When clicking that link in Chrome I get a "The site ahead contains harmful programs" warning page with a bright red background.

"Attackers on github.com might attempt to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit)."

How strange... I don't get it for other github pages.

From that page:

N.B. A few antivirus programs incorrectly flag Policy Plus as malware. Policy Plus is a powerful tool and so may cause problems if used recklessly, but it is not malicious.

No so much different than "hacking tools" or similar being detected as "malware". In other words, just another example of the paranoia typical of the authoritarianism that is so common in the software industry today.

> In other words, just another example of the paranoia typical of the authoritarianism that is so common in the software industry today

I don't think it's authoritarian, just that the more positives your antivirus detects that others don't, the better you can sell it. Something like Process Hacker should have never been detected as malware, as it can't harm others, but it ups those numbers.

Same here. Surprisingly, Microsoft* just allowed it, no problem. Edit: Also, Google doesn't trigger on https://github.com/Fleex255/PolicyPlus/ (note the trailing slash) but reacts to https://github.com/Fleex255/PolicyPlus (no trailing slash). Weird.

VirusTotal summary page says that it is detected by five different engines: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/dca4ecd769253d3b4a165a5b...

* Both Edge SmartScreen and Defender.

I get the same on Firefox as well, and this is the first time I've seen such a warning ever. I definitely don't get it for other github projects.

The same happens sometimes when trying to download netcat and almost always when downloading any of the SysInternals password recovery tools. Cybercriminals use these tools in attacks and so they must be malicious! You know, like bank robbers use hammers and cars...

If chrome uses something like the public safe browsing blAPI malware checking is done with hashes of full urls

Is this the first app of its kind in the world? I literally don't know of a single other app that can edit group policy besides gpedit.

I guess you could be right. As a relatively new admin i find it so odd how software that improves administration for windows isnt more common

I'm always amazed by just how much community tooling is developed for Windows. From PowerToys to SysInternals, those two package managers, TerraCopy, etc. All things that improve on what Windows ships with because Microsoft refuses to put any effort into doing it themselves and it's not open source so you can't exactly open a pull request and do it for them.

I guess that kind of approach quickly hits an API ceiling when it comes to administration tools. A lot of them need pretty low-level access to things that MS doesn't provide good APIs for and few people want to develop a product on top of entirely unsupported reverse-engineered APIs.

The two problems I see are that the program could have bugs that the original gpedit doesn’t, and how most enterprises wouldn’t dare trust third-party software to manage group policy on their internal network.

As far as I know, all gpedit does is act as a special-purpose registry editor anyway.

Not quite. It modifies more than just the registry.

No, there’s steps in between to make it combine with the domain policy.

Windows hasn't historically been considered abandonware.

Huh? Who said anything about abandonware?

I was about to post it too, fiddling with registry directly where things are scattered all over the place should be last resort when there are better tools out there.