On Jun 29, 2006, at 8:59 PM, Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
Thursday, June 29, 2006, 12:02:38 PM, William Knop wrote:
Having the ability to autorun cds is most definitely not a misfeature.
Of course it's not. It's the perfect means of distributing trojans, backdoors, rootkits and other very useful software an every CD, including DVDs and music CDs.
If your assuming said media is compromised in such a way, requiring the user to manually run the executable will not protect him. The fact is, most media is not compromised. Software publishers ensure they are not. Most windows users can trust their software publishers. For those who cannot, they can simply click "No" when the dialog pops up. Or they can set it to never autorun. Or they could set it to virus-scan before autorunning. Everybody's happy.
One thing I'm sure of: If regular guy Joe Schmo has to run executables from CDs manually, he will either say CDs don't work in wine or say that wine is a PITA to use.