C|Net’s News.com recently reported that three trade organizations representing record and movie companies released a program called Digital File Check, a so-called “powerful scanning engine that allows you to search your computer for installed file-sharing programmes , as well as media files.” That quote is directly from the home page, as is the grammatically-incorrect space before the comma.
Since I like being a victim, I decided to run this on my laptop, which was recently overhauled as a result of a hard drive crash. Here’s some interesting information on the overall experience.
- The Digital File Check (DFC) Web site is written mostly in Flash. It is also configured to scale to window size, so peole with desktop resolutions of 800×600 will have a difficult time reading the blurry text without zooming in. Whoever designed this site needs to take some hints from usability expert Jakob Nielsen.
- Nowhere on the DFC Web site does it say it only works on the Windows operating system. Glad to know they have no problem with file-sharing Mac and Linux users.
- Inexplicably, you are required to enter a password when installing the application, in order to “stop unauthorized users from trying to run this program without your permission.” I thought they’d want people to run this program as often as possible.
I chose the password “jerk”. The default password recovery question is, “What is your favorite movie?” I also used the work “jerk”. Too bad passwords must be six characters long, so I changed everything to “thejerk”. Continuing, the installation finishes fine, so I fire up the program, type in “thejerk,” and get to the main window.
Going for total system hosing, I tell the program to do a full file search. After a few minutes, I’m told I have 0 file-sharing software, 0 videos, 6 music files, and 14,000 images (exactly 14,000).
A little wizard tells me it’ll automatically remove my file-sharing software if I click on the ‘next’ button, even though I don’t have any. Confused, I click ‘next’ anyway, wondering how a program can remove something I don’t have.
With the excitement to be gained by uninstalling things not installed, I click next, hoping for total system meltdown. No luck; the program(me), obviously concerned that the user does not read what’s on the screen, warns me again that it’s about to remove software that doesn’t exist on my computer.
Sadly, clicking ‘finish’ didn’t reformat my hard drive in an attempt to remove the nonexistant. However, I’m still curious as to what those 14,000 (exactly 14,000) images are, so I go to the “Music, image, and video files” area.
This is clearly a very useful tool, if you are interested in seeing a list of every image on your hard drive, including those installed by evil programs such as Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio, OpenOffice, and the demon of all demons, the Recycle Bin. No formats are ignored — I have JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TGA files identified.
By the way, the program simply looks for any file with a <dot><extension> in the filename — anywhere in the file name. I know this because I created two files on my desktop, one named thejerk.gif and another named thejerk.gif.txt. Both were empty files (0 bytes). Excellent false positive matches by DFC.
Overall, this is the most impressive piece of useless software I’ve ever seen. I’ll give an update after I install it on my home PC, which is chock-full of legal music files (from my own CD collection) and legal images (taken from my own digital camera). I can hardly wait.