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That reminds me of self-extracting archives. Perhaps we could also create self- mutating programs that modify themselves to embed the flags.

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That would actually be handy, because I'm personally sick of all the ~2KB ini files that "portable" programs* leave all over the place. It would be awesome if they instead came with a few KB internal padding that was used to store the config (so the filesize doesn't change, to not affect simplistic sync/backup routines), and then silently updated their config on-the-fly.

* ini spawning programs include CPU-Z, HWMon, HWiNFO, BulkRenameUtility, HxD (newer versions spawn a settings folder), seemingly every NirSoft + O&O tool - and the master of all spawners: explorer.exe dropping desktop.ini's.

Thinking more, Microsoft should definitely implement this as a standard feature. They should be able to implement it quite quickly, and then promote it as a win for Windows AND dotnet - and they need some wins!

So there would need to be standard defined, whereby the exe would basically embed a "protobuf" definition in it's header area, and then a maximally sized "message" could be tacked on to the end of the exe. In the Explorer>file-Properties screen, there could be a config tab that shows the current config (and maybe allows direct editing), plus buttons for import/export/clear config. And as part of the standard, options could be defined as public/shared or private, and thus private fields would get encrypted by the OS/TPM, which means sharing an exe with sensitive info embedded would "not be a risk". The config tab could even have a "meta" option for things like "config changes update this executables modified date" (again for the sync/backup aspect).

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