basically tech

72 MS Word 2007 crash "is a feature"

Saturday 14th April, 2007

This is amazing. When warned of three new flaws in Word 2007, Microsoft were unimpressed.

a company spokeswoman ... "found that none of these claims demonstrate a vulnerability in Microsoft's Word 2007 or any part of the Microsoft Office System."

Nope, no vulnerability at all. In fact, how Word reacts to these previously unknown problems is part of a cunning plan ...

"In fact, the behavior observed in Microsoft Word 2007 in this instance is a by-design behavior that improves security and stability by exiting Microsoft Word when it has run out of options to try and reliably display a malformed Word document," the spokeswoman said.

So, how does Word 2007 improve "security and stability"? It crashes of course! How much more stable can you get? Well, how about just displaying a message which says: "I can't open this document." But let's put that aside for a moment and discuss what the customer is supposed to do next ... simple, just restart Word!

She went on to suggest that it is no big deal if Word 2007 did crash under those circumstances, a scenario that could lead to the loss of any unsaved data. "The sample code in [Aharoni's] postings cause Microsoft Word to crash, and users can restart the application to resume normal operations."

(Emphasis added.)

But what about that unsaved data? Well, you just typed it. Type it again!

Use OpenOffice.org. You won't have to pay for the privilege.

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