Peervacy Automatic Filter Updater Tool

[cyko_01]

This is the first release of the Peervacy Collaborative Anti-Spam Filter Updater. This is an alpha release and is not yet suitable for general use! I have only tested it on winXP so far, but feel free to try it out on other versions of windows and let me know how it goes(although I doubt it will work). If you have an idea to make it work then feel free to propose a solution (Update: v0.3 works on vista and win7 when run with admin privileges). I am posting it here so people can test it and give me feedback

constructive criticism only please!

The Peervacy updater tool is a low-level filter updater. What is does is it shuts down shareaza, checks for updates and downloads them if available, backs up your existing security.dat and adds a timestamp to the filename, replaces the file "security.dat" in the application data folder, and restarts shareaza. It also check for updated versions of iteself and shows a pop-up window if one is available, with the option to visit the download page. The idea behind the updater is that you would create a scheduled task to run the application overnight and when you wake up you filters are updated and shareaza is the way you left it.

the tool uses a few exes that I found online. One is process.exe that shuts down shareaza nicely(instead of taskkill.exe) and the other is URL2File.exe which allows us to check for updates and downloads them. These have not been tested except for on winXP, but if you can find an alternative that works just as well then let me know.

Update: v0.2 and later now uses webfetch.exe instead of url2file

Before the stable release, I would like to create a setup utility that will configure it, but i have not gotten around to that yet. Currently there are only 2 settings. They can be found in settings.ini
Reboot Mode - options are nowarn, tray, nowarntray, normal
Ignore Tool Upgrades - this is a true (1) or false (0) value and can be set by either running ignore.bat (used when "cancel" is clicked in newtool.vbs ), or by manually changing the value to 1. When set to 1 you will not see pop-up notifications about new versions of this tool

>>> Download Now <<<

To install it simply download the EXE, run it to extract the files, and execute "runme.bat"

[brov]

Avast tells me that there's a suspicious file (url2file.exe).

[cyko_01]

[brov]

WGET is easy and can run on win32, if you want I can modify your code to use wget instead of url2file.


EDIT: BTW why the files are copied to sysroot/system32?

[roestvrijstaal]

[cyko_01]

[cyko_01]

I will not be using wget after all. wget is overkill.

I found a drop-in replacement for URL2FILE.exe that has a much smaller file size (just 80KB) and is open source. the tool is called webfetch and is not identified as a virus by any of the engines on virustotal. I only need to change about 5 lines of code to make the switch. I'll change it as soon as I get a chance and post the new version here

[cyko_01]

[roestvrijstaal]

Will the new rules merged with the rules in the current filter list or will the new filter list replace the current filter list?

Because I've done a quickly view in the security list and it seems the list was untouched.

But for the rest...I've seen no error screens appearing @me when i run Peervacy 0.2

[cyko_01]

[cyko_01]

[old_death]

Does it update the filter with new rules or does it simply replace the filter database with a new one from the web?

[cyko_01]

[cyko_01]

should I assume, from the lack of feedback, that v0.3 is working perfectly for everyone?