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WINE: A New Place for KLEZ to Play?

Posted by michael on from the playing-with-fire dept.

An anonymous submitter sends in this cautionary tale about Wine being maybe a little too good at emulating Windows. Update: 10/23 21:05 GMT by M : Better links: mirror 1, mirror 2.

6 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Wine and / mounted as Z: ? by Havokmon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I swear when I read the article earlier today (It was posted on Desktoplinux and NewsForge already), that the guy said that by default, "/" was mounted a Z:.

    I've just recently done a wineinstall to clean out my wine settings, and I don't have a Z:. Does that happen if you're running as root?

    The only potential issue I can see is that your whole home directory is 'shared' between Linux and Wine by default.

    Maybe I just read ~/ as /

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  2. Old Story, Kinda by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There was a story a year ago about sircam running on Wine.

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  3. The good comes with the bad by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Kinda obvious but easily forgotten. Being able to run windows apps is a two edged sword in many different respects. Access to good applications versus potentially reduced interest in linux development. Ability to run applications not built for linux versus inconsistant ability to run some of those same apps. And now of course, access to Windows apps versus the viruses that often go with them. The good comes along with the bad and there are plenty of unintended consequences to go around. Any engineer will tell you that there are tradeoffs for any design decision. WINE is no exception. Caveat emptor...

  4. Re:I'll say this only once... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There was recently some discussion on the Wine newsgroup about limiting emulated applications' access to the system. This could be handy for dealing with semi-malware or just programs that don't fully like the emulated environment (and might need to be prevented from doing too many suspicious is-it-really-Windows checks). The reply was that since a Wine emulated program is running as an ordinary executable, it could call Unix system calls anyway, so there would be little point (from a strict security point of view).

    However, something like NetBSD's and OpenBSD's recently added feature to monitor system calls and define policies could potentially be very handy for running binary-only programs you don't fully trust: and of course most such programs are on the Windows platform.

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  5. Re:It's not a Wine problem... by kasperd · · Score: 5, Interesting
    • How is KMail supposed to know if it is safe to "run" the attachment?
    • How is KMail supposed to know how to "run" the attachment?
    It is two different questions, but the answer is the same. You give KMail a list of filetypes, and tell it what to do with them. The list could contain a flag specifying dangerous filetypes. If that feature does not exist in KMail, the filetype should be ommited from the list.

    To me this sounds like a bug in the configuration rather than the software. And it does sound like a configuration mistake in the default install of this distribution.
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  6. Re:It's not a Wine problem... by gmarceau · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why did Wine accepted to run a file which didn't have +X permissions? That would be Wine's contribution to bugtrack.

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