[OT] feature backlash

[Richard Gaskin]

I promised to restrain myself from OT posts last month and will reduce 
them going forward, but this one is a hoot too good to miss.

There's a moral here for all of us about considering the implications of 
software feature design before we rush them to market....

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Word flaw a window into Microsoft

You'd think the people who make Microsoft Word understand enough about 
the program to avoid embarrassing themselves with unintended disclosures 
of internal information.

You'd be wrong.

Michal Zalewski, a 23-year-old computer security specialist in Warsaw, 
Poland, pulled off a clever bit of online sleuthing last month. In a 
delicious piece of irony, he found about 500 Word documents on 
Microsoft's own Web site that hadn't been purged of revisions made 
during the editing process.

My favorite: In a 2002 white paper refuting the value of the upstart 
Linux operating system, an anonymous Microsoft author wrote "Microsoft 
is an enduring company . . ." Apparently a cooler head then prevailed on 
the author to remove the second part of the sentence: "that's not going 
out of business (unlike many Linux vendors)."
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The news story:
<http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1620&e=15&u=/sv/wordflawawindowintomicrosoft>

The straight dope:
<http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/strikeout/>

:)

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com