Category: 3rd Party Software
Link: Test Drive for Microsoft Office 2004 now available
Posted on MacBytes.com
Approved by Mudbug
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Test Drive for Microsoft Office 2004 now available
- Thread starter MacBytes
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Category: 3rd Party Software
Link: Test Drive for Microsoft Office 2004 now available
Posted on MacBytes.com
Approved by Mudbug
bousozoku said:Does it delete everything in your home directory?
Oh thats good!! haha, maybe if you go find it on p2p networks!
Does Office still invisibly share your private files with people?
Does anyone know if MS ever truly fixed the problem where MS Word documents have random data from deleted files stuck on the end, easily viewable with a text editor? Peeking at Word docs people send to me, I haveseen FAR too many private fragments of information to trust Office until I KNOW this is fixed. But the problem (or several similar problems) have been in multiple versions of Word, on BOTH platforms, and to my knowledge were never acknowledged by MS, year after year, even thought it affects a number of MS products.
Here's some scary discussion of one manifestation of the problem--but the problem is not truly limited to Mac Office 98:
http://www.macintouch.com/o98security.html
(Quick explanation: Office "rounds up" the saved file size to the nearest block--and instead of filling the extra with empty data, it restores deleted data--from ANY source--off your HD instead: whatever was stored in that block before.)
I'm curious so I know what to advise other people... no sense in securing your computer and then sending out a Word doc that contains your credit card number--grabbed not only from an unrelated, random, NON-MS file... but from one that you thought you deleted too!
Scroll to the end of any Office doc in BBEdit (easier than TextEdit) to look for stuff that has been tacked on. It's hard to be sure though, since the grabbed data is random and could just be gibberish--as is much of the legitimate Office file too.
Does anyone know if MS ever truly fixed the problem where MS Word documents have random data from deleted files stuck on the end, easily viewable with a text editor? Peeking at Word docs people send to me, I haveseen FAR too many private fragments of information to trust Office until I KNOW this is fixed. But the problem (or several similar problems) have been in multiple versions of Word, on BOTH platforms, and to my knowledge were never acknowledged by MS, year after year, even thought it affects a number of MS products.
Here's some scary discussion of one manifestation of the problem--but the problem is not truly limited to Mac Office 98:
http://www.macintouch.com/o98security.html
(Quick explanation: Office "rounds up" the saved file size to the nearest block--and instead of filling the extra with empty data, it restores deleted data--from ANY source--off your HD instead: whatever was stored in that block before.)
I'm curious so I know what to advise other people... no sense in securing your computer and then sending out a Word doc that contains your credit card number--grabbed not only from an unrelated, random, NON-MS file... but from one that you thought you deleted too!
Scroll to the end of any Office doc in BBEdit (easier than TextEdit) to look for stuff that has been tacked on. It's hard to be sure though, since the grabbed data is random and could just be gibberish--as is much of the legitimate Office file too.
When you install the demo, it installs a Microsoft Auto Update background process in your startup items. This runs *all the time* even when you're not using Office.
All I wanted to do is try out their word processor, and I get a whole new permanently running service. Lucky me.
All I wanted to do is try out their word processor, and I get a whole new permanently running service. Lucky me.