Healer, heal thyself

Googling the answer for some questions may have ironic outcomes

So, I was looking into getting scanning working on the new machine.

Big mistake: I know, right?

Second link! Not the highlighted one! The second one!

I knew where the magic shortcut was, and that there had been some “controversy” on why it had been subject to “extraordinary rendition” in Windows 10.

I. Just. Want. To. Scan.

So I though I would do a little search.

Surprise #1 file:/// is still a thing?

surprise #2: Chrome does something — you only need to press Enter

And you only need to click on it — imagine this had been a different application in a different place.

Now let’s see where that copy is….

The kosher version

This is the right place, and the right settings

Erm — the “In Downloads” version

This is messed up

Why does this matter?

Confession: I don’t spend time crafting malware, but it strikes me that making it trivially easy for users to run programs from unexpected paths with unexpected permissions and unknown files in the current directory can’t be the best of ideas.