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98codes

> On Windows land you have something similar

I'm still waiting to hear about a kernel-level exploit that starts with Visicalc or similar.

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Windows has far worse. Injecting code into other processes is routine and almost impossible to get rid of.

I've never heard of that from store apps

The store which doesn't even provide one of the most useful Microsoft product (Visual Studio)?

Yeah. That really doesn’t need to be from the store.

I really hate going through the Apple Store to download Xcode. We all know how to download software. I’d rather go through a dev portal than a consumer portal.

YMMV

Xcode can be downloaded from developer.apple.com too, it's not an App Store exclusive.

Command line: https://github.com/XcodesOrg/xcodes

GUI: https://github.com/XcodesOrg/XcodesApp

> I’d rather go through a dev portal than a consumer portal.

You actually can, alongside with conmand line tools, additional xcode utils, debug kernels et cetera.

Readers here are all very likely to appreciate some links alongside statements, cause really this is a sensitive topic. Both statements need certain context as it seems it’s not the universal understanding of what goes on and how often.

SetWindowsHookEx is a blast.

Not sure it can be proven with citations but it's well known that process injection is widely used on Windows. GPU drivers are known to do it. Utilities have historically often injected code into Explorer. Raymond Chen has written in the past about this problem and how hard it made it to evolve the platform.

> Raymond Chen has written in the past about this problem

That would be a citation. Do you have a link?

You install tortoiseSVN or something similar, look at explorer.exe process or any process that use a standard "Open File" widget, and you will see some dll from the utility loaded by the process. (Easy to see with process explorer from sysinternals)

I think tortoiseSVN and consorts are "just" a shell extension, though, which is an officially supported concept, even if that means that potentially any random software using the standard file dialogues ends up loading your DLL, too.

Three random Explorer examples:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=10...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230324-00/?p=10...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220613-00/?p=10...

For code injection into applications that don't load third-party DLLs as plugins, see, e.g., Microsoft's (unsupported) toolkit for runtime API interception:

https://github.com/microsoft/Detours

Visicalc doesn't run on recent versions of Windows without emulation.

I guess it is a form of emulation... but

You can run 16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows with https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

I got Microsoft Encarta 98 to work on Windows 11 this way

Encarta 98 has to be 32 bit... Win16 was pretty dead for new products by that time.

Though it's conceivable that an installer could start off with 16 bit code to show an error message that you need Windows 95 ...

Edit: it seems Encarta 95 could run on win16, but Encarta 98 required win95 or nt4

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