Untrusted publisher? (I’ll say)

I just noticed that Microsoft have this thing called PowerShell. The blurb says it allows easy command-line control of your system through “cmdlets”. Being an avid Linux user and also regularly use Cygwin on Windows, this sounded pretty good. 2MB download and you need .Net 2.0

  • It installed fine.
  • I clicked on the program shortcut.
  • It brought up a “CMD” like box – but just blank.

I waited 20 secs or so and I thought that I would hit “Enter” a few times to wake it up.

When it did wake look what I got :-

Windows(R) PowerShell
Copyright (C) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Do you want to run software from this untrusted publisher?
The file C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml is published by CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US. This publisher is not trusted on your system. Only run scripts from trusted publishers.

[V] Never run [D] Do not run [R] Run once [A] Always run [?] Help (default is "D"):

Error loading the extended type data file:
Microsoft.PowerShell.Core, C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml
File skipped because of validation exception: "The file C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml cannot be loaded. You have elected to not run this software now.".

Which was repeated three times.

I guess I won’t shoot it for buffering my “Enter” keystrokes (which means that the startup code didn’t run) but surely you would think that whatever these plugins would already be signed and hence trusted by the PowerShell code I have already installed?

Man, Microsoft, we really haven’t advanced at all if you have the capability of clearly establishing the authenticity of code but you still want to ask the user whether you should trust what is part of of the base install