Mission Computer virus?

So I just tried downloading Mission Computer from the addons and noticed Safari is throwing up a "Harmful Software" warning whenever you download an addon. I proceeded regardless but then when I tried to launch MC I got told that it contains the "OSX.HellRTS.A" malware. I'm sure this just a false positive but I'd rather not take the chance. Does anyone already have MC that they could upload and share? Then I can compare it to the one from the addons to see if it has been tampered with.

My copy of Mission Computer is from January 2011, (version 4.2) unfortunately the .dmg was cleaned up a long long time ago but I've compressed it and hosted it on Dropbox. If it doesn't work right away give it another minute, it's still uploading as of the time of this post.

Thanks. Everything appears to be identical except that your one has a CodeSignature and the one I downloaded from the addons doesn't. Odd, but both show the malware warning when I try to open it so I'm going to assume it's just a false positive.

I'm not having any trouble downloading anything from the addons page, using Chrome. Probably just a third-party software security thing? Sounds like Safari being Safari.

Apparently HellRTS was written in REALbasic, of a similar vintage to what I was using for MissionComputer 4.x. So it isn’t a particularly surprising false positive — I expect they contain several of the same framework files. (All the articles I could find are from 2010, and say it hadn’t actually been found in the wild.)

JacaByte’s copy of MissionComputer 4.2 appears to be identical to mine. The CodeSignature isn’t part of the original distribution, but that seems to be something that Gatekeeper adds when you give it permission to open.

Thanks David, I suspected it was something like that. Sadly MC can't get past Gatekeeper at all now - the only way around it is to remove the quarantine xattr.
Any ideas how we can make this easier for other people trying to download it?

@guy, on 14 February 2017 - 07:22 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

Any ideas how we can make this easier for other people trying to download it?

Is the problem with Gatekeeper and the archive itself, or is it simply that browsers don’t trust ambrosiasw.com?

My browser trusts ambrosiasw.com, and I have no problems opening my copy of MC. But then I haven't had to re-download MC either. I'm also using Safari on 10.10.5 Yosemite.

Now, though, I just re-downloaded MC from the link in David Arthur's sig and had no problems. Ran fine, no warnings.

@david-arthur, on 15 February 2017 - 09:06 AM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

Is the problem with Gatekeeper and the archive itself, or is it simply that browsers don’t trust ambrosiasw.com?

Both.

The latter could be resolved by hosting it elsewhere, but that would run the risk of the new host eventually being flagged too. I'm not sure why others aren't encountering the warning, it's provided by Google Safe Browsing. Perhaps you guys have the warnings turned off in your settings?

The big problem though is with Gatekeeper which simply won't let you launch the app, even if you right-click and choose open. It warns you of the malware, offers to report it to Apple and move the app to the trash. DarthKev, I assume you have Gatekeeper disabled?

I’ve done some more research, and it looks like Gatekeeper will do the same to anything containing the REALbasic framework from this period, which does seem rather excessive. Short of a full-scale port to the current version of ‘Xojo’, as they’re calling it now, I can’t really see anything I could do.

Dumb. Well given no one's complained about it before, hopefully it won't be much of a problem.

Any chance I could borrow the code for MC's RLE encoder to use in SpacePort? Orca did make a separate RLE program but it isn't Intel compatible and I don't have the source for it.

@guy, on 15 February 2017 - 03:45 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

DarthKev, I assume you have Gatekeeper disabled?

Well my settings are set to allow applications from the Mac App Store and identified developers. So I still have to tell it I'm sure I want to open a new application the first time I open it. And occasionally I will find an application it won't let me open without right clicking, but with MC none of that occurred.

As for Google Safe Browsing, when I click the link you provided it does tell me ambrosiasw.com is partially dangerous, but other than that I get no warnings through normal use and visits.

@guy, on 15 February 2017 - 06:10 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

Dumb. Well given no one's complained about it before, hopefully it won't be much of a problem.

Honestly I can’t see a lot of use for it at this point. If I were tempted to write something like an EV plug-in at this point, I’d be looking at the impressive Endless Sky engine.

@guy, on 15 February 2017 - 06:10 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

Any chance I could borrow the code for MC's RLE encoder to use in SpacePort?

I remember Make RLE being one of the most self-sufficient sections of MissionComputer, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to untangle. I’ll take a look and see what condition the code is in.

@david-arthur, on 16 February 2017 - 04:02 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

Honestly I can’t see a lot of use for it at this point. If I were tempted to write something like an EV plug-in at this point, I’d be looking at the impressive Endless Sky engine.

I honestly can't stand Endless Sky. I like the premise, but the auto navigate feels too hands free, like I'm not even playing. But it's just so convenient I keep using it anyway, which then makes the game boring.

To be fair it's been a long while since I last looked at Endless Sky, or even NAEV. But neither can really match up to EV in my opinion. To NAEV's credit, they wanted to be different from EV, and they succeeded at that, but what they have now just isn't very palatable for me.

The only EV for me is EV.

/hijack

So here’s Make RLE. It has a few dependencies on ResFrame, but really only for the loading and saving. It should be easy enough to see what they’re trying to do, and replace them with whatever calls are appropriate to your framework.

winMakeRLE.zip (23.55K)
Number of downloads: 1

@darthkev, on 17 February 2017 - 01:31 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

I honestly can't stand Endless Sky. I like the premise, but the auto navigate feels too hands free, like I'm not even playing. But it's just so convenient I keep using it anyway, which then makes the game boring.

I felt that way at first, but honestly I don’t think the appeal of EV comes from pressing up-arrow and down-arrow at the same time, or repeatedly hitting the J key.

NAEV I looked at a few years ago, and it had some merit, but I didn’t like the direction they seemed to be taking it in, with the constantly running clock and wormhole-only travel. And the scenario wasn’t very interesting — Endless Sky ’s ships have a certain sameness to them, but the story has some genuine surprise and discovery to it.

@david-arthur, on 18 February 2017 - 04:24 PM, said in Mission Computer virus?:

So here’s Make RLE. It has a few dependencies on ResFrame, but really only for the loading and saving. It should be easy enough to see what they’re trying to do, and replace them with whatever calls are appropriate to your framework.

winMakeRLE.zip

Great, thanks heaps for that!

I'm still a little concerned about the warning when downloading addons. Safari, Chrome and Firefox all use Google's Safe Browsing and show a warning for any addon you download, and sometimes for other files elsewhere on ASW. To clear ASW's name, MC would have to be removed from the addons.