The release of the new version of the powerful compression program and archive manager WinRAR 3.80 has been announced by win.rar GmbH and RARLAB. As of October 1, WinRAR 3.80 is available for downloading on the WinRAR website (http://www.win-rar.com ). Download.com is offering the software as of September 30 as part of a special promotion.

The pack software now supports ZIP archives that contain Unicode file names in UTF-8 format. The file names themselves are also saved in Unicode when creating a ZIP archive that uses Unicode characters in file names. The implementation of Unicode support for the WinRAR user interface has also been improved.

The fact that ZIP archives encrypted using AES and created in WinZip can now be unpacked is another additional feature.

The new function "Wipe Files" provides even greater security: users have the option of deleting the file, moving it into the Recycle Bin, or wiping the file. Data is overwritten with zero bytes by wiping the file. Deleted data is thus protected from unwanted recovery. WinRAR has user-specific settings which are saved in profiles. These settings can be enabled with a right-click of the context menu, provided the new option "Add to Context Menu " is enabled in the dialog "Profile Settings" in the new version.

At http://www.win-rar.com/whatsnew.html (in English), c complete list of all new WinRAR 3,80 functions - including the command line version - can be found.