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Data Storage Operating Systems Software Windows

WinFS - Who Will Actually Use It? 106

Posted by Cliff from the banking-on-a-new-filesystem dept.
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?"
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WinFS - Who Will Actually Use It? More

WinFS - Who Will Actually Use It?

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  • My take ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by noselasd ( 594905 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:10PM (#8124144)
    Well, if WinFS is default, million of users _will_ use it. They don't care or know what's in the bottom. They just use the system that came with the PC. Only the future will tell what this will do to your system,
    after all we weekly encounter new and exciting ways spyware/viruse/worms/etc. screws up windows.

    • Re:My take ? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Phillup ( 317168 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:18PM (#8124868)
      Sorry, but... in this case, choice is an illusion.

      First it will be the default... then it will be the only choice.

      This is, of course, the optimist in me... the pessimist says that you will be lucky if this is as bad as it gets.

      It could very well be a "transitional" file system. The final file system will actually live on your bank's system... making the movement of money from your account to their's all the more seamless.

      The end goal is to create one massive grid computing system that constantly funnels money from the banks of the world into MS's coffers.

    • Re:My take ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 )
      This is so very true. Every time i sit down at an Internet Explorer users sytem to help them with something, I am shocked they put up with the pop-ups and what not. The problem is they didn't know better, they didnt know to try another browser or a third party blocker. I feel bad for them, they are like people that constantly get ripped off by mechanics because they don't know cars. It's really the sorry state of computer userdom nowadays.
      • I feel bad for [common computer users], they are like people that constantly get ripped off by mechanics because they don't know cars. It's really the sorry state of computer userdom nowadays.

        Well, thats too bad for them. Computers were invented for Scientists and other smart people ONLY - they were invented to be used by people with some intelligence.

        Computers are still designed for smart people -- for everyone else, there's windows(R) (c) (tm)!

    • Re:My take ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      It's not inherently insecure to allow actions to be associated with shortcuts or add other whizzy things. If the user has write access to the filesystem, why shouldn't the user set up these things for his own files?

      Consider - the window manager I use (icewm) has a menu file saying what programs appear on the start menu. It is possible for a program (including a worm) running as my uid to change that menu so that clicking on 'xterm' runs something else instead. This does not mean icewm is insecure.

      The p

  • Take some Ritalin (Score:4, Funny)

    by josephgrossberg ( 67732 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:10PM (#8124145) Homepage Journal
    "What's your take?"

    It's too fscking early to say.

    Stop talking out your ass and speculate on something important, like Episode III.

  • Slashdot's take: (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by cperciva ( 102828 )
    What's your take?

    Well, we have absolutely no information about how WinFS works, nobody here has actually used it, and it isn't even finished yet... but it comes from Microsoft, so it's probably slow, exploitable, and an attempt to abuse their monopoly powers.

  • Security (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Uma Thurman ( 623807 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:12PM (#8124164) Homepage Journal
    Security isn't my primary worry, at least at first. The indexing data is stored in an SQL database. I've had my share of registry corruption to know that when Microsoft stores a pile of critical information in a centralized database, you'd better keep that database backed up. At the very least, it'd be wise to stay away from the new formats until everyone else has debugged them.

    • Re:Security (Score:4, Insightful)

      by simonecaldana ( 561857 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:19PM (#8124242) Homepage
      Security isn't my primary worry

      and seems it is not a worry for end users too. End users always thinks bad things happens to someone else. That's why a poorly designed security model IS a problem. OTOH, it is an end user problem, something here on slashdot could be used as base for jokes.

  • Woah, hold on (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slubberdegullion ( 544119 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:13PM (#8124177)
    The programmers at Microsoft are surely aware of these sorts of issues. It might be a good idea to wait until the product is complete before deciding that it's terribly insecure.

  • Registry (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Idealius ( 688975 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:18PM (#8124233) Journal
    Right now, all spyware has to do is a few simple registry entries to add itself to context menus, startup, Internet Explorer default search engine, etc. What's the difference between a simple reg tweak and a simple XML tweak? Same "exploits", just different interfaces.

  • are you serious? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:24PM (#8124287)
    I'm sure I'll be hearing from /. about how all the concepts in WinFS would be wonderful to have... just as soon as we hear something new about Reiser4 [namesys.com]. Seriously, just adding some extra metadata to a filesystem doesn't have to make it insecure; in fact, in Reiser4, they're doing it to make the filesystem *more* secure.

    Now, I know about MS' track record with security just as well as the next /.'er, but let's wait until WinFS is actually released to start picking it apart, ok? Until then, it's still vaporware, and there's no guarantee that it'll get released in 2005, 2006, or any other time.

    And if it just ends up being a layer on top of NTFS that lets people sort their music and vacation pictures, well, I'm not too worried about it yet. And if it turns out that it's a security risk, then you *turn it off*, or just use FAT32.

    • Patents (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:06PM (#8124755) Homepage Journal
      The scary thing about WinFS will be the patent protection.

      We've seen too many patents granted for which there certainly appears to be prior art. Someone else brought up the moniker, "Object Oriented Filesystems," and danced around the concept of single-level-store. That stuff goes back to the old IBM System/38, whose patents have probably expired. (It actually goes back further, but S/38 made it out the door.)

      As others have said, metadata has been on the Apple resource fork since 1984, and OS/2's HPFS had Extended Attributes (OS/2 even had Extended Attributes kludged onto FAT.) prior to 1990. Then you (and others) bring up Reiser4.

      I wonder what the patent filings on WinFS will look like. Reiser4 is obviously "published", but it would be good if there were some way to make the USPTO aware.

      • Re:Patents (Score:2)

        by pb ( 1020 )
        I agree... MS is currently licensing FS patents with prior art--for VFAT. But maybe IBM can help us out with this one; they probably have a boatload of filesystem and database related patents as well (you mentioned HPFS, which surely is the reason that MS isn't trying to get people to license NTFS patents...), hopefully they aren't all already cross-licensed with MS... :/
      • I can't think of one situation where Microsoft has tried to sue some company for patent infringement. Many have sued Microsoft though.

        • Have to think about that one...

          But have they threatened?
          I seem to remember a Linux project or two shut down under 'suggestion' from Microsoft.

          Chilling Effect is the key phrase.
      • but it would be good if there were some way to make the USPTO aware.

        Don't they need to become self-aware first? :>


    • And if it just ends up being a layer on top of NTFS that lets people sort their music and vacation pictures

      A system like that could be quite valuable, even though the description doesn't sound like much.

      I've often thought the concept of VFolders from Evolution could be introduced into *NIX filesystems to great benefit. Something like systems of symbolic links you can create to get alternate views of your nested directory structures.

      Thus, one organizational structure might look like "./project_A" "./pro

      • ways of viewing filesystems with user-decidable hierarchal tree views could be useful.

        The problem is, people will always go with the default. That's why they're using Windows to begin with! What makes you think they'll sit, engage their brain cells, and do something other than the default filesystem view? The number of Windows users who will actually use this functionality is exactly equal to the number of Windows users who reorganize their menus: approximately six worldwide.
        • It's all dependent on the UI. If the sort action is off under View > Arrange Icons > ..., of course fewer people are going to find it. If it's sitting right there on/under the toolbar as Sort: [by date |v], then vastly more people will see and use it.

          Generally people are intelligent and creative, despite thinking in so many different ways. They just have no concept of what's possible or impossible with computers, nor any idea of how to do some of the possible things, nor a sense of whether they'll "b
      • See GNOME Storage [gnome.org]. It's still a work in progess, but it's exactly what you describe and sounds interesting.
      • ReiserFS is where I am hoping to see these kinds of revolutionary features emerge. Version 4 is about to be released and it already has a number of features that are hard to find in general purpose filesystems. If you really want to expand your thinking about data storage and access, read Hans Reiser's vision [namesys.com] for the future of ReiserFS. Your ideas would definitely be implementable in his model.
      • Besides GNOME Storage that another poster mentioned, segusoLand [sourceforge.net] looks rather interesting as well. I was actually thinking about inventing the same wheel once; I'm glad I didn't bother.

  • Bah Apple did it before (Score:5, Informative)

    by Matthias Wiesmann ( 221411 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:24PM (#8124294) Homepage Journal
    Actually, the trick of embedding viruses into the filesystem was done a long time ago (1989) on the Macintosh.

    In the HFS filesystem, a file has two forks, a data fork, that corresponds to the file data in Windows or Unix file-system, and a resource fork, that contained structured data, basically bits of data that had an attached id, name and type.

    Resources were used to store all kinds of stuff. This was very convenient, as you could for instance store the window shape of a text document in the resource fork without affecting the content of the file (data fork). This was also used to store custom icons, text styling without actually affecting the data. You could even use it to embed fonts into word documents.

    The trick is, the OS used resources extensively, an application typically had an empty data fork and lots of resources (icons, pictures, sounds, windows, dialogs), including 68K code segments.

    One Macintosh virus, WDEF [llnl.gov], used this mechanism to propagate. What the virus did, was add resource of type WDEF to the database file describing all the icons on the desktop. WDEF resources were window definition code. So when the Finder (file explorer) opened this database file for a given volume, the resource would get loaded and overloaded the default window drawing code, thus enabling the virus to execute and spread.

    • Re:Bah Apple did it before (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tux2000 ( 523259 ) <alexander@sla3.1 ... oken.de minus pi> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @01:46PM (#8125193) Homepage Journal

      NTFS has "Streams", essentially a more generic case of the HFS. You don't just have two forks, you have a nearly infinite number of forks/streams, with the unnamed stream being the "normal" file. Windows uses this forks for file descriptions and a few other things. But nearly nobody knows this feature. It seems even the virus programmers don't (ab)use it.

      Google found [google.com] among others this page [diamondcs.com.au] explaining those streams a little more.

      The most evil thing about streams is that you can only see the default stream using "onboard" tools like "dir" or the Explorer.

      Tux2000

    • Acorn's Risc OS (a very early and startlingly good OS for the first ever ARM-based microcomputer) took things one step further: an application was a directory. The files in the directory defined the application, so the application could store whatever it liked in there.

      Some of the files had special names. !Boot and !Run, for example; !Boot was executed when the application was first seen by the filer (and did things like load the application's icon, register file types, etc) and !Run was executed when the

    • I was led by other Slashdottoers to believe that Mac's can't have a virus

  • "and I will not be using it if given a choice" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) * on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:38PM (#8124438)
    Solution:

    You will not have a choice.

  • Nothing to worry about, folks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Txiasaeia ( 581598 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:46PM (#8124537)
    What do we do now to protect our computer from spyware? Regularly update and run adaware. What will we do with WinFS? Regularly update and run adaware longhorn. No problem. I haven't had spy/adware in freaking years; of course, it helps that I've switched to a superior browser [opera.com]...

  • Well... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 )
    Who will use it? Probably the millions of people who buy it or a those who buy a new computer with it already installed. Let's put our thinking cap on here people.
  • How timely, as yesterday MSDN posted a thick article [microsoft.com] on WinFS.
    While the article date is December 2003, the date on the front page of msdn.microsoft.com [microsoft.com] is January 28, 2004.

  • Does not sound like a problem to me (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @04:00PM (#8126870) Homepage
    Even from the quick description you gave, it sounds pretty safe to me. Not modifying the underlying file system is IMHO a good idea and mitigates all the paranoia you are having.

    Windows already has the file associations like knowing that clicking a .jpg should run a certain image viewer. This is not done in the file system it is instead done by another program that reads normal files and determines this information from the normal files. Now we all know that those file associations can be mucked with (ie hijacked to run another program) but in fact any such messing with it can be determined by a program reading the setup files, and easily avoided by a program using *less* code to run a program.

    Compare with a worst-case scenario where the system only had a "run this file" command and you could not determine what it did because it was encrypted into the file system (sort of what you really fear WinFS would do). Then somebody hijacking the .jpg extension would be a real and unfixable disaster. But in fact they are avoiding this if your description is at all accurate. This is a *good* thing.

    I do worry about some peoples intentions for meta data. In my opinion meta data should be used *only* as a "cache" of data that could be determined from the file itself. An obvious example is an image preview. But the file type and program should also be figured out using a program like the Unix "file" command and the result cached in the metadata. You could even make schemes by which the author, owner, permissions, date and time, and even filename are considered cached metadata and determined from the file contents. We should not have to rely on the correct transmission of anything other than the "data" bytes and the file length in order for a program using a file to do the correct and predictable thing.

    I am worried that in fact most recent ideas in filesystems are going exactly the wrong way, and in fact Microsoft may be doing this right for a change.

    • This "cache-only" thing is a good idea. Modern Mac OSX programs handle metadata this way - if a resource fork is present in the file, they use it, otherwise they generate a new one based on the file contents. But there are exceptions. I was bitten because Final Cut Pro 4 does NOT like opening project files that are missing their resource fork. I store files on an NFS server and made a habit of deleting the "._foo" auxillary files that OSX spews all over the place to store resource forks on a UNIX filesystem
  • I don't see how this is much different from the registry, through which one can do a lot of the things you mention. And you don't even have to be buzzword compliant to use it!

  • Argh (Score:2)

    by JackAsh ( 80274 )
    [quote]It is also very flexible and extendable, which, for Microsoft, can mean 'slow' and 'exploitable'.[quote]

    Prepare for Karma burn in 5..4..3..2..

    I guess nothing in the Linux world considered "flexible" and "extendable" can be considered "slow" or "exploitable"?

    *cough* *cough* X-Windows *cough*.

    Seriously, I don't like Microsoft any more than the next guy, but this kind of comment right on the front page shows why Slashdot has to be taken with a huge grain of salt to begin with. Let's all try to be a
    • What are you doing with a five-digit ID and still thinking that slashdot needs to do less editorializing?

      Despite the motto, slashdot is not a news site. It's a commentary site. If you're coming here looking for straight news with no opinion, you are coming to the wrong place. It is, to put it in programming terms, a feature, not a bug.
  • I have far, far more bothersome issues to worry about between now and whenever WinFS comes out.

    Let's see:

    • It isn't slated for release until late 2005, early 2006.
    • This suggests to me that what we're looking at in the current Longhorn builds is, in effect, early beta software.
    • Microsoft have a long track record of changing their software quite dramatically through the creation process -- a la NT5.
    • I don't particularly plan on upgrading to a Windows OS on my home systems if I can help it anyway. It'd have to have a hell of a lot of "must have" features before I'd consider doing so, since that would require an architectural switch for a lot of my equipment (Mac and Solaris to PC).
    • At work, the IT department can bother with issues involving security/spyware and so on. Of course, the IT department's past history suggests we'll be upgrading to Windows XP about the time that Longhorn is finally released, and that any worms/virii won't be of much concern to them...
    No, I don't think Microsoft will produce a particularly stable or reliable OS, or at least, not one which is much more stable or reliable than what they've released to date. Doubtless there'll be improvements, and doubtless there'll be new features to exploit. There always is, and I dare say always will be.

  • The logical move for them would have been to go with the original story - create a whole NEW filesystem - preferrably taking in as many enhancements from ext3 and Reiser - keeping as much of NTFS as possible - and adding some incredible new "WinFS" features. This would have been totally acceptable in my book. Indexing services and filesystem add-ons, no way. I learned my lesson with DoubleSpace/DriveSpace years ago.
  • Tom's a long winded person who tries to impress by using big words unnecessarily.
  • I'll use it. In fact I'm looking forward to it. I think it will be easy to program for, and make it easy to find and sort things into classes. I take many digital photos and I will definately appreciate being able to add meta data to the file that gives background on where it was taken, when, and the circumstances. Much like a photo-album where you scribble remarks under the photos.

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