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Grant Sewell wrote:
I would suspect personally that T/C is on by default, and probably used to assist the undo / redo features. What would concern me if I where an MP, PM or government official is that I have no way of knowing if my document is being reported back to base at Redmond (not having the source and all !).On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 20:59:58 +0100 (BST) John Palmer wrote:Having read the newspaper reports of the Home Secretary's doubts about his anti-terrorist bill, as revealed by erasures in his letters to opposition counterparts, I'm not clear if these represent in any sense an insecurity in the software he uses. Does anyone have any information about this ? The incident reminded me of the well-known fact that MS-Word .doc files may contain hidden passages of text that the author thinks he has deleted from the final version. It doesn't seem to be quite that, though.I don't know the ins and outs of the document format (*does anyone?*), but "officially" (well, according to the MSOffice course specifications) the only time a MSWord document should contain deleted passages is if the author has saved previous versions of the file (using the File->Versions menu option) or has enabled "Track Changes". Just going by what you've written, it sounds more like T/C than Versions. Grant.
Hmm perhaps that could be used as a sales pitch to get Government to seriously switch over to Open Source solutions.
Recently a friend of work commented that when he opened a word document and then just closed it, it asked him if he wanted to save changes (when none where made). My reply to him was that I assumed that it was logging the fact that he had opened the document as a "change".
But then I believe that OO.org has T/C as well, and I maybe just being over paranoid again.
The real issue here is as always user training (or lack there of). After all its not my email browsers fault if I give my credit card details in reply to one of those "Unique business opportunities" emails that come winging my way all to often. One could however argue that if you spent less money on procument of software licenses you could channel the saved money into adequate training for otherwise clueless users. As the americans like to say work smarter not harder.
Tom. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html