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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: hisbonenus on May 12, '04 02:17:51PM

However, I would not want to be able to trash my entire home folder, with or without a virus. Is there not a way to have it ask for confirmation if a certain number of items are to be trashed at once?



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: etrepum on May 12, '04 02:32:09PM

No, because there are legitimate reasons to delete a lot of files, and in many cases those legitimate uses happen without user intervention (like deleting temporary files).

There are no technical solutions to social problems. Don't run programs you don't trust, or run them as a non-admin user that you don't care about (a "sandbox", if you will) until you do trust them. There is fast user switching, use it!



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: aranor on May 12, '04 02:39:21PM

That would be unwieldy and unproductive. Virus writers would just switch to deleting smaller blocks of files sequentially. You can't protect against this sort of thing, and any attempt will just make it harder to do things legitimately.



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: guet on May 12, '04 07:27:35PM

If you are worried about opening a particular application or even file.

Keep a spare limited user account arround (not admin), use fast user switching to switch to it, DISCONNECT FROM THE INTERNET, and run the application/script. That way it can't trash anything but the contents of that user account, and it can't send anything out over the wire.

Of course you really should try to limit the number of times you're opening files that you're not sure about... (ie from the internet).



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