Marcus Meissner wrote:
Hi,
Fun article ... author tests various viruses with WINE.
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/25/1430222&from=rss
Ciao, Marcus
I actually have run across quite a few people who were quite worried about the ability of wine to run all of the viruses that windows does.
I took the time to explain to each person that many of the viruses that plague the windows users are simply because of the insecure OS and applications such as Outlook or Internet Explorer. If one managed to get a windows virus under wine - they would most likely have to do it manually, which is possible - but a lot easier to protect against. Just make sure you scan any file you download that you are unsure about. It won't hurt.
Many also seem to be worried that a virus under wine could do damage to their other partition with windows installed. I tell them that without an entry in Wine's configuration for that virtual drive - any pure windows application wouldn't even know that such a drive existed. On the other hand - if people start writing winelib viruses - we may have something to worry about.
Anyway - the only reason I'm bringing this up is because I think that making this knowledge about wine more publicly known would make quite a few possible wine users more comfortable. I'm not sure how that would be done - but I think it's a rather good idea that wouldn't hurt.
--Brad DeMorrow