Why are RAR files banned/blocked

Is there a valid reason why My Opera bitches at me when I try to upload a RAR file?

This has been asked before (several times, by others) but is never answered.

If I repackage as a ZIP it is fine, but it eats so much more of my online storage, and I lose the benefit of recovery records.

Try 7z — that seems to upload OK.

Originally posted by Pesala:

Try 7z — that seems to upload OK.

Thanks but,
this is the same suggestion I see every time, and is not the answer I'm looking for

I do use 7zip, but it's interface is awful and amateurish, but most importantly, I use the recovery record in RAR files, when 7zip add this important feature I will swap to using it.

Until then I would like an answer from one of the My Opera team, as to why RAR files are blocked. Please ?

*BUMP*

Aww come on. Can someone give me an official answer before I have to write a letter or phone Opera head office?

This is getting stupid.
Just fill in the blanks.
"We have blocked RAR files because........."

Originally posted by dr-flay:

Can someone give me an official answer before I have to write a letter or phone Opera head office?

I doubt if that would work either. I am still waiting for a response to my thread and this much older one, but at least the Config Links are working again now.

My guess is that Opera need to pay a license fee to incorporate WinRar extraction into its forum code. All files uploaded are checked for viruses.

Unfortunately we needed to limit the types of files users are allowed to upload on My Opera. The main purpose of allowing users to store files is to make it easy for you to share images and other small files on your blog. In the case of rar files, these were often misused for spreading viruses and rarely used to share safe, legal content on My Opera.

If you check out the wikipedia page about the rar compression, you'll see

"7z's LZMA algorithm reaches a higher compression ratio than RAR, except for "multimedia" files like .wav and .bmp files where RAR uses specialized routines that outperform LZMA.[8] Other free compression software such as NanoZip and FreeArc usually outperform WinRAR."

So for the most part you should do as Pesala suggested and use 7z for compression instead of rar.

Wow, I think it's the first time I see someone from the opera team here on the forum. Glad to see you people actually read the comments.

The problem with 7z(using 7-zip at least, haven't tried any other) is that it sometime corrupts what you extract(I have only seen this on big files though since I rarely hash small files) so that's the reason I came back to winrar and use rar files.

It's only associated with viruses because it's the compression format most people use. Someone with bad intentions can easily put it in a 7z or any other compression format so I think it's a pretty weak reason to block them.

Originally posted by SamKook:

Wow, I think it's the first time I see someone from the opera team here on the forum.

Maybe this will jog your memory?

Originally posted by digmed:

these were often misused for spreading viruses and rarely used to share safe, legal content on My Opera.

Agreed. Actually most torrent websites serve the content as RAR. Also, RAR is in frequent use by people who upload cracked softwares on the Internet.

Originally posted by Pesala:

Originally posted by SamKook:

Wow, I think it's the first time I see someone from the opera team here on the forum.

Maybe this will jog your memory?

I indeed completely forgot about it and now I feel more depressed since I can't tell myself they didn't fix it only because they didn't see it.

Originally posted by Swapnil99pro:

Originally posted by digmed:

these were often misused for spreading viruses and rarely used to share safe, legal content on My Opera.

Agreed. Actually most torrent websites serve the content as RAR. Also, RAR is in frequent use by people who upload cracked softwares on the Internet.

Again that's only because .rar is the most popular archive format nowadays and has great features like including recovery records inside them to repair broken archives. Before it it was .zip and now .7z is gaining popularity.
When a new format becomes more popular, that's what will be used to contains viruses since it will be what most people use. Blocking a format won't stop people from spreading bad stuff since they can easily repack it into something else.

It's like saying brown boxes should be banned because that's the color most people use to put bombs(or anything else bad) in.

I agree there should be no file extension block.

It's not very cool you say someone has 2 GB space and don't let them use with whatever he/she wants...

Unfortunately we have had to become very restrictive with the file types that we support, because many file types have been heavily abused in the past. We've actually measured this, and found that only a small percentage of the RAR files that were hosted on My Opera (while it was still allowed) were used in a legal way. The rest were used to share content to other sites (hotlinking) and/or sharing illegal/copyrighted material.

If you really need to store and share large files on the internet, there are a lot of services out there, for instance Opera Unite, Dropbox, RapidShare, etc.

And again, the main purpose of allowing users to store files is to make it easy for you to share images and other small files on your blog. For that, 2 GB of space should be more than enough for most users.

Originally posted by digmed:

2 GB of space should be more than enough for most users.

Yup. I would not be able to utilize my 2GB even throughout my life.
So would you block 7z files too if it gets popular for serving malware and cracked software?

Originally posted by Swapnil99pro:

So would you block 7z files too if it gets popular for serving malware and cracked software?

We haven't noticed much abuse of 7z files, so as things are now the answer is no. Things would have to get fairly extreme for us to block a filetype, as things were in the case of rar files.

Facebook blocking My Opera URLs in the past echoes in my mind now...

But SamKook's last comment just makes yours about blocking files types to make little sense. The thing you could do is analyzing the files for viruses (you seem to do it now), I think that's the definitive solution already (if it can analyze inside archives).

I was thinking on how these limitations (hot-linking and file type) aren't explained anywhere before the user register (but checked that other services don't even provide info on the total available space and file size limitations ).

Originally posted by SamKook:

When a new format becomes more popular, that's what will be used to contains viruses since it will be what most people use. Blocking a format won't stop people from spreading bad stuff since they can easily repack it into something else.

Except it isn't just about viruses. Blocking a format used mostly for piracy will make it harder to do piracy. They can't easily repack because the warez scene has rules on how the pirated stuff is supposed to be packaged. And if they do start using another format and it's obvious that this format is almost exclusively used for illegal stuff, then that can be banned from the site too.

It's like saying brown boxes should be banned because that's the color most people use to put bombs(or anything else bad) in.

No it isn't. When just about all .rar files are not legit, that's good enough reason to ban them.

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

It's not very cool you say someone has 2 GB space and don't let them use with whatever he/she wants...

That's the site's choice. Lots of sites do it this way. There's no reason why a site should have to allow all kinds of files just because it offers you free storage.

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

But SamKook's last comment just makes yours about blocking files types to make little sense.

On the contrary, it is you who are not making sense. Did you read the part where he said that just about all .rar files were used for copyright infringement?

Originally posted by Chirpie:

Blocking a format used mostly for piracy will make it harder to do piracy.

My Opera doesn't have rules against piracy.

Originally posted by Chirpie:

When just about all .rar files are not legit, that's good enough reason to ban them.

And them just about all .zip files become malware. Ban. And then 7z, ban. And then tar, ban. Just because there are people using it for malware???

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

Originally posted by Chirpie:

Blocking a format used mostly for piracy will make it harder to do piracy.

My Opera doesn't have rules against piracy.

Looks like you need to re-read the terms.

2.5 By using the Services, User warrants that User will not upload, transfer, or otherwise make available files, images, code, materials, or other information or content ("Content") that is obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or that violates any laws or third-party rights, hereunder, but not limited to, third-party intellectual property rights. -- http://my.opera.com/community/terms-of-service/

Can you even upload files more than a few MB in size on MyOpera? I kind of assumed there was a size limit based roughly on, say, high-res photographs. But perhaps my error is in thinking about stuff like movies when I see copyright infringement.

@Leevi oops!

@Frenzie Currently 64 MB. (But you can infringe copyright with small photos too, imagine a few KBs).

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

(But you can infringe copyright with small photos too, imagine a few KBs)

Obviously, but we're talking RAR files here. JPEGs aren't banned as a whole; they're one of the most important use cases. I imagine copyright infringement based on a simple TXT file is by far the smallest possible infringement.

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

Originally posted by Chirpie:

When just about all .rar files are not legit, that's good enough reason to ban them.

And them just about all .zip files become malware. Ban. And then 7z, ban. And then tar, ban. Just because there are people using it for malware???

No "just because," but if almost all files of those types are illegal there's no reason not to ban them. If you had a shred of honesty in your body you would notice the difference between "some files being used for illegal stuff" and "nearly all files being used for illegal stuff."

Originally posted by Frenzie:

I imagine copyright infringement based on a simple TXT file is by far the smallest possible infringement.

By which I mean smallest in file size.

Originally posted by Slamdex:

If you had a shred of honesty in your body

Please refrain from using personal attacks in the discussion.

Originally posted by Chirpie:

They can't easily repack because the warez scene has rules on how the pirated stuff is supposed to be packaged.

That's just for the groups originally releasing them, the user that gets it after can re-release it however they want.


It's true that if most of them are used for piracy, it's a strong argument for banning them, but it's just another example of legit users having to pay because a lot(you can also read this as "almost all" if you want but I like to be optimistic) of people use something for bad.

I would have liked a solution that doesn't restrain legit users like scanning the rar files content and only ban them if the stuff in there is most likely illegal. For example I would use space on a blog to upload photos for an event or something like that and group them together in a rar so that people could easily get them all if they want. So if the rar file contains only photos, there's less chances it's something pirated, or if it contains a couple of small video(I don't know a lot of video of copyrighted stuff at less than 64MB) or other files people would be likely to put on a blog. You could ban rar that contains exe or nfo files(since most pirated releases has one).

The rar format is the only one(That I know of) that can include recovery records to help you repair a file that gets partly corrupted and as things are now, we, legit users, can't use that great feature.

Originally posted by SamKook:

The rar format is the only one(That I know of) that can include recovery records to help you repair a file that gets partly corrupted and as things are now, we, legit users, can't use that great feature.

ACE and ARJ do too, to give you a blast from the past. There are some others I've never heard of.

Well I never expected this controversy , but I'm glad to finally get an answer!

Thank you Frenzie, for the first truly useful suggestion.
I will be probably be trying out ACE first as I used it many years ago, and I think the standards like WinRAR and WinZip will open them.

I see the way it works. I've come across it before with the blocklists for Shareaza. They block all zip files by default as they used to be (and still are) the predominant distro format. They also block all wma and wmv as these are commonly used as auto-generated spam.

Zip is the only format natively supported by most OS's, and in my experience is at about 50/50 with rar files on the crakz sites (I do a lot of virus hunting and submitting).

It's a shame some My Opera users have spoiled it for the rest of us.
I don't have my own connection, so I use MyOpera as a place to keep my tech support tools, and a few Unreal Tournament related things.
None of these things are big, and mostly never linked in a page. That's not why I'm using RAR. It's the recovery record.

I still have the luxury of a few small mp3s I uploaded before being dis-allowed (These are not linked, but used as music on certain pages).
I'll just have to see how the archive competition has progressed.