Not yet in force. Findra ships unsigned today, and Windows warns about an unknown publisher because of it. The line below states the policy in advance, and it becomes true on the day the application to the SignPath Foundation is accepted and not a day earlier. Until then nothing here, on the site, in the installer or in a release claims a signature that does not exist.
Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
Team roles
Findra is maintained by one person, who fills all three roles.
| Role | Who | What they do |
|---|---|---|
| Author | blakazulu | Writes and changes the code. |
| Reviewer | blakazulu | Approves changes before they reach the default branch. |
| Approver | blakazulu | Decides which builds are signed and released. |
Multi-factor authentication is required on the source repository and on the signing account.
Privacy
Full policy: findra-search.netlify.app/privacy.
This program will not transfer any information to other networked systems unless specifically requested.
One exception exists and it is switchable off: Findra checks whether a newer version has been released. It is an anonymous HTTPS request to the GitHub releases API - or, for a copy installed with winget, to the winget catalogue's listing on GitHub - made at most once every 24 hours, in the background, on startup. It carries no query parameters, no machine or install identifier, and nothing about your files or your searches. It never blocks anything, and a failure is a line in the log rather than a dialog. Turning the check off stops it; pressing Check now still makes the same request, once, because you asked.
Pressing Update now is also "specifically requested": it downloads the new installer from the release page on GitHub, checks it against the checksum GitHub publishes for it, and runs it. It sends nothing about you.
The model downloads are the "specifically requested" case in the sentence above: they happen only when you choose a capability and ask for it, they fetch model files, and they send nothing about you. If you never choose one, Findra never makes them.
Findra never sends your files, their names, their contents, or your searches anywhere. There is no account, no cloud and no telemetry. Everything it indexes stays on the machine that indexed it.
What Findra changes on the machine
- It registers a scheduled task that runs a helper process at logon with the highest privileges available. That helper is what reads the filesystem index, and it is the only part of Findra that needs administrator rights.
- It writes settings to
%APPDATA%\Findra\and its index, models and logs to%LOCALAPPDATA%\Findra\. - If you switch on "start when I sign in", it writes one value under
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. That is the only registry value the application itself ever writes, and the installer does not write it - only Findra does, when you ask for it. The installer registers itself with Apps & features in the usual way, which is how it is listed there and removed from there. - It installs its program files, including this project's
LICENSEandNOTICE, into a folder with no version number in the path, so an upgrade never leaves the scheduled task pointing at a binary that has been replaced.
The uninstaller stops the helper and the indexer first, then always removes the scheduled task and any autostart entry. Your settings, your index and any downloaded models are kept by default, because re-downloading gigabytes and re-indexing a disk is expensive and most people who uninstall are reinstalling. Deleting those is opt-in, through a choice in the uninstaller and a flag on the command line. findra.exe --uninstall does the same for anyone who built from source, and --purge also deletes the data.
Why Findra reads the disk directly
Findra opens a read handle to each NTFS volume and reads the master file table and the change journal. This is how a search tool learns every filename on a disk in seconds instead of walking directories for minutes, and it is the same technique other fast desktop search tools use. It reads filesystem metadata only. The elevated helper never opens the contents of a file; every decoder that parses file content runs in a separate process at normal privileges, because decoders read arbitrary files and are the most likely thing a malformed file could exploit.
Licence
Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.