Bad ShrinkIt archives on Asimov

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

Dave Touvell found some damaged ShrinkIt archives on Asimov a couple of
days ago.  We did a little digging, and there are indications that most
of them were created by a single person or single program.

The archives in question appear to have been created by a brain-dead
ShrinkIt program, possibly running on a Mac.  The interesting part of
the record is this:

    FileSysID: 6 (Macintosh (HFS))  FileSysInfo: 0x003f ('?')

The archive entries have what looks like a reasonable HFS Option List
stored in them, so they either came from a Mac or the HFS partition of
a IIgs.  The interesting part is the FileSysInfo field, which specifies the
separator character used in the filenames.  For older archives it will be
the ProDOS '/', for newer it's the GS/OS ':'.  No sane program would use
'?', especially since the filenames themselves are separated with ':'.

(It does provide an easy way to identify the archives with CiderPress:
open the archive, right-click on an entry, and select "rename".  If the
path separator character is '?', the archive was created by this program.)

The archives appear to be fine, and claim to be compressed with LZW-II,
but none of the files can be uncompressed.  Uncompressed data extracts
and verifies correctly.  This was checked with CiderPress and GS/ShrinkIt.

The complete list of damaged .shk/.sdk/.bxy files is below.  The first
part of the list was verified by Dave to be victims of the "bad mac"
program:

Asimov/documentation/AppleSoft.SRC.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2.2000997G.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2.BOOTLEG6.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2.Bridget.GAME.shk
Asimov/unsorted/A2.CDraw6.shk
Asimov/unsorted/A2.GConvert.BMP.shk
Asimov/unsorted/A2.GUIJRDSYS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2.Koenig.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2.Launch4ALL.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2.SabineGUI.shk
Asimov/unsorted/A2.Textscrn.shk
Asimov/unsorted/A2200079.SDK
Asimov/unsorted/A2200099.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A22000997U.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/A2200101.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/AE.PCTRANS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/AE1.6MBHD.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/APPLESCAN.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/AUX.SYS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/AppleSoft.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/BackUpII.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/Balloon.NDA.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/BinLaunch.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/CDAS.and.NDAS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/Clone.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/DT2.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/FV.BBS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/FastBoot.v3.4.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/GAndanim.shk
Asimov/unsorted/GIFT3.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/GS.SCSI.SCAN.Driver.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/GS.SCSI.Tape.Driver.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/GS.StyleWriter.Driver.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/GenPMDvrs.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/ID.FORMATTER.GS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/ID.PARK.GS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/IIgs.Printer.Driver.src.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/InnerDriver.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/LaunchBox.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/LifeGuardGS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/Numerologie.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/Opix.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/P8CPRPATCH.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/PC.BMP.to.A2.HR.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/PRIME.BBS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/Pascal.1.3Patch.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/PenWorks.v2.1.bxy
Asimov/unsorted/ProDOSfilenav.v2.1.shk
Asimov/unsorted/RunPro.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/SNotebk.shk
Asimov/unsorted/SelectorSys.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/SeqText.shk
Asimov/unsorted/ShadowDial.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/ShrinkIt.v3.4.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/ShrinkItGSv1.1.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/SoftWord2.0.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/StyleWriter.Driver.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/TFB.Disasm.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/UnShrink.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/UnShrinkv1.1.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/ZorkZeroMaps.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/keywinGS.col.1.shk
Asimov/unsorted/keywinGS.shk
Asimov/unsorted/symlinkGS.shk
Asimov/unsorted/xMgr.SHK

It's possible that the information in these could be recovered if the
program used to create them could be identified.  It may be using a
variant of the standard compression code that nothing else can understand.
It would also be useful to figure out where they came from so we can
prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

Does anyone recognize these as files that they or someone they know have
uploaded?  If you're a Mac user, do you have a ShrinkIt application that
can open these archives?


FWIW, I see similarly damaged archives in the Ground archives, e.g.

Ground/upl1998/Apr98/MiniPaintGS.SHK

If the directory names can be believed, the program that creates these
archives has been around since at least 1998.  I'll post a list of
unreadable archives from Ground in a followup.


The following are also damaged, but not in the same way.  Some are victims of
truncation, some have bad CRCs, some either aren't ShrinkIt archives or are
ShrinkIt archives embedded in some other format.

Asimov/images/french_software/fv.shk
Asimov/images/french_software/fvstuff.shk
Asimov/images/utility/misc/nibble_magazine/nibble291.shk
Asimov/images/utility/misc/nibble_magazine/nibble292.shk
Asimov/images/utility/misc/nibble_magazine/nibble489.shk
Asimov/images/utility/misc/nibble_magazine/nibble789.shk
Asimov/images/utility/misc/nibble_magazine/nibble889.shk
Asimov/unsorted/APW.MAKE.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/AZ.MAN.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/DISKQUEST.P8.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/EA.COPIER.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/ECLIPSE.BBS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/FHA.PEPSI.V1.4C.BBS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/G4.][.the.Rescue.SHK  (begins "HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY - 2001")
Asimov/unsorted/MANAGING.YOUR.MONEY5.0.BOOT.SDK
Asimov/unsorted/MANAGING.YOUR.MONEY5.0.DATA.SDK
Asimov/unsorted/MCMBBS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/MULTIVID.ANSIV1.23.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/NYBBLER.bxy
Asimov/unsorted/SEPIA.IZER.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/SHRCONVERT.v2.1.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/SUPERZIP.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/SYS.P16.v10.SDK
Asimov/unsorted/SYS.P16.v20.SDK
Asimov/unsorted/SZ.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/VM.2.05.BBS.SHK
Asimov/unsorted/apple2ws.shk
Asimov/unsorted/diskQuest.P8.shk
Asimov/unsorted/hc.lib.68.bxy
Asimov/unsorted/hc.lib.76.bxy

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