Not infuriated, just . . . disappointed. It's like watching the stupid American TV show Honey Boo Boo and watching all the red necks continually do embarrassing stuff.
I have a firewall, I have ALL my PCs set to WORK so that the HOME sharing and HONE GROUPS are not enabled. I have NONE of my drives shared beyond the MS normal hidden shares for each drive (the admin$ and IPC$). I have passwords. Beyond that I keep a majority of my DATA on Truecrypt encrypted drives. I am not security paranoid, just security conscience. Add having your system open for others to see your HOME folder and THEN giving them access to other drives / folders (YES Steve I am aware it can be a folder OR drive) is just adding fuel to insecurities.
It's no worry while you're at home on your own network, it's when you take that computer somewhere else and forget what you've done - or worse yet IGNORE it and then you're open for attacks.
Use it or not, it's a valid way, But just be sure that there is already a way to do it, the X$ shares, and opening up MORE can be dangerous.
Simply deleting the symlink LOCALLY is not an issue, just delete it in Explorer and it's gone. It's when you delete it OVER A NETWORK that it can delete the CONTENTS that the symlink point to rather than the link itself. In the situation I pointed out a woman had SYMLINKS - which I erroneously thought were simple shortcuts - on her desktop pointing to folders off the root of the C: drive. Her Windows profile got hosed, I had her reboot and I connected to her computer over the network and deleted her entire \user\NAME folder in Explorer over the network share (I am a domain admin). This is AFTER we did a chkdsk and talked about the contents of her profile. She assured me that all was safe and that what she didn't have on the server was tucked away OUTSIDE her profile - this was the stuff she had symlinks pointed to. Well, I deleted her user folder and BAM! The symlinks allowed me to delete the CONTENTS they pointed to. At least that's what I remember happening - YEARS ago. Now when faced with the same issue I RENAME the old profile, have the user recreate it by logging back in and then COPY the contents back in to the new one. So IT CAN BE A DANGER of data loss. O users doing stuff like reading how to make symlinks and putting them all over instead of shortcuts or better yet proper folder structure. And all it takes is one foolish slip like what I made and the data is GONE. It's just so tough to REMEMBER you've done this sort of odd thing when the chips are down and you're trying to get things back in order.
Is it WORTH the risk? Only you can decide. But realize this, THERE IS A RISK. Opening up further / easier access to people you may NOT want to give it too and possible (perhaps unlikely) data loss.
We've had names being called, cuss words thrown out, arguments ensued, grammar nazi's insisting on corrections. All I can think of is the events that led up to the demise of this boards predecessor and the loss of continuity and cohesion that this community once had and a fear that it may happen again. Can we just let it go?