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WinFS - Who Will Actually Use It?

Hel Toupee asks: "Tom's Hardware is running an article about the file system to be employed in Windows Longhorn, the to-be-long-overdue successor to Windows XP. According to the information that the authors could get out of Microsoft, WinFS seems to be little more than an indexing and searching service that sits on top of NTFS or FAT. It is also very flexible and extendable, which, for Microsoft, can mean 'slow' and 'exploitable'. For instance: quite a bit of the inner workings of WinFS rely on XML data tags which can allow 'for instance, that developers will additionally be able to automatically display or execute commands linked to items located by a specific search'. This seems to imply that the new generation of spyware only has to change a bit of XML and it can add entries to your context menus, or open webpages when you click on a file, or, since files can be grouped by content in 'virtual folders', spyware could effectively add entries to these folders, or reorganize your entire filesystem on the fly -- all with slight tweak in some XML file! Am I being paranoid? WinFS seems fairly insecure, and I will not be using it if given a choice. What's your take?"

2 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Ooo yes, lets speculate! by Jukashi · · Score: 0, Troll

    And thank you btw for explaining what Windows Longhorn was..

    Who will use it? 98% of the desktop market. And yes, we all know linux users will not be. Next question plz..

  2. The only thing i know about WinFS by Jukashi · · Score: 0, Troll

    is it'll take forever for the kernel to have write drivers for it :p