No, that’s Dreadnought. Deadlock is a Batman villain who is an expert in firearms.

This reads like you work for Gamers Nexus and aren’t shy about it

… and is not a regex

How could you be sure of any of that? For all we know, nuclear war could start tomorrow. Or, a bit more realistically, next year. How fast can these factories be built?

Try this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/major-outages-at-crowdstrike-microsoft-leave-the-world-with-bsods-and-confusion/

Welp, Ars Technica has another theory:

Microsoft’s Azure status page outlines several fixes. The first and easiest is simply to try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike’s non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD. Microsoft says that some of its customers have had to reboot their systems as many as 15 times to pull down the update.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/crowdstrike-fixes-start-at-reboot-up-to-15-times-and-get-more-complex-from-there/

That’s some high quality speculation

I am so confused. What’s supposed to happen on the 15th reboot?

site isn’t loading for me, but I’m guessing it’s one of those “combine two things to get a new thing” games like Doodle God, but with AI answering on the fly instead of it being handcrafted?

I don’t think that PS1 model of a car will ever look acceptable to me. It’s not a design that grows on you or you get accustomed to. It’s just bad.

Yup, the .text “file” is binary, and I assume it’s exactly that - the executable machine code - but I did not try opening it with any hex editor or disassembler. I tried with a text editor, knowing in advance that it’s going to fail, and it did - there were a bunch of null or error characters shown and the editor crashed soon after.

I honestly didn’t look any further into it, because I just don’t care. Archive Manager apparently just splits up the sections of the .exe and exposes them as if they were files in an archive. Seems as useful an approach as any.

I’m assuming Unicode anyway, and UTF-8 is by far the most natural because most files will be in ASCII. A “normal form” (see link above), you might think of it as a canonical form, is a way to check if two strings are equivalent, even if they encoded the text differently. Like the example mentioned on Wikipedia:

For example, the distinct Unicode strings “U+212B” (the angstrom sign “Å”) and “U+00C5” (the Swedish letter “Å”) are both expanded by NFD (or NFKD) into the sequence “U+0041 U+030A” (Latin letter “A” and combining ring above “°”) which is then reduced by NFC (or NFKC) to “U+00C5” (the Swedish letter “Å”).

Well, I did get my hands on an exe file (some game on Steam) and opened it with Archive Manager. It does show some files, but the file properties say Type: application/x-ms-dos-executable (as opposed to application/zip). So it’s not an actual archive file, the archive manager is just displaying it as such to be helpful.

The “files” I can see are:

/.text
/.reloc
/.rsrc/version.txt
/.rsrc/ICON/2.ico
/.rsrc/ICON/3.ico
/.rsrc/ICON/4.ico
/.rsrc/GROUP_ICON/32512.ico

I tried to create a zip file and rename it to .exe, but Archive Manager failed to open it at all which I found strange. You’d think it would look at the actual file contents to figure out what type of archive it is, and not rely on the extension.

Thanks for the backup :)

Good point. Do filesystems use a normal form to at least prevent having two files with effectively the same name?

I should point out the flip side though, that there’s no avoiding Unicode in filenames. Users in languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet (such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Russian, and the list could go on) can reasonably expect to be able to give a file a name they can read and understand with no extra effort. All the software woes that come with it - too bad, software needs to deal with it.

I’m not on Windows.

Let me know when you have the screenshot!

It’s a zip file that includes a bunch of things, including embedded images and a bunch of other junk, but yes - the most important and central files in the zip are XML-based.

I don’t think that’s true for .exe or .dll files, but it’s definitely true for .docx files and other Office files ending with x. Some .exe’s are self-extracting archives or have other files embedded in them, so maybe that’s what you’ve been seeing.

There might be some double counting, but it doesn’t matter - this just illustrates the insane scale of these companies.

Unicode in filenames? Are you crazy?!

Okay that was /s to some extent but I gotta rant, I’m totally convinced that there’s still new software today that completely trip over themselves when files or paths have non-ASCII characters, or sometimes even a space. Incompetence didn’t go anywhere.