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Threat actors exploited Windows 0-day for more than a year before Microsoft fixed it (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That would be annoying for people who work on files with a double extension for legitimate reasons, e.g. .tar.gz, and (this can't be stressed strongly enough) Windows users do not pay attention to warning popups, so it wouldn't actually help. Despite it being eighteen years since Windows Vista released, and therefore vanishing unlikely that any given software was written assuming that Windows didn't have a permissions system, it's still most people's first troubleshooting step to try and run things as admin, and you still get loads of people (including ones who should know better, e.g. ones who also use Linux and would never log in as root) who disable UAC as one of the first things they do when setting up a windows install, and end up running everything as the equivalent of root just to suppress the mildly annoying pop-up when something asks for elevated permissions.

So, your proposed popup:

would be annoying including for legitimate uses
wouldn't help as anyone who already ignores the smart screen popup that shows up when running a dodgy application will ignore the new popup, too
would be disabled by huge swathes of users anyway

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I already addressed compression. It's as entirely trivial to whitelist those cases as it is to do in the first place.

Again, I said it's not magic. But most of these cases are inattention that would be reduced meaningfully if Windows made them actually pick what file type they were opening. There's a big gap between "advanced users" who will notice that it's the only file with an extension and morons who will just skip everything no matter what it says.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Don't bother with teh MS apologists. They are the worst.

If the operating system doesn't know the file and the type of file, it's a bad operating system.

It should be trivial to have an OS determine the file type and display a warning if the extension doesn't match.

Posix has had file for decades.