, what I do is...'.)
        • In the days when I used pkzip, I first bundled up the files into an uncompressed zipfile with -e0, and then compressed that. This gives you a few percent over compressing the files straight into a zipfile, when they are compressed individually.?

          You're the first other person I've found who noticed that, although I never bothered with -e0 on the first pass. For some bizarre reason, PKZip didn't (doesn't?) compress the archive table of contents at all, and since it is essentially an ASCII list of filenames, it should (and does) compress rather well. It becomes *really* noticable when archiving large numbers of small files like icons for example.

          • I understand the reason for this is due to Zip applying the compression on a per file basis.

            There was a compression program on the Amiga called Lzx, which worked slightly differently in that it 'grouped' files into set chunks of data and then compressed. Usually with much better results than Zip.

            I understand that the Lzx algorithum is now used in the latest versions of MS cab format.

        • Re:Are zips still relevent? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:44AM (#4650044)
          (Although maybe someone will prove me wrong and say 'I update existing zipfiles every day, it's an essential feature, what I do is...'.)


          It IS an essential feature and I do use it all the time. Being able to pop up Winzip and read individual files in an archive without extracting the whole thing (which can be hundreds of megs) is much better than the tar/gzip approach that's standard on UNIX systems. Hell, even Sun realizes that. Their recommended cluster patches are distributed in a zip archive so you can easily pull out individual patches without unarchiving the whole 50+ megs and thousands of files.

          • ...and what's wrong with 'tar tvf file.tar' to get a list of files in a tarball (pipe it through more or less if it's a big tarball), and 'tar xvf file.tar file.txt [file2.txt ...]' to extract one or more files? It's not graphical? That's the only drawback I can think of, and I couldn't care less about that.
        • Therefore the Unix model of tar and then a separate compression program makes more sense - even though tar is such a crusty and wasteful format.

          Joerg Schilling, the author of the famous cdrecord [fokus.gmd.de], probably disagrees with you. tar has everything you need, and a lot more. The problem is that all the different tar implementations suck. GNU tar, for example, is _not_ POSIX-compliant. 'file' recognizes this and will tell you what kind of archive it is. gnutar also doesn't support very large files.

          Joerg Schilling has written an excellent tar program by the name of star [fokus.gmd.de]. To overcome the limitations of the "other" tar formats, he has produced his own, without any limitations. Features of star that completely blow away anything else:

          - fully ANSI/Posix 1003.1 compatible
          - ACL support
          - automatically detects several common archive formats and adopts to them. Supported archive types are: Old tar, gnu tar, ansi tar, star, POSIX.1-2001 PAX, Sun's Solaris tar (GNU tar supports only one foramt--its own)
          - stores/restores all 3 times of a file (even creation time)
          - pattern matcher

          As you can see, the "tar" format no longer sucks.
          Schilling has written a very good comparison between star and gnutar, entitled STARvsGNUTAR [fokus.gmd.de]. I highly recommend reading it. Another cool document is a listing of bugs in every other implementation of tar [fokus.gmd.de]. :)

          You can grab LSB-compliant RPMs of this at my RPM page [sourceforge.net].
        • IMHO, since 99% of the time all you do with archives is create them or extract them, it's not worth implementing features like 'add to archive', 'delete from archive' or 'update archive'.

          You are crazy. Those features were made and are perfect for automated processes. Every day I have an AT process that runs (like a cron job for NT), and ADDS a single web server logfile to an existing monthly zip file. The log files are each around 80MB in size. At the end of the month, I archive the zip to CDROM.

          Therefore the Unix model of tar and then a separate compression program makes more sense

          What exactly does it offer over zip? You want something like tar, use zip without compression. You want something like .tar.gz, use zip with compression. We got it covered. How often do you create uncompressed Tape ARchives in the windows world?

      • Re:Are zips still relevent? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Surak ( 18578 ) <surakNO@SPAMmailblocks.com> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:27AM (#4649991) Homepage Journal
        You know all those foosetup.exe InstallShield and similar formats? Most of those are either CAB compressed (Microsoft), but many of them are still PKZIP compressed.

    • Re:Are zips still relevent? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by shic ( 309152 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @07:41AM (#4649882)
      I think you mean your files which don't compress "too well" have high entropy not "nowhere near enough" :-)

      entropy
      1. Symbol S For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
      2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
      3...

      Oh - and some of us use computers for things other than digital photography and MP3s! I find loss-less compressed archives as valuable a technique today as I ever did.
  • 1) replace rot13 with xor
    2) ???
    3) profit!!!

  • Obviously (Score:3, Funny)

    by jki ( 624756 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:59AM (#4649636) Homepage
    The company has crafted a new partnership with RSA Security Inc., which will lead to merging zip capability with security features in the same programs. This will build on PKWare's earlier efforts to add features to its own programs allowing the encryption and authentication of files placed in zip archives.

    They need a new name. PKIWare :)

  • Shareware? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kj0n ( 245572 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:00AM (#4649642)
    From the article:
    PKWare no longer sells its products as shareware.

    Is this a good idea? I believe that shareware is the only way to get your product known to all computer users (apart from bundeling it with Microsoft Office). There are not that many computer users that still known PKWare, and when this strategy is followed, that won't change.
    • The company's sales efforts are now focused on corporate customers.

      And why companies should listen:

      The company has crafted a new partnership with RSA Security Inc., which will lead to merging zip capability with security features in the same programs.

      Maybe that'll be enough.

      I'm pretty sure the shareware business model for these guys would be dead anyway whatwith some other competitors being so well known and wide spread there days. Can you say "WinZip"? (Yuck, bad, bad program.)

    • Re:Shareware? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Schnapple ( 262314 )
      There are not that many computer users that still [know] PKWare
      Indeed, most people probably think WinZIP invented ZIP files. It would make a weird kind of sense since "WinZIP" is the more obvious name and "PKZip" sounds like an offshoot.
      I believe that shareware is the only way to get your product known to all computer users
      Yeah but I could count on my left hand the people who've paid for WinZIP. Most people crack it or just tolerate the nag screen. Still if a larger number of people buy it legitimately (by mere percentage) than would pick it up in a store, I can see why WinZIP isn't putting stronger protection in.

  • PKWare and questionable business practices. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:01AM (#4649651)
    Everyone should read this [esva.net] article. It analyses the questionable business practices that founded PKWare.

    Some might think the past to be irrelevant; I sincerely do not think so. The article dedicates more space in the vision of its founder than in the "new business strategy".

    • "If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your
      conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."
    • I concur. They should've used PKZip on the article.

    • Bad programming, too (Score:4, Interesting)

      by djmurdoch ( 306849 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @09:43AM (#4650258)
      Back in the late 80s I did a lot of DOS programming. I noticed that one of my programs would mysteriously crash; it took me weeks to realize that this only happened when I was running it after running PKARC, and then a while to figure out why. Turned out it was because of sloppy programming on my part, and malicious sloppy programming in PKARC.

      In DOS, debuggers worked by inserting a one byte opcode that triggered a breakpoint interrupt when executed. The interrupt vector for that opcode was normally set to a no-op, that would just return and let the program continue on. This meant that during program development, you could insert one of these opcodes and it would have no effect outside a debugger, but would cause the debugger to stop at that point if you ran it in a debugger.

      I was sloppy, and left one of these breakpoints in a program after I had finished working on it. This would have been fine, except that PKARC had changed the vector to point at some code that caused the system to crash, in order to foil reverse engineers. They didn't restore the vector when PKARC terminated, so my program triggered the system crash code.

      I didn't pay for PKZIP when it came out a while after that. (Registration was optional in those days.) I figured I'd already contributed enough to Phil Katz.

  • Strange future this! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by krazyninja ( 447747 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:02AM (#4649652)
    Am I the only one who is noticing that most, if not all the "future" of technology is related to either enforcing, breaking, or aiding security and its offshoots???? Consider Zipping, multimedia protection and P2P sharing, hacking and protection against hacking, freenet and surveillance on the net............

    • Re:Strange future this! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @07:37AM (#4649873) Journal
      This is because in this economy, there's nothing innovative going on. Most of the software companies have shifted from developing new products to protecting their rights on existing products; hence the 'mad-cow' over encryption, security, and DRM. 9/11 didn't help matters either as everyone is clamoring for more 'security'...

      Hell, Zip is a case and point. Is anyone trying to come up with a better compression algorithm? no. Why? Because media is getting huge and most everyone has a really high-speed connection to the 'net. Bandwidth and media capacity have grown so fast that they have nearly absolved us of the need for data compression. What's the buzzword in the telecom industry these days? All together now: "EXCESS CAPACITY!"

      So, what's left? If there isn't a big enough demand nor the available money to launch a development effort for something new, what can you do? The answer is DIFFERENTIATE. "Do one thing and do it well" worked during the software arms race of the late 90's when there were at most 3 competitors in a given niche market, and there were so many people buying that it didn't matter how much market share you had, you were going to make money regardless.

      Now, niche markets are gone and nobody is buying squat because what they have works fine. So, now software companies have to focus on providing products that improve a company's PROCESS. So, instead of WinZipping a file, then encrypting it with PGP and using even another tool for DRM possibly, it improves productivity to have all of that in one suite. The ONLY thing companies are willing to spend money on right now is reducing labor costs.

      The company I work for is shipping heads over to Prague, Bangalore, and Beijing as fast as they can afford to buy the pink paper that they print termination notices on. They'd gladly spend a few hundred or even thousand bucks on a software package that allowed them to get 5 more salaried employees off the books.

      • excess yes, but they still charge by the byte (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:04AM (#4649932) Journal
        Which is why my web server uses mod_gzip

        In September I reached my 10Gb transfer limit
        I'd never worried about it before but suddenly we were about to be bumped up into the next charging band.

        I turned on mod_gzip and my bandwidth consumnption was 75% of the previous month, despite a 20% increase in traffic.

        DRM etc. is a predicable response to p2p etc.
        It's an arms race that's been around as long as Lotus 1-2-3 & Kings Quest if not longer

        The reason the Winzip et. al. niche markets are going is because they are being assimilated into the Windows code base. Dancing with the devil is dangerous.

        Meanwhile tar -j -cf - -C srcdir . > backup.bz2 lives on happily
        It's an inherent problem when writing for a GUI you can't control. The list is so long and goes back so far in Windows time. Old heads know it well. Just ask Stac or Novell.

        • If only I could moderate your post. Very insightful indeed. I hadn't thought about the M$-Borg factor...

          But, the fact does remain that they are targeting two specific movements in corporate america (the article DID say they were targeting corporations, not end users). Those are 1) the protection of proprietary information and 2) increasing productivity. Like I said before, my company would be happy to fire me if they could find software to obsolete me. :)

  • Great (Score:4, Interesting)

    by e8johan ( 605347 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:03AM (#4649655) Homepage Journal
    This seems like a good plan. I'd like zips to have:
    • global password (for the filelist)
    • per file(s) password(s) (for groups or individual files)
    • version management (store changes, but keep the original)
    • signing (both global and for file(s))
    • execution abilities (oops, could trigger viruses, must be signed, but for example decompress files and compile 'em)
    What I would also like is for them to go open source and actively support *nix (including Linux and MacOS X).

    • Re:Great (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zwoelfk ( 586211 )
      I agree. But it would suit me better if it was built into the OS. I want an (optionally) compressed, (optinionally) encrypted, journalled filesystem that is not fundamentally linked to the media it's on. So I can just extract/copy an image (subset) to CDR or floppy and mount it then sync it up later.

      This seems like a good plan.

      What plan? I mean zip already has encryption (bad), this'll just make it better. I didn't read anything in the article that they would offer me (as a business) that I don't already have. It's pure hype. I want real details and a real development roadmap!

    • Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:35AM (#4649742) Homepage
      Hmm. 'Do one thing and do it well' might be a better strategy. There are existing very capable encryption and signing programs you can use on individual files or the whole zipfile; there are plenty of existing version management tools. Let the archiver just archive files.
    • Am I dreaming? Certenly not! My old RiscOS did this, like, TEN YEARS AGO!. The zip files were handled just like any other folder/directory. Then you could use the OS standard access control and version managment. (Put a cvs repository inside zipped filesystem?) But somehow I think this isn't so important anymore, in times of 100GB hard drives.
      J.

  • Cool moment. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Soulslayer ( 21435 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:04AM (#4649659) Homepage
    One of the coolest moments of the many GenCon Game Fair's that I attended in Miwaukee, WI was when a panel consisting of most of the premiere Origin [ea.com] producers including Richard Garriot [lineage.com] and Warren Spector [ionstorm.com] took a question from the crowd during the Q&A session and when the nervous speaker said, "Well I have a programming question...and...um.. well I'm from a little company in town...do you know PKWare?"

    And all the members of the panel looked at one another and then started doing the Wayne's World bow and chanting, "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"

    Then Warren (if I remember correctly) made a mildly sarcastic and admonishing comment towards the poor PKWare dude along the lines of, "Hey man you guys have saved us tons of money on media. We use Zip all the time. Of course we know your company." (games of the era were beginning to approach some 30 floppy discs compressed and CD-ROM had not yet become an affordable alternative)

    It's nice when a little mostly unkown (at the time) company making software compression utilities gets recognition from a (at the time) powerhouse game development company like that.

  • bzip (Score:4, Informative)

    by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <[moc.cirtceleknom] [ta] [todhsals]> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:05AM (#4649665)
    I would really like to see bzip2 take over as the defacto compression standard ... it is much smaller then zip and smaller then gzip, in some cases (source code in particular) it is almost 50% better). As an informal survey take the crystal space distribution (crystalspce.org)

    cs94_002.tar.bz2 (Source) 10.7Meg,

    cs94_002.tar.gz (Source) 12.6Meg,

    cs94_002.zip (Source) 16.7Meg

    As a side note, winrar will extract bzip2 but not create it.

    • Re:bzip (Score:5, Informative)

      by Spire ( 101081 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:49AM (#4649775)
      For comparison purposes, I downloaded cs94_002.zip and recompressed it with the latest version of WinRAR [rarlab.com] (3.10 beta 3), set to maximum compression. The result:

      cs94_002.rar (Source) 9.4MB (9,407,157 bytes)

      WinRAR appears to compress much better than bzip2; however, it isn't free. Interestingly, as good as WinRAR is, even it doesn't come that close to having the best compression ratio out there.

      For lots of useful statistics on the relative capabilities of virtually every compression engine in the world, check out Jeff Gilchrist's Archive Comparison Test [compression.ca]. A lot of progress is still being made in compression technology, so the state of the art keeps changing.
    • http://www.7-zip.org/

  • Could work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Cowdog ( 154277 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:07AM (#4649673) Journal
    The .zip format has great inroads into the corporate world, whereas PGP is still a geek's toy. By leveraging (cough) the massive usage numbers, they could be successful with this. Of course, it remains to be seen what features they want to add. But enough zip files fly around corporate networks without security, that it does make sense to improve PKZip in that area.

    On the other hand, WinZip has a a head start, as the preferred way to deal with zip files for most people. And the PKWare website [pkware.com] seems to come up blank on Mozilla, not an encouraging sign.

    But what I really want is security for my PDA data, so it is secure over the network, and secure on the hard drive of any PC, even a PC that others have access to. Can zip help with this? Not sure.

  • what a business (Score:5, Funny)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:17AM (#4649705)
    A corporation built on "tar -cf - . | gzip | crypt". And people wonder why TCO for Windows systems is so high.

  • What about JAR? (Score:2, Informative)

    by TerryAtWork ( 598364 )
    By the guy who did ARJ, JAR implimeneted GOST as it's encryption.
  • PKWare promoted their GUI'd version of PKZip way too late into the game. Winzip already dominated the windows audience, which is already a big chunk in itself. PKUnzip will always hold a special place...those were the days.

  • Growth??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:37AM (#4649750)
    I find it offensive that the /. editors count the usual corporate business plan (that is not even laid out properly on the news report, but never mind) as growth.

    Growth means increase. Either of revenue, or profits... Is there even one word of real as opposed to expected growth for PKWare? Will the new format even be compatible with .zip???

    In my book, the article can be resumed to:

    1. Build a better .zip format

    2. ???

    3. Profit

    It is the ??? the /. community should analyse, not the bullshit marketing.

  • So are these security features for the users, as everyone seems to be assuming, or for the content producers? Incorporating DRM into zipping would be a good way of placing speedbumnps on various P2P sharing systems.

  • hmm? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Graspee_Leemoor ( 302316 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:54AM (#4649789) Homepage Journal
    From the article:

    "Eventually his personal problems caught up with him. Struggling with chronic alcoholism, Katz was estranged from his family and often hung out with strippers. He turned into a recluse, often avoiding his posh Mequon condominium and staying in cheap hotels instead."

    You couldn't pay the trolls on /. to come up with a better paragraph than this.

    graspee

  • Like to see an effective stream compression system... That way mebbe one day we can actually SEE the REAL sites that have been slashdotted!!
    • Steam compression has been available for a long time, using a process known as "cooling." Using it, you can fit incredible volumes of of the stuff into a cup and take it with you. Oh, stream. Never mind.

  • Now that the RSA patent has expired, why does anyone bother with RSA Security, Inc. anymore? RSA, Inc's crypto software was widely regarded to be poorly implemented and slow. According to my (limited) understanding, nearly everyone serious about crypto purchased their suite but never actually used it; they considered it the cost of a patent license and used widely available Open Source implementations, which were almost universally better.

    Schwab

  • Hope it has better milage than Winzip (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:20AM (#4649974)
    I remember when Winzip came out and PkZip didnt really have it together in terms of a GUI, when companies started seeing the benefit of using compression Winzip came along and took most of the market only because it had a half decent GUI, Pkzip's was pretty shoddy, if anything Winzip had better icons heheh.

    Not being a troll, but ever sick of the woes of the 2 gig limit on zip's data structure. (I'm in data engineering and usually work with files over 6 gig) Other missing features were not being able to easily click on a few files/dirs and select the size of the volumes (disk span) and save the files to the current dir without sticking in floppies one at a time, poor password/encryption security.

    Winrar on the other hand has had their features for years including an 8 gig limit on rar's, (one of the major reasons i *had* to switch) you can also setup policies so each time you create a rar it will follow the policy you setup originally in the configs.

    Supports multiple NTFS file/permission streams among other things.

    I hope the new PK Inc can live up to some of the features in rar, they may have a good chance...
    • sick of the woes of the 2 gig limit on zip's data structure

      Not only that, there are apparently file number limits also. I recently had to archive up a few million small files, and ZIP just exploded. I tried InfoZIP on Linux and WinZIP, and both did the same thing, created the ZIP file but then it didn't work.

      So I used RAR. I really don't ever use anything else anymore; RAR is what they have to surpass now.

  • zip & unzip everytime. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:35AM (#4650013)
    pkzip/pkunzip were great tools, make no mistake but these days there is little reason to use them unless you're DOS bound. Perfectly fine open source versions exist and the likes of WinZip and XP's own zip folder extension cover the GUI side.


    On the subject where the zip format should go, I believe it would be nice to see some new compression algorithms - I believe the header has space to define new types. The bzip2 algorithm would be a lead candidate. It would also be nice to see encryption and signing capabilities incorporated, perhaps based on the Java archive (jar) format.


    Another thing that would help compression were if there were something akin to the tar / cabinet file mechanism for compression, where the entire contents and manifest are concatenated and compressed as a single entity rather compressed individually. This would allow for some very tight distributables.

    • That is true.

      Back in the days when I was DOS-bound though, pkzip was an excellent utility. My favourite feature was disk spanning, meaning I could create single volumes that consisted of multiple floppies. Back when removable media was mostly limited to 1.44M floppies, that was an invaluable tool.

      For a long time I was (probably still am for that matter) the only person I personally knew with a legitimately registered copy of PKZip.

    • Just in case it's not clear to everyone, JAR files *are* ZIP files. See http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/jar/basics /index.html for docs on this.

      ZIP files are more relevant than ever, but PKZip is not. They have little chance of taking control back.
  • I thought that as this article might trigger some compressionists to listen, maybe you would be interested in taking this challenge [openchallenge.org]:

    Maximum compression-rate with lossless algorithm
    Implement a compression algorithm that virtually takes resources for granted and provides ultimate compression rate for "source-like" data. If this is not enough, design a method for automatically detecting the optimal compression rate / bandwidth to optimize the total download/uncompress time. Who downloads and uncompresses the Linux kernel fastest using same bandwidth and identical HW resources?

  • How well will new features work? (Score:4, Informative)

    by FJ ( 18034 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:39AM (#4650025)
    The first new feature they introduce will create an incompatability with InfoZIP & other clones. I'm sure the users of such products will complain loudly.

  • Rest in peace (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's amazing that PKWare ever succeeded, based on the story. It was the dream of every shareware author: a product that was so successful it could overcome nonexistent management, etc.

    On the other hand, we now have a horde of pointy haired "professional managers" taking over, wanting to "build on success" to enrich themselves. Time to pump out resumes before the laser printers get monitored.

    Three guesses where PKWare will be in a year or two (and where the "investors" will be, with whatever they can loot.)

  • Fairly clueless... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Eivind ( 15695 ) <eivindorama@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @09:01AM (#4650099) Homepage
    Well, I don't know about the company, but this article is full of hype and cluelessness. Consider for example the following nugget:

    Programs that encrypt computer files tend to make the files much larger, gobbling up valuable room on a hard drive or ...

    This is bullshit. I do not know of even a single cipher which makes the files larger. Indeed all ciphers commonly used today for file-archiving are block-ciphers which transform a fixed-size (typically 64 bit) cleartext-block into an identically sized ciphertext-block. Examples of such ciphers include DES, IDEA, Blowfish, 3-DES, AES, Twofish and many others.

    Combining encryption with data compression is a natural, said Stephen Crawford, vice president of marketing.

    The vice-president of marketing is not typically a good person to ask about technical issues. In this case he is correct though, it is a good idea to compress files prior to encryption, this both saves place, aswell as making certain attacks a little bit harder due to more entrophy in the compressed plaintext than in the plaintext itself.

    Unfortunately for him this idea is so obvious that it's been implemented in typical encryption-programs for ages. Both PGP and GPG for example by default compress the plaintext priorto encrypting it. This is hardly novel.

  • Joe Home User.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tsali ( 594389 )
    (Trollish post coming...)

    ... so Joe User is going to encrypt/decrypt zip files? And he'll pay for the this when it was offered as shareware before?

    Joe User doesn't care. Joe user has an internet connection, MS Works, and couldn't tell the difference between a firewall and a firefly.

    I think they'll lose money and people will use the regular format because its out there and you can encrypt it however you please now if you feel like it. Who would pay for this?

    For all the spyware they crammed into their product, you would think their marketing department would have done a better analysis on future market share...

  • Encryption (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Björn ( 4836 )
    If you want a zip utility with good encryption now, UltimateZip [ultimatezip.com]is a pretty good WinZip clone. It is free (as in gratis) for private and commercial use and has an extra meny command that can encrypt/decrypt with AES Cipher Rijndael. It's only for Windows though.

  • New Business Plan??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Corrado ( 64013 ) <rnhurt@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @09:27AM (#4650198) Homepage Journal
    When Katz was in charge, PKWare's programmers often would work on new features that they found interesting rather than targeting specific needs of potential customers, Kennedy said.

    "In some cases what they did was successful, but in many cases what they did wasn't anywhere near successful," he said. "The company from this standpoint now is market driven."

    This is the most disturbing part of the whole story. I think that PKWare will die a slow and painful death as all the "interesting" ideas get thrown on the floor. Why do companies think that purchasing a successful company and then changing the basics around how they operate will make them grow?!?

    Yea, making the company "market driven" is going to work.

  • Microsoft killing WinZip? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @10:23AM (#4650434) Journal
    I wonder if this new business plan has come up because of the new feature in Windows XP -- Compressed Folders, aka .zip files that are treated just like folders. Zip files in XP now have the little + icon next to them, just like folders. Click on it, and it opens the file and directory listing just like a folder. Drag and drop files into and out of the 'compressed folder.'

    Ouch WinZip...
  • was, "The investors who bought the company.... bolstered the top management team." In light of some of the recent commentaries by Robert X. Cringely (like this one [pbs.org], the decision to usie"professional managers" in a software company may be the kiss of death. Too many of these suits have a "vision" of short-term gain versus long-term profitability. PKware is not a public company, of course, and doesn't necessarily follow Cringely's model (which is to increase stock prices, sell out, and haul ass for the next vict... er, company). But, if there is an IPO in the near future, watch out!

    It was also interesting to learn that a drunk techie CEO who let his programmers follow their own interests still managed to have a profitable company. Remind me to hang out with strippers more often.

  • I love PkWare (Score:4, Funny)

    by CanadaDave ( 544515 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @12:20PM (#4651328) Homepage
    I sure PkWare never goes out of business. I don't know what I'd do without my WinZip and my GNU zip/unzip.

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