Coworker just ran into a utility that, when trying to save a file, bailed with a scary warning because the file size was a multiple of 4096.

[me@social.taupehat.com]

Coworker just ran into a utility that, when trying to save a file, bailed with a scary warning because the file size was a multiple of 4096. This was one of the Ancient Errors... (and yes, adding a newline char solved the "problem")

[philsalkie@mindly.social]

@ai6yr @me

There was a software copy protection system back in the dawn of time - it encrypted the executable, and wrote decryption information in the slack space past the end of some system file on disk, using the unused bytes in the last disk sector allocated to that file.

Problem was, it didn't check the length of the file it chose to write to - if there wasn't enough room in that slack space, it just happily overwrote the next sector with a few bytes of key and filled the rest with 0.

A rare occurrence, but known to have caused mystery data deletion when programs using that copy protection system were installed.

[danlyke@researchbuzz.masto.host]

@me yikes, and having ymodem flashbacks.

[me@social.taupehat.com]

@danlyke it's exceedingly likely that you know, and perhaps even worked on, this particular utility. And it would have been old when you did.