There is a company out on the fringes of technology. Making software that most of us only dream of being able to write. Scoffing at the current obsolete methodologies and practices, these brave new developers have recently pioneered an awesome new era in software development.
This software company is clearly just another one of your typical geniuses not recognized in their time, as the very unscrupulous “CNet / Downloads.com”:http://www.download.com/PC-Mesh/3260-20_4-6263078.html reviews have been far too harsh on this enterprising company.
“PC Mesh”:http://www.pcmesh.com is, of course, the company to which I refer. It is with the most sincere amazement I discovered this little gem of a company today. Or more specifically, the discovery was their “Hide Files and Folders”:http://www.pcmesh.com/hide-files-folders.htm software.
How can I make these claims about this company? Well, for starters, their web site tells us all we need to know: PCMesh Hide Files and Folders is a revolutionary new software product…. But I’m not an idiot – I know to do my homework and not take everything at face value, even a statement so indisputable as that one. So how do we know these guys are the real deal? I’ll go through their feature list, item by item, and explain just how brilliant they are. Some of what you’re about to read may be difficult to accept, but keep in mind that true brilliance will often challenge that which we have been taught to believe, and that challenge can sometimes be difficult to accept. Now, on with the -propaganda bashing- product highlights: * Invisible from the operating system, invisible from virus attack and invisible from spying eyes that won’t even know the cloaked files or directories are present. ** Wow. Just… wow. Okay, invisible files are protected from virus attack and spies. Humans won’t know to look for cloaking software, of course, because this concept is totally new and unique, and even now that it’s out, unauthorized people would never dream of doing research to learn of this exciting new software. As for viruses, yeah, they can’t infect what they can’t find. Too bad most people want to hide data files, not fracking executables. And too bad that when you make those files visible, a virus will then see the OS reading the files and infect them. And too bad a smart virus could easily be written to infect this POS program in such a way as to destroy the data as you try and make it visible. But other than that, yeah, this software is amazingly effective. * Encrypted files are still visible on the hard drive. This makes them vulnerable to attack from anyone who is interested enough in the content of the files to spend time trying to decipher them. And with more and more hackers intent on defeating modern encryption algorithms, a need exists for a better type of protection. ** In fact, this may be the only statement that’s partially true. Granted, most encryption today is nearly unbreakable, especially for home computers that don’t house highly-sensitive data, but otherwise this isn’t a “bad” thing to say. Better encryption standards are always a good thing. Questioning the strength of today’s encryption is certainly a worthy goal. Course, I’m not sure where they got the idea that “more and more hackers” are are intent on defeating modern encryption algorithms. Haven’t droves of hackers (and security specialists and general security enthusiasts) always been interested in defeating encryption algorithms? Without those people, we’d all still be using Caeser Shift Ciphers! * In addition to rapidly becoming obsolete, current encryption programs are slow. ** Rapidly becoming obsolete? Gosh, even the encryption algorithms that are considered to be broken are still pretty strong for the average computer user’s needs. And anybody with data so sensitive that it needs unbreakable encryption can probably deal with the fact that they need to update encryption methods every few years. * It takes as long as 10 minutes per 200 MB to encrypt or decrypt a file, while PCMesh Hide Files and Folders executes instantly regardless of the file size or number of files/folders being protected. Just one click is all it takes to render any file or directory invisible. ** Okay, I don’t know much about encryption speeds. I have to be honest, this could be completely true for a really awesome encryption algorithm. So let’s say they have two semi-true statements. Let’s note here that this software “executes instantly”, which means to me it flags files in some way (prefixing them with $sys$, perhaps?), and doesn’t do any kind of encryption. * Data that’s protected by PCMesh Hide Files and Folders is not visible, so it can’t be attacked. In fact, the software itself does not even run continually, so it does not announce its presence to snoopers and hackers. The only time the software is active is when it’s being used to hide or reveal protected files or directories. ** This statement (or series of statements) is so ridiculous I am amazed. “Security through obscurity”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitythroughobscurity is just plain stupid. If an attacker simply finds out about this garbage software, they’ll know to attack the “invisible” files. And since the files are still on the system, there is no way to truly make them hidden – if this software can get to them, so can an attacker. Worse, the authors actually believed that an attacker will need something continually running in order to realize what’s going on. I imagine PCMesh is populated by people who’ve never even read a single article on security, encryption, or hacking. If hackers had no access to the internet and didn’t know how to research new “protection” schemes, they really wouldn’t ever be a threat. * Better Than Encryption ** Though this is higher on the page than the last few items (its their header in fact), I thought I’d mention it here just after the security bit, to point out how absurd the claim is. Obscurity is /never/ better than encryption for sensitive files. It’s only better than encryption when it comes to files you don’t need strong protection on, and situations where you just want to keep the honest people honest. Nobody can currently break AES, but just spending some time hacking through this product’s disassembly (after unpacking their undoubtedly “proprietary” packed executable) would probably reveal how to find the “hidden” files. Though I suspect it’ll turn out to be similar to the “Sony rootkit”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005SonyBMGCDcopyprotectionscandal BS from 2005. * Hide files or folders of any size instantly. There is no processing time. ** Most of the bullet point “highlights” are just repetitive crap from the “Better Than Encryption” section of this website. But this one struck me as funny. It’s really no big deal; it’s just that with computers (and pretty much anything), there’s no such thing as “no processing time”. I dunno, I’m picky, shut up.
So clearly this product kicks ASS. Go out and buy it today.