All Windows Downloads are now code signed

Since Yesterday all Winodws (.exe) downloads are now code signed. Lately Windows has increased their security measures for Internet Explorer and Edge quite a lot (Smartscreen) and it became difficult to open/run any of the maps if downloaded by Edge or IE. Similar to Nortons Reputation system (which is even worse rubbish) Windows only trusts downloads which are downloaded very very often. (like 10.000 times in a month) – this resulted in basically only the mtbgermany and velogermany map to be saved without security warnings. Now such a mechanism is not smart at all. The only way to overcome this is to buy a code signing certificate (not that easy actually with the background checks) and sign all downloads. This makes primarily sense if downloads can be done from several servers – and that way you can check the downloads content has not been changed (if you would open up e.g. Firefox download and check if the certificate is from Mozilla – because smartscreen could still be easily fooled by just changing the download and putting a different security certificate). Additional advantage is that if the download is incomplete/corrupt you would also get a warning (could be simply done […]

August 4th, 2016 | 33 comments

Compatibility with new Garmin devices and Unicode Maps

Last week I changed all maps of countries which do not use Latin as main script to Unicode. Before this was not the case for the Europe, Asia and Africa continent map. On the other hand all unicode maps – are now also available the respective main script of the country. This even seems to work quite well for countries like China which has no alphabet at all. All modern devices – should be quite fine displaying them. Mapsource sometimes shows garbled text however – as will very very old GPS devices – which unluckily also don’t support unicode. So I’m sorry – but Garmin devices that are pre ~2006 will only work with maps from countries with Latin script now (e.g. Vista C, or GPS Maps 60C, I’m not certain about Vista Cx or GPS Maps 60Cx – I think they support unicode maps). I don’t think there are many people using them still anyhow.

I will still put more effort in reworking the naming depending on language in the next couple of weeks. All non Unicode maps are available to download via the Non Unicode tab on the respective download pages. Only a couple of countries […]

June 27th, 2016 | 4 comments
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