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Microsoft Corp. apologized to a software rival for saying its file format posed a security risk and issued new tools to let users of Office 2003 SP3 unblock a host of barred file types.

In a posting to his own blog, David LeBlanc, a senior software development engineer with the Microsoft Office team, admitted the company’s mistake in blaming insecure file formats, including the one used by CorelDraw.

“We stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct,” LeBlanc said, referring to a description in a now-changed support document. “A file format isn’t insecure — it’s the code that reads the format that’s more or less secure. The parsers we use for these older formats aren’t as robust as the code we’ve written more recently, which is part of our decision to disable them by default…

LeBlanc also echoed the mea culpa made by Reed Shaffner, product manager for Office, who acknowledged that Microsoft had done a poor job communicating the changes to users, and had failed customers when it posted daunting work-arounds that required manual editing of the Windows registry…

The revised support document lists four downloads that users can run to unblock Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel files. Other downloads are available that reverse the file blocking…

Uh, how long have these guys been around? And how many programmers on the payroll?

Playing pantywaist catch-up doesn’t exactly impress.




  1. SN says:

    I can hear the conversation between the programmers now:

    M$ Programmer 1: “We’re supposed to make the code that reads these old file formats more secure. Any ideas?”

    M$ Programmer 2: “Who uses those formats, I’ve never even heard of WordPerfect, what the frick is that?!”

    M$ Programmer 3: “Yeah, let’s just dump support for those old formats. No one uses them anyway.”

    M$ Programmer 4: “And if they do, we’ll just issue a complicated way of reverting back. That’ll teach them for complaining.”

    M$ Programmer 1: “So it’s agreed, we’ll drop support for the old file formats, we’ll blame the file formats themselves for being insecure, and then we’ll make any user who complains suffer. Ok, who wants to break for lunch?”

  2. Esteban says:

    First they bullied by Apple; now they’re apologizing to Corel. Wow! This isn’t your grandfather’s Microsoft.

  3. gquaglia says:

    I like the expression on that guy’s face. I guess thats the face you make when you are getting boned up the ass by the Windows Genuine Advantage.

  4. rectagon says:

    The irony is that Corel Wordperfect files (also blocked in this “update”) have always been way more secure since they don’t use VBA (Draw files can). Back in the heyday of .doc viruses we always encourage people to open their .doc files in WP!

  5. AdmFubar says:

    What is really funny… wordperfect is used mostly lawyers, i wonder if this has anything to do with it……… :))

  6. Uhh these guys really had messsed up everything from top t buttom and put the user in it


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