KatsBits Community

General Category => Blog => Topic started by: kat on November 05, 2011, 02:48:05 AM

Title: Windows 7 and user generated content
Post by: kat on November 05, 2011, 02:48:05 AM
If you use Windows 7, you might have come across the little 'Golden Padlock' on some of your files. Have you ever wondered what it is? It's Windows 7 and Microsoft's Security Essentials informing you the character mesh, *.map level or game project you just made isn't 'safe', and therefore has proceeded to block or limit access to the file (usually to 'read only') - "for your safety and that of other passengers Windows has determined this file to be unsafe for use and restricted access to 'Read Only'". Wait, what? That's my cuddly teddy bear texture! How can that not be safe!? You made the file, you know it's safe. And yet, because W7 and MSE do not recognise what it is or what you're doing, the default action of the operating system is to treat it like an infection of some description, a sort of 'guilty until proven otherwise' approach to doing things (notice that wasn't "guilty until proven 'innocent'").

To be blunt about the issue, this is Microsoft's way of telling the user two things at the same time, that 1) we don't know what we're doing and 2) we should be using computers to 'consume' media, not 'create' it. The entire User Interface is purposefully designed with this in mind in fact, Wizards and big buttons for "ease of access" that allow certain actions defined by the way Microsoft envision their software being used - we have permission to "watch", "play" and "listen" to photos, movies and music, but not much else. Used within the context of developing content and suddenly time is wasted unblocking files (where's batch unblock?), thumbnails can't be seen, unknown file-type errors crop up and media can't be opened in the application that made it.

If third party application develops can build programs that 'fix' the above, why can't Microsoft? It's no wonder why users are switching to Linux/Android and iOS/Mac.
Title: Re: Windows 7 and user generated content
Post by: ratty redemption on November 05, 2011, 04:33:49 AM
that sucks. recently i've been working on an old win xp 'professional' system where by, for about a week, the os randomly took ownership of some of my files and set them to read only, which even an admin account couldn't take ownership back. after a lot of windows updates and running check disk a couple of times, i can now copy, paste and edit all of my files. since this was probably a bug in the os and they fixed it for xp, why would they make the same mistake in their shiny new os? unless as you say it's because ms don't trust us power users/admins.
Title: Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) & access denied permissions
Post by: kat on November 12, 2011, 09:35:26 PM
Spent the last couple of days wrestling with this issue... it turns out that yes, it's to do with Microsoft and their attempts at 'protecting' users be blocking certain types of activity from being able to execute. Generally this is supposed to prevent scripts and other types of 'malware' executing on your system. But, and this is the problem, Microsoft are the ones that determine the terms by which something is regarded as being harmful - if it doesn't known what the file is, it blocks it by default. This obviously means for us content creators much of what we do is to generate content that MS won't know about (part of the reason MS has it's "Improvement" program is to encourage users to submit material for assessment, but the wider issue there is that one shouldn't need to do that, not to mention associated privacy and data-mining issues).

Anywho, the way to fix this problem and get around Windows blocking access to files is to do one, or both of the following;
N.B. there are other solutions but they generally require messing around with the registry and/or adjusting deeper system options.
Title: Re: Windows 7 and user generated content
Post by: ratty redemption on November 13, 2011, 02:04:41 AM
thanks kat for the heads up on this latest 'charlie foxtrot' from ms. at least the partition option sounds straight forward enough, but do apps like blender etc run from non c: drive install paths? i don't know, as i've never had to test this.
Title: Re: Windows 7 and user generated content
Post by: kat on November 13, 2011, 11:58:19 AM
Generally speaking there aren't usually any problems associated with installing to none C: drive locations as any critical files the OS needs are always placed where they need to be ("system32" for dll files for example).
Title: Re: Windows 7 and user generated content
Post by: ratty redemption on November 13, 2011, 06:01:20 PM
understood, cool.