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Digital Restrictions Management in Office 11
conaone writes "According to a Microsoft Watch, there is a feature in the leaked Office 2003 called "Information Rights Management." A lot more control over documents with this... the story says: "Microsoft is threading DRM throughout the Office 2003 suite, allowing restrictions to be set on Outlook mail messages, as well as on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Using "permission templates," document authors can determine restriction policies to be applied to entire categories of documents, according to Microsoft's site." Here's a link to the whole story."
Because none of us are using Microsoft products or file formats... right?
I was at MS for a job interview in the not so distant past and a lot of office doors have signs that say "OFFICE XP FREE OFFICE - DOG FOOD SUCKS" with a picture of an 11 with the circle/slash through it. Some people even went so far as to have pictures of the software and a dog taking a dump on it. I asked around and a lot of people were like "yeah, it's pretty divided. Even the Office team isn't too impressed by it."
Posting AC since I signed that nasty NDA you know.. And - yes, I did get an offer, and yes, I did laugh at them.
Or in courtrooms where they can be highly useful in convicting scumbags like the executives at Enron or WorldNet. Or revealing, such as those escaped memos from Microsoft which were worded something like, "Craig, Linux scares the f**k out of me, just like Java did, co-opt it and kill it, embrace and extend if we have to, but kill it. --Bill PS: Be over for dinner Tues., We're going to roast Stutz on a spit."
Of course you could probably still just bring up the appropriate document, hit ALT-PrintScreen, then paste it in Paint and send the .bmp to anyone you like.
More likely it'll work out the usual way, though, you can't crack it on your desktop, but if you leave your PC on, overnight, with IIS running, the cracker elves will unlock it for you by morning. That always works.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I wonder why Microsoft is so interested in controlling access to archived emails?
...
I wonder if they have had any bad experiences with this in the past?
Just a hunch
1) Someone reads the document, remembers it, and later recalls it at a non DRM computer.
This is a bug, and will be fixed in the next version of Microsoft's Thought Management Server v2.0
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist