S
Steve Hodgson
Hi Steve:
If you have a "message for Microsoft", I suggest that you use Help>Send
Feedback to send it in to them. The chance that Microsoft staff will read
it in here is not reliably distinguishable from 0.
I am certainly not making excuses for Microsoft. I am well known for
flaming their little behinds as often as needed (they would say far more
often than needed...). But I am struggling to understand why anyone would
think that this particular decision needs any excusing.
If you had some exposure to the computer security field, you would probably
understand that it's not such a smart idea to tell the bad guys what you are
going to do in advance. Actually, that's kinda dumb
The only new information that has emerged is the discovery that some
applications have been setting the file type or creator code wrongly,
presumably because their coders have been either sloppy or too lazy to
think.
Effectively, they are misaddressing postal articles, and relying on the fact
that the Post Office will get the package to the right place by
clairvoyance. And now the post office has started reading the address label
and dropping packages for a non-existent address in the dead letter office,
they are complaining
But if we sit back and take a realistic look at this for a moment, we can
see that in this case, what Microsoft has done simply doesn't matter. A
work-practice that has always been a bit risky is now disabled, for a series
of file types that have not been used for more than a DECADE. Why would we
care? Why would ANYONE care?
Your users already know the answer to this: it's been part of their standard
operating practice for years. For many years we have been telling users
"Word won't open some kinds of files on a double click. If you encounter
one of those kinds of files, use File>Open." As a competent Sys Admin, you
posted this on your Help Desk help page around 20 years ago. You did do
that, right?
The Mac is becoming sufficiently popular now that there are enough of them
out there to make it worth while for the bad guys to have a go. So Mac
software manufacturers (and Apple...) now have to apply a little more
case-hardening to their code than before. No biggie. It's a testament to
the success of the Mac in the marketplace.
No data has been lost. No users have been inconvenienced -- they can open
their files just as easily using an alternative method. No specifications
have been reduced. No user functionality is removed. No impact -- at all
-- other than to slow down the bad guys.
Let's move on, shall we?
Too many Steves...
I think you’re right this debate has reached a point where it’s not
going to be solved in m.p.m.o.w. This forum has established a
workaround for the problem and now at least some users understand why
they can no longer open Word files using the tried and trusted
mechanism of double-clicking in the Finder. I suspect there are quite a
few more users elsewhere who are still wondering what the hell is going
on in the absence of a public statement that this point release will
potentially introduce a limitation. I’ve read
<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952331/en-us> and MS08-026 but
couldn’t see it there but may have misunderstood it or perhaps it’s
elsewhere.
I find the postal service analogy interesting but I would amend it
slightly. It seems the postal service is now only delivering letters
and parcels if the post code is 100% accurate. If this ain’t the case
it won’t try to find you by reading the rest of the address it just
dumps your parcel and walks away
)Setting aside the issue of how a mis-typed file got onto your system,
Word now sees a file that it now considers ‘wrong’ so refuses to open
it despite it apparently being a Word document, albeit a very old one.
Where is the end-user feedback to indicate why the file can no longer
be opened? why is there no message in 12.1.0 to indicate that such old
versions of Word files are now considered to be a threat and therefore
should only be opened from within Word using ⌘-O. If I try to open
non-Word documents in Word 2008 it tells me this is ‘The document might
be in use or might not be a valid Word document’ but in the case of
these Word documents there is no such warning.
Thanks for all the help to understand the problem.
--
Cheers,
Steve
The reply-to email address is a spam trap.
Email steve 'at' shodgson 'dot' org 'dot' uk