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Lzexe

The article should mention that "LZEXE" (written by some young kid in France nobody had ever heard of before) pretty much single-handedly invented this category of programs (at least as far as widespread use on microcomputers goes), leaving PKWARE and the others hurrying to catch up... AnonMoos 09:38, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, it did not. Fabrice Bellard wrote this program in 1989-1990 (according to his own website), at which time executable compressors had already been used routinely for several years by e.g. cracker and groups on the C-64.[1][2] --Viznut (talk) 11:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe -- but it still made a big splash in the MS-DOS world, and left much more professional and established software companies like PKWARE hurrying to catch up... AnonMoos (talk) 16:04, 18 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=43321
  2. ^ http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=10209

Merge

Support

  1. Yes, Exe Packers and Executable compression should be merged -- they are synonoms. The Exe Packers article seems much better maintained and descriptive than does this one. --db90h 08:44, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support - Squilibob 07:24, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Merge. --DCrazy talk/contrib 14:20, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Merge -- Taral 08:30, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

I oppose merging the two, especially while the term 'packer' is The title of this page is "executable compression". Everywhere on the page this is described as making an executable programs smaller. Obfuscation is listed as a side effect.

A 'true' packer performs some kind of compression on the executable. Many of the tools listed in the "List of packers' do not actually compress the binary; some make it much larger than the orignal. While obfuscating sometimes happens as a side effect of compressing a program, packers generally are not designed with that as the primary goal.

If the intent of a tool is to make it hard to analyze, it is a protector or obfuscator, not a packer.

Packing is how you make something fit in a smaller space. Obfuscating is how you make things hard to understand. Protection is the goal of the obfuscation.

Unfortunately, the term 'packer' has grown in some circles to mean "any tool which modifies an executable so it doesn't look the same as the original."

VMProtect, for example, is not a compressed executable. VMProtect is a virtual machine based emulation of the original code, which takes much more memory, disk space, and CPU to execute. It is not possible to extract the original code from a VMProtect app.[1]

It's a protector, and it uses very strong obfuscation techniques to do this. It does not pack the program, so it is not a 'true' packer.

If anything, this page needs to make that distinction clearer.

Neutral

Would you be so kind to mention also applications which are able to detect these often bad used exepacker/compressors ? For example, see at http://www.z80.eu/otherdelphi.html ... there is an application which is able to find these files in a generic way also. Please consider this. Thank you. PeterSmith123 (talk) 11:38, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ http://static.usenix.org/event/woot09/tech/full_papers/rolles.pdf

FSG

The external hyperlink on FSG is not helpful. It leads to a page which seems not related to anything similar to FSG. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.86.142.7 (talk) 14:34, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch, link changed. --HamburgerRadio (talk) 17:43, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

PeSpin?

Virus or not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.70.114.202 (talk) 15:11, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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