[R-pkg-devel] False positive antivirus reports on package vignettes

On Tue, 18 Feb 2025 07:05:06 -0600

one of the two pdf vignettes (which I happen to create as a shallow
Rnw -> pdf wrapper around a pre-made pdf, here that inner pdf had not
changed in five years, sigh ...)  now upsets one of these (idiotic,
but hey, I am sure that at least they are very expensive) anti-virus
checkers.

Does VirusTotal confirm the non-zero virus detection?

Has anybody figured out a workaround?

Last time [*] it turned out to be a collision of a 32-bit checksum in
the virus database. Try re-compressing the vignette or finding a
comment that can be changed. For example, (La)TeX-produced vignettes
sometimes contain a comment that says charToRaw('PTEX') |> as.integer()
|> bitwXor(0x80) |> as.raw(), and these four bytes can be replaced by
four spaces.

Best regards,
Ivan

[*] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2024q1/010411.html