Lingon trainers..

[Joe Forster/STA]

Well, then it's official.

Originally Posted by EMPiRE

I understand that some of them want to protect their work for various reasons but I also think that sharing your knowledge is a good thing and then there would be no need to pack files

Being a faithful communist, I cannot possibly disagree with the second part of the sentence.

Much more generally, people are wasting way too much of their time, energy and other resources battling with each other when there are so many useful goals out there. (We could've colonized half the Solar System by now which would've inherently solved many of the major problems that mankind is currently struggling with.) Well, that's capitalism, people!

Originally Posted by EMPiRE

My thought is that the AV companies should never have added detection for packed files, I totally understand that they did it as they want to warn EVERYBODY for the possibility of an infected file and not just a small group of people... (better safe than sorry)

The problem with this is that, 1) when an executable is packed and/or encrypted, you cannot (easily) find out whether or not it's malicious because you can't see the actual code, 2) it's impossible for an anti-virus company - or anyone else, for that matter - to code depackers and decryptors for all packers/encryptors available, especially for serious encryptors where the point is exactly to avoid people from seeing what's inside. Therefore, the easiest way is warning the user about packers/encyptors that are usually found in malware and there's nothing we can do about it.

Of course, smart programmers listen to the needs and requests of their users. However, there's nothing we can do about this either.