One of many things I cannot stand about Windows is how Access Control Lists (ACL) are implemented. By default Windows wants to use NTFS which has access controls. As a Linux person, I’m used to file permissions. The difference is, if I need file permissions in Linux, I just take them—sudo is all-powerful. There is not a true equivalent in Windows—administrator is not the same as root and Windows has no problems telling the administrator “permission denied”. I have spent many hours trying to reverse messed up file permissions due to the fact that finding messed up ACL and removing them is not trivial.
I tried to synchronize a hard drive and after I was done file permissions were all messed up. I tried several times to correct this, each time thinking I got it and finding out something else couldn’t access the data. Eventually I gave up on NTFS and reformatted the drive exFAT. Microsoft doesn’t seem to want you to do this because exFAT is not given as an option for formatting, but it can be done from the command line. The reason for using exFAT is there are no ACL. In theory that should have solved my problem. I no longer had problems reading/writing to the drive—from Windows Explorer. No program could actually write to the disk. I came up with no solution to that problem nor any explanation why it was happening.
Windows Defendor is a miserable piece of crap. In trying to synchronize some hard drives it refused to copy several files. A couple had the extension “.virus”. They were, in fact, computer viruses. But they were also encrypted and thus harmless. Note that a properly encrypted file is indistinguishable from random data (and why you should compress first, then encrypt). The only indication these files were viruses was the extension. It’s kind of like trying to police by asking people if they are criminals, and if they say yes, arresting them. Defendor won’t copy them. I can just imagine the all heartbroken hackers thwarted by this defense.
Defendor also refused to copy anything with the name “crack” or “keygen.” These programs were not encrypted, but the ones I have are for really old software—like late 90s warez software. I doubt any threat they might have contained is even remotely relevant. At this point Defendor went from an over protective fool to a moronic autocrat. Big Brother is going to make sure you aren’t going to break any of the rules.