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."

Comments

openoffice, koffice, etc.

[wfmcwalter]

...which naturally gives them an exc^h^h^hright to permanently break interoperability with OpenOffice, Koffice, etc. It's like Trusted Computing and signed Xbox images - they're not trying to shut out competition, but if that incidentally happens, they're not going to cry about it.

*Why* this shouldn't concern anyone on Slashdot

[0x0d0a]

Because this will undoubtedly be cracked within a month, tops. There's a good chance it's already been cracked based on the betas -- and Slashdot posting it *ensures* that every techie that didn't already know about it does.

Heck, *I* woulda cracked it if I had a copy sitting around and had any interest in Office, just for the egg-on-your-face factor affecting Microsoft when they try selling their "strong" security to companies.

You cannot do secure DRM in the current computing environment. *Maybe* with Palladium in place. Definitely not now.

The only benefit I can see this giving Microsoft is a legal excuse to make their file formats *incompatible* with everyone else, and anyone else implementing support for their file formats being liable under the DMCA.

Office is Microsoft's bread and butter, and incompatibility is the worker that brings it home each day.