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Skipper’s Defender False Alarm and More
🕑 Added 2025-06-17 06:41:38 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I’ve been tied up on another project for the past few weeks, so development here stalled a bit—and a couple of little fires popped up as a result.
First one: our AutoHotkey–powered Skipper app got flagged by Microsoft Defender as “Trojan:Win32/Bearfoos.A!ml.” The “!ml” part just means it was a machine-learning false positive. We filed a report, Microsoft analyst confirmed Skipper.exe is clean, and they’ve removed this detection.
No action with command prompt is required on your part—the definitions have likely already been updated. But if Defender did quarantine Skipper on your device, reinstall it.
We didn’t promote Skipper heavily yet (to check if there any big issues like that one) and there is no built-in analytics in it, so we’re not sure how many people got hit. Not a single user reported it—we only noticed when Defender freaked out on my dev machine (which I hadn’t used in the last few weeks).
According to our GitHub stats, there have been 600+ downloads. So, if Defender quarantined your Skipper.exe and it won’t launch, just reinstall it—you should be good to go.
To avoid this in the future, we’ll probably need to:
Rewrite Skipper without AutoHotkey (will burn few dozens hours and much more in the future)
Acquire a code-signing cert (burns about $200–$800/year)
Neither is super fun, but it’s the only possible fix on Windows.
It’s terrifying that Microsoft can wipe out everyone’s installation base over a machine-learning false positive, with no way to restore the confirmed false positives. But it’s not all that surprising—AutoHotkey has a long history of false positives, and plenty of people have probably written sketchy scripts over the years, too.
Other than that, there was an issue a couple of days ago where the patrons list stopped updating, but it was fixed as soon as someone reported it.
Lastly, I’ve been poking around the UI/UX with fresh eyes and… yikes. Some of this stuff looks rough and unnecessary complicated. Expect more UI tweaks (and occasional breakages) in upcoming alphas—it’s all part of the ride.
Stay tuned and thanks for sticking around!
-qrlk
