Question

Since AIM 7 beta 2, and now onto AIM 7 beta 6, and GM – AIM has started to use a new .aba file format for keeping files in. The files used to be located in a folder that we could access in program files, however due to “performance increasements”, AOL has decided to put them in this .aba file instead. The file is not extractable using winRAR, or any other universal extractor I’ve tried.

Is there a way to extract it? Someone told me he was pretty sure the .aba file was using ZLIB. But nobody can confirm that. Someone on another site was going to try to use AIM itself to extract the files, and read them – but never did.

Hopefully the smart people here can figure out how to extract them. Specifically, I’d like to have the bl.dtd file located in it. If you open the file in notepad, you can see it has mostly gibberish, but also lists out the files in it – which includes that file.

There is not a need to compress it back into the aba file, once they’re extracted – but if it’s possible – it wouldn’t hurt to do.

You can download the .aba file here: http://www.filedropper.com/en-us

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

This “EXTREMELY QUICK AND DIRTY (1) “ PHP code extracts JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and gz-compressed text files from that file by finding some magic strings… The text is decoded and the images displayed…

(1) Quick-and-dirty is a term used in
reference to anything that is an easy
way to implement a workaround or
“kludge.” Its usage is popular among
programmers, who use it to describe a
crude solution or programming
implementation that is imperfect,
inelegant, or otherwise inadequate,
but which solves or masks the problem
at hand, and is generally faster and
easier to put in place than a proper
solution. (Wikipedia)

<?php
    $PNG_SIG = "\x89PNG\x0D\x0A\x1A\x0A";
    $PNG_EOF = "IEND\xAE\x42\x60\x82";
    $GIF_SIG = "GIF89a";

    $aba = file_get_contents('en-us.aba');
    $pngs = explode($PNG_SIG, $aba);
    foreach ($pngs as $i=>$png) {
      if ($i>0) {
        $extra = explode($PNG_EOF, $png);
        $img = base64_encode($PNG_SIG.$extra[0].$PNG_EOF);
        echo '<img src="data:image/png;base64,'."\n".$img.'" />';
        echo "\n";
        if ($extra[1]!='') {
          if (substr($extra[1], 0, 6)==$GIF_SIG) {
            $gifs = $extra[1];
            $gifs = explode($GIF_SIG, $gifs);
            foreach ($gifs as $j=>$gif) {
              if ($j>0) {
                $img = base64_encode($GIF_SIG.$gif);
                echo '<img src="data:image/gif;base64,'."\n".$img.'" />';
                echo "\n";
              }  
            }
          }
          else {
            $gz = @gzuncompress($extra[1]);
            if ($gz!==false) {
              echo "<pre>\n";
              echo htmlspecialchars($gz);
              echo "</pre>\n";
            }  
            else {
              $jpg = base64_encode($extra[1]);
              echo '<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,'."\n".$jpg.'" />';
              echo "\n";
            }
          }  
        }
      }  
    }
?>

The results:

alt text http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/280/83168934.png

alt text http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/6541/32497869.png