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Some of you may have noticed a new file blindman.exe inside the
Spybot-S&D folder, and have asked yourself what it is for.
In short words: it does nothing.
I guess an explanation is needed why a file that does exactly nothing comes
with Spybot-S&D. Spybot-S&D offers a tool to control the System
startup in its Tools section. This includes the ability to disable
or enable startup entries from the Autostart group (found in your Start
menu under Programs). This group contains links to the actual files.
Windows stores those links as files with the extension .lnk. When
Windows encounters a *.lnk file in that folder upon startup, it will
start the linked application. Now the easiest way to disable those entries is
to change the extension. The System startup tool of Spybot-S&D
does simply change the extension .lnk to .disabled. This easily
prevents the linked application from being started. But as Windows doesn't
know this extension, this could slow the startup down. So Spybot-S&D does
link that extension to blindman.exe. Windows now tries to run the
.disabled file with blindman.exe - and as blindman.exe does exactly
nothing, there's no slow-down in booting.
Some people have suspected it could even be spyware itself. For those I'll
print the Delphi source code (blindman.dpr) here:
(The included resource file is blindman.res and contains just the icon and some version info)
program blindman;
{$R *.res}
begin
end.
Anyone knowing a very small bit of programming should see that this program
is totally harmless.
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