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 (news - web sites) 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)." What Zalewski uncovered is a classic example of how Microsoft often plows ahead with new features and only later stops to think about the consequences. Recent versions of Word and other applications in the Office suite, such as Excel and PowerPoint, have been packed with "collaboration" features that allow work teams to edit documents.

News source: Yahoo! News

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