Author archives: NeverShaveYourDuck

You’ve got to hand it to me. For two weeks I’ve had an article about the Divocodec scam on my web site, and absolutely no links or nothing pointing to it; in fact I forgot even to tell anybody about it. How’s that for efficient information flow? In case you encounter an AVI file which […]

I have encountered yet another spawn of the spyware-ridden WinZix installer. The worrisome part is, my antivirus package (AVG from Grisoft) doesn’t find anything harmful inside (although you can bet the farm it’s most decidedly harmful), even with a day-fresh virus DB update. I think this is because the installer is a NET 2.0 binary, […]

A quick note to those who want to install UnZixWin 0.0.9 mentioned below: During the installation process, you may get asked whether you want to replace your current version of a certain DLL with an older one from the installation. Your gut reaction, off course, is to click ‘no’. And that is precisely what you […]

Fellow scambuster Jim Dunn has alerted me to a new trend of AVI scammers. If you get an AVI file which shows you this message: This is, off course, just another variation of the 3wPlayer scam. The same people responsible for 3wPlayer scam has added another trick to their bag. They’re double-encoding 3wPlayer files and […]

The new version, which handles the new ZIX format, is now finally available for download. ZIP version (4.79 MB) Bittorrent file (so you can share the burden of uploading) Sorry about dragging my feet this last week, folks. As a small token of gratitude for your patience, I went ahead and added support for 3w-encoded […]

First of all, apologies for churning out these blog entries at such a snail pace. I had intended to write up the DRM scam sooner, but considered it a fringe thing. Good thing I was slow on the draw with this one, though, because it has proven to be more serious than I thought, and […]

Prior to last week, users encountering ZIX archives have been able to find information on WinZix in Wikipedia. This was an invaluable source of information, and it included warnings about the spyware in WinZix and links to damage reports as well as remedies for those affected. I was able to contribute in a small way […]

Jump for joy! Thanks to a few alert users who pointed me to a certain ZIX archive online, I hit paydirt. This archive contained multiple files and a folder hierarchy, which was all I needed to complete the puzzle. I have now dissected the new format almost completely. As a consequence, I’ve been able to […]