PRESS: run windows viruses with wine ...

[Brad DeMorrow]

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