thinBundle - Great, but my Norton antivirus doesn't like it

[dcromley]

So I download thinbasic_1.9.0.0.zip (12,865KB)
It unzips to thinbasic_1.9.0.0.exe (12,885KB) which I execute.

Now, you could say, "Why zip?" "Why not just download the *.exe?"

But, where does upx come in?

[zak]

Hi Dave i have downloaded your file from http://dbarc.net/helloworld.exeits size about 255 kb i copied it to some folder together with the file upx.exe downloaded from http://upx.sourceforge.net/download/upx307d.zip
now from the command prompt write: upx -d -q helloworld.exe after that check its size you will see that it is about 388 kb, so this is the real inflated size. now check this bigger size file with your antivirus to see its report.
now regarding why zip and not exe ? i remember i tried to upload a file to a public mail site as an exe file, and the site refuses that for security reasons, so i have compressed it to zip and uploaded it again. i guess something like that here, some users are using company servers and the company servers prohibit downloading exe files. this is my quess.

[ErosOlmi]

So I download thinbasic_1.9.0.0.zip (12,865KB)
It unzips to thinbasic_1.9.0.0.exe (12,885KB) which I execute.

Now, you could say, "Why zip?" "Why not just download the *.exe?"

Web browser are too much sensible to executable.
Also some firewalls are too much sensible to downloading executable.
Many company policies prohibit to download executable.
One way to bypass this is to distribute a .ZIP file.

But, where does upx come in?

All .exe and .dll files distributed with thinBasic are compressed with UPX otherwise thinBasic would come out with a 30Mb setup file.

All bundled exe contain executable (thinBasic.exe, thinCore.dll plus all the module needed by the script) compressed with UPX.
This, again, in order to reduce executable size.

UPX is used all over the world in order to reduce size of executable and dlls

[dcromley]

OK, Michael and Zak,

I was skeptical, but I (finally) did what you suggested:
I copied MyFirstTBAppA.exe to MyFirstTBAppC.exe.
Then "upx -d -q MyFirstTBAppC.exe" and, as you said, it was 388KB.
Checking that with Norton gave "few users".
Then I uploaded it to http://dbarc.net/MyFirstTBAppC.exe
When I downloaded that, NIS (Norton Internet Security) noted "few users" and
suggested that it was suspect. When I executed it, it again noted "few users"
and gave me the option of running it or deleting it.
This is much more reasonable. Acceptable.

Regardsing upx, you said:
"It helps with virus scanning because they don't have to unpack the file to scan it."

Can you say a few more words about that? What does Norton see in the non-upx
version that makes it worse than the upx-version?

And I do see that browsers and firewalls could be more sensitive to executables
than to zipped or otherwise packed files.

So the bottom line is -- I will "upx" my thinBundle executables. Thank you. Dave

[edited just after post] I just ran the old http://dbarc.net/MyFirstTBAppC.exe with
the same results. Eros must have had Norton change something. ??