Yet another reason to love Microsoft

Tim Byars (tbyars@earthlink.net)
Fri, 17 Jul 1998 19:13:05 -0700


As many of you might or might not know, Microsoft Word as about as secure
as a sieve. If you don't believe this grab and old .doc and open it in a
text editor. Notice all the undo's are still in the original file? Nice huh?

Well on the Mac it's even worse. When it saves a file it reads the sector
that it's about to write to and includes any data that's on that sector
into the file. Of course the Mac community found this to be unacceptable
and demanded a fix. So this is what the brilliant minds in Redmond came up
with.

> (Office 98 Unwanted Data Patch)
>
> This update resolves a recently discovered problem in which Office 98
>inadvertently includes
> data from previously deleted files when saving a document.
> If you download this patch Office 98 will completely erase the portion of
>a disk a saved file will
> occupy before saving the file. The patch utility makes changes to a file
>called Microsoft Office
> First Run in the Microsoft Office 98 folder, and then will cause the
>First Run file to update OLE
> shared library files which reside in the Extensions folder.

Isn't it wonderful that Microsoft is now erasing portions of my hard drive?
Isn't this called a Trojan Horse?

Tim

p.s. This wonderful piece of software engineering is only 5 megs. (No not
for Word, for the patch...)
-

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining
armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological
chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling
second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.
-Douglas Adams, on Windows '95

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