The personal website of Matt Henderson.
13 May 2005
This is what I get for being an early adopter. I figured once the beta campaign was over, the release version of PGP 9 would be safe. Actually, it *is* generally safe, but I discovered a bad bug today. Here's what I sent to the PGP Support Forums:
Hello,
Today I lost a considerable amount of work, encrypting files with
PGP 9.0.0 for Mac OS X. Here's what happened:
I have the following directory structure:
Customer/
--Proposal/
----Issue 1/
------Proposal.doc
----Issue 2/
------Proposal.doc
------Analysis.xls
In the Finder, I select the three files (Proposal.doc,
Proposal.doc and Analysis.xls), control-click, and choose PGP
Encrypt. I then specify, in the subsequent dialog window to PGP
Shred the originals after encryption.
In version 8 of PGP, this operation would have resulted in:
Customer/
--Proposal/
----Issue 1/
------Proposal.pgp
----Issue 2/
------Proposal.pgp
------Analysis.pgp
In PGP 9, this operation resulted in:
Customer/
--Proposal/
----Issue 1/
----Issue 2/
------Untitled.pgp.zip
When I unpacked the resulting PGP file, it contained the
following:
------Proposal.pgp
------Analysis.pgp
In other words, the whole operation caused me to LOSE Issue
2 (the most current, and the one I'd been working on today) of my
Proposal.doc file.
As far as I can tell, there is no preference governing the new
behaviour -- i.e. creating a Zip archive, instead of simply
encrypting the individual files. When a new version of the
software deviates so greatly from a previous version, it seems to
me an injustice to the user to not at least warn them of this, or
provide the option to revert to the previous behavior.
Matt Henderson
What's particularly annoying is that apparently I can't even report this to PGP without paying $2.95 per minute. :-(
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