First of all, this was already posted in Lemmy several times in several places. Just because it’s a critical vulnerability doesn’t mean you keep reposting it every month - just how long will you keep reposting it?
Also, hardly anyone uses WinRAR these days, so this isn’t really as important as you make of it. Your post may have been relevant when the zero-day came out, but a month later - no one cares.
I never reposted it. I have only posted for the first time, and there are far too many users that still say their WinRAR version is 5.x to this day. I do not think you understand how popular WinRAR is, and how many users exactly use it. Even on Linux via WINE it works perfectly, so the userbase is massive. RAR format is also popular enough, and the exploit for RAR 3.x archives is common enough because a lot of the stuff on internet is packaged in the RAR 2/3/4 format.
You didn’t, but it was posted by others. Posting about a critical vulnerability a whole month later is pointless. If this was acceptable then we’d see people constantly posting outdated news stories for critical vulnerabilities in other apps weeks or months after it’s been published, which doesn’t make sense. Admit it, you made a mistake in posting this - you didn’t check the date and thought it was a new article, right? Otherwise why would you post about this a month later?
Because WinRAR is popular and I have not seen it posted as much? My motive was to spread awareness, because of its sheer popularity. I see no harm in this.
This CVE being a month old does not mean its an outdated thing, because the potential of users getting affected is massive. Too many RAR 3.x and older packaged archives circulate around the world, and WinRAR does not automatically update for people, unless you are a techie that uses winget or choco.
I remain on top of such news usually, and if I missed it, there is a very good chance many have. Yes, I see myself as a benchmark of sorts, considering how seriously I treat and advocate privacy and security. If you want to just look good for calling me as a mod out, it is very unnecessary, unless there is some malicious intent or a low effort post being made.
Edit: you say it was posted “a lot” on Lemmy. But I only see one post each on Beehaw and Lemmy.world, which, for a CVE of this potential is… very bad? This news should have been plastered all over in relevant tech subs for maximum awareness.
because the potential of users getting affected is massive.
Except, it’s not actually popular these days, and therefore, it doesn’t really warrant reposting such old and irrelevant news. And my earlier point still stands - what you posted is basically a repost. Just because you missed it doesn’t mean others have, nor does it justify it.
You probably won’t believe me that WinRAR isn’t popular, so I made a poll just for this - you can see for yourself that not many people here actually use WinRAR.
Do you realise WinRAR has over half a billion users? Your personal poll, assuming 20-30 votes, will not change that fact. 7-Zip has lesser users because WinRAR has been a full featured archiver since over a decade with a pretty GUI.
The average user that uses Windows installs and uses software in this order -> Chrome/Firefox, VLC, WinRAR, MS Office, Zoom/Discord/Teams, then rest of the stuff. No matter what large software downloading website you check (Softpedia, Majorgeeks, Techspot, Filehorse, Filehippo), the most popular downloaded software will have these at the top. Photoshop, IDM and Avast are also similarly popular.
You have no idea about general user security and popular software demographics.
Do you realise WinRAR has over half a billion users
Citation needed. But regardless, these users are clearly not on Lemmy. This is about relevance to Lemmy users, and the poll reflects how relevant WinRAR is for them.
No matter what large software downloading website you check (Softpedia, Majorgeeks, Techspot, Filehorse, Filehippo), the most popular downloaded software will have these at the top.
That’s not really a valid metric, because these sites only show the total downloads, and don’t display recent numbers. WinRAR may have been popular 10 years ago, but they don’t show how many users downloaded it in the last year or whatever, so those numbers are meaningless.
You have no idea about general user security and popular software demographics.
I’ve been a Windows sysadmin for 11+ years and used computers since the days of MSDOS, so don’t tell me I don’t know software demographics. It’s you who is out of touch. Besides pirates, I’ve haven’t seen anyone still actually use WinRAR in the wild. The average user just doesn’t have a need for WinRAR - Windows already creates and opens zip files, and that’s all they need, because everyone else uses mainly zip files these days. And in offices, where they may need to transfer password protected files, they may ocassionaly use 7zip (due to its more secure encryption). But that’s all. Excluding Linux and Mac users, Windows users mainly only use .zip and .7zip these days (once again, excluding pirates).
Do you realise WinRAR has over half a billion users
Citation needed. But regardless, these users are clearly not on Lemmy. This is about relevance to Lemmy users, and the poll reflects how relevant WinRAR is for them.
With over 500 million users worldwide, WinRAR is the world’s most popular compression tool!
Lemmy is not catering to Lemmy users, but to internet users who may search and find this post as one of the search results. In the case of tech and information subreddits, Reddit never exclusively acted as a place catering to Reddit only, but to disseminate information people could read 5-10 years later and still find use out of it. This logic of making Lemmy an isolated culture is invalid.
That’s not really a valid metric, because these sites only show the total downloads, and don’t display recent numbers.
Thanks for validating this post even more. This means most people downloaded a WinRAR installer years ago, and never updated it. And since then, WinRAR is just being used as a rightclick -> extract tool. Hence the reason I said most WinRAR users who never updated are somewhere around 5.20 version. WinRAR on top of this is not a software that can self update.
I’ve been a Windows sysadmin for 11+ years and used computers since the days of MSDOS, so don’t tell me I don’t know software demographics. It’s you who is out of touch. Besides pirates
It is worrying that you have been a sysadmin and yet you are telling me these things. I have been a hardcore Windows user since the 95 days, having switched to Linux 6 years ago, and am dualing Debian and W10 since more than a year.
I think you do not exactly understand how piracy works, if your claim is that implied pirate users aka “torrent” only users receive RAR files. Most pirate users get their RAR files from regular file sharing websites like Mediafire or Gofile. Your implication could be further reduced and extrapolated to something like “oh people do not download they just stream, why worry” as well.
RAR continues to be the most robust production ready archival format due to its builtin recovery records (Igor Pavlov recently refused to work on incorporating it) with the most complete file timestamp support and archival locking features over 7Z, which is why there exist people who still prefer it. I personally switched to 7-Zip for compression ratio years ago, but I have been fairly an expert on file compression and archival for over a decade. WinRAR also skips errors often and successfully extracts all multipart (and regular) RAR and ZIP archives unlike 7-Zip which sometimes fails, which is the reason many users use it.
7-Zip gets installed onto corporate machines due to its free license, just like Notepad++ and VLC, something you probably base your claim off of, which is not how personal users work.
I think you are arguing for the sake of arguing, and to solve a problem that does not exist. Winning internet debates is bad for mental health and bad for feeding the confirmation bias monster in your head. If this “1 month old” post was such a widely known vulnerability, the vote ratio would have been atleast 35-45% negative, and I would have received more than 1 report as complaints.
Many people still do not know, and it is the only vulnerability in recent years.
First of all, this was already posted in Lemmy several times in several places. Just because it’s a critical vulnerability doesn’t mean you keep reposting it every month - just how long will you keep reposting it?
Also, hardly anyone uses WinRAR these days, so this isn’t really as important as you make of it. Your post may have been relevant when the zero-day came out, but a month later - no one cares.
I never reposted it. I have only posted for the first time, and there are far too many users that still say their WinRAR version is 5.x to this day. I do not think you understand how popular WinRAR is, and how many users exactly use it. Even on Linux via WINE it works perfectly, so the userbase is massive. RAR format is also popular enough, and the exploit for RAR 3.x archives is common enough because a lot of the stuff on internet is packaged in the RAR 2/3/4 format.
You didn’t, but it was posted by others. Posting about a critical vulnerability a whole month later is pointless. If this was acceptable then we’d see people constantly posting outdated news stories for critical vulnerabilities in other apps weeks or months after it’s been published, which doesn’t make sense. Admit it, you made a mistake in posting this - you didn’t check the date and thought it was a new article, right? Otherwise why would you post about this a month later?
Because WinRAR is popular and I have not seen it posted as much? My motive was to spread awareness, because of its sheer popularity. I see no harm in this.
This CVE being a month old does not mean its an outdated thing, because the potential of users getting affected is massive. Too many RAR 3.x and older packaged archives circulate around the world, and WinRAR does not automatically update for people, unless you are a techie that uses winget or choco.
I remain on top of such news usually, and if I missed it, there is a very good chance many have. Yes, I see myself as a benchmark of sorts, considering how seriously I treat and advocate privacy and security. If you want to just look good for calling me as a mod out, it is very unnecessary, unless there is some malicious intent or a low effort post being made.
Edit: you say it was posted “a lot” on Lemmy. But I only see one post each on Beehaw and Lemmy.world, which, for a CVE of this potential is… very bad? This news should have been plastered all over in relevant tech subs for maximum awareness.
Except, it’s not actually popular these days, and therefore, it doesn’t really warrant reposting such old and irrelevant news. And my earlier point still stands - what you posted is basically a repost. Just because you missed it doesn’t mean others have, nor does it justify it.
You probably won’t believe me that WinRAR isn’t popular, so I made a poll just for this - you can see for yourself that not many people here actually use WinRAR.
Do you realise WinRAR has over half a billion users? Your personal poll, assuming 20-30 votes, will not change that fact. 7-Zip has lesser users because WinRAR has been a full featured archiver since over a decade with a pretty GUI.
The average user that uses Windows installs and uses software in this order -> Chrome/Firefox, VLC, WinRAR, MS Office, Zoom/Discord/Teams, then rest of the stuff. No matter what large software downloading website you check (Softpedia, Majorgeeks, Techspot, Filehorse, Filehippo), the most popular downloaded software will have these at the top. Photoshop, IDM and Avast are also similarly popular.
You have no idea about general user security and popular software demographics.
Also, go figure. I have a whole guide on Linux/Windows computing that covers users of all skill levels. https://lemmy.ml/post/511377?scrollToComments=true
Citation needed. But regardless, these users are clearly not on Lemmy. This is about relevance to Lemmy users, and the poll reflects how relevant WinRAR is for them.
That’s not really a valid metric, because these sites only show the total downloads, and don’t display recent numbers. WinRAR may have been popular 10 years ago, but they don’t show how many users downloaded it in the last year or whatever, so those numbers are meaningless.
I’ve been a Windows sysadmin for 11+ years and used computers since the days of MSDOS, so don’t tell me I don’t know software demographics. It’s you who is out of touch. Besides pirates, I’ve haven’t seen anyone still actually use WinRAR in the wild. The average user just doesn’t have a need for WinRAR - Windows already creates and opens zip files, and that’s all they need, because everyone else uses mainly zip files these days. And in offices, where they may need to transfer password protected files, they may ocassionaly use 7zip (due to its more secure encryption). But that’s all. Excluding Linux and Mac users, Windows users mainly only use .zip and .7zip these days (once again, excluding pirates).
From the official website https://www.win-rar.com/ (https://rarlab.com is the other site):
Lemmy is not catering to Lemmy users, but to internet users who may search and find this post as one of the search results. In the case of tech and information subreddits, Reddit never exclusively acted as a place catering to Reddit only, but to disseminate information people could read 5-10 years later and still find use out of it. This logic of making Lemmy an isolated culture is invalid.
Thanks for validating this post even more. This means most people downloaded a WinRAR installer years ago, and never updated it. And since then, WinRAR is just being used as a rightclick -> extract tool. Hence the reason I said most WinRAR users who never updated are somewhere around 5.20 version. WinRAR on top of this is not a software that can self update.
It is worrying that you have been a sysadmin and yet you are telling me these things. I have been a hardcore Windows user since the 95 days, having switched to Linux 6 years ago, and am dualing Debian and W10 since more than a year.
I think you do not exactly understand how piracy works, if your claim is that implied pirate users aka “torrent” only users receive RAR files. Most pirate users get their RAR files from regular file sharing websites like Mediafire or Gofile. Your implication could be further reduced and extrapolated to something like “oh people do not download they just stream, why worry” as well.
RAR continues to be the most robust production ready archival format due to its builtin recovery records (Igor Pavlov recently refused to work on incorporating it) with the most complete file timestamp support and archival locking features over 7Z, which is why there exist people who still prefer it. I personally switched to 7-Zip for compression ratio years ago, but I have been fairly an expert on file compression and archival for over a decade. WinRAR also skips errors often and successfully extracts all multipart (and regular) RAR and ZIP archives unlike 7-Zip which sometimes fails, which is the reason many users use it.
7-Zip gets installed onto corporate machines due to its free license, just like Notepad++ and VLC, something you probably base your claim off of, which is not how personal users work.
I think you are arguing for the sake of arguing, and to solve a problem that does not exist. Winning internet debates is bad for mental health and bad for feeding the confirmation bias monster in your head. If this “1 month old” post was such a widely known vulnerability, the vote ratio would have been atleast 35-45% negative, and I would have received more than 1 report as complaints.