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Microsoft Warns of PowerPoint Attack
narramissic writes to let us know about yet another PowerPoint flaw, this one affecting PowerPoint 2000, 2002, and 2003, soon after Microsoft issued a record number of patches to fix numerous Office vulnerabilities (among others). The new problem came to light in a blog posting by Microsoft Security Program Manager Alexandra Huft, but the coverage at ITWorld has more detail. Huft writes, "We've been made aware of proof of concept code published publicly affecting Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint," and goes on to say that Microsoft is not aware of any attacks that exploit the bug.
I don't use PowerPoint. When I go to a meeting, which is often, I immediately leave the room if someone decides to bore me with stupid phrases in 12-centimetre type. I am an intelligent man and I demand an intelligent medium by which to be educated.
I open and create all of my presentations in either Open Office or Star Office. So I don't see and issues for me. I don't do anything esoteric, so I have never had a MS Office user have a problem with my presentations.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
That has got to be one of the funniest headlines I've seen in a LOOOONG time.
Stock up on milk and bread! Get out the hand-crank radio! The autoshapes are approaching fast! Run! For the love of God, RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I left my wallet in El Sigundo!
Well, if nothing else, college classes would get a little more interesting if the prefessor's slideshow suddenly turned into a stag reel...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
... I've seen plenty of presentations where the content has been so obscured by all the bells and whistles the user has added. While they're fixing the bug, maybe Microsoft can add a 'View Presentation in Minimalist Mode' option to Powerpoint.
When I was an intern at a company that was in a competition with other companies to get business from lockheed they sent out a CD with power point slides on it that showed how our company rated against other companies. They had "scrubbed" the presentation so that we didn't know who anyone was except for our own company. There were many Excel graphs in the slides. It turns out that not only were the graphs embedded in the slides but the entire spreadsheets to make them were too. This allowed me to find the code to un-scramble which companies were which. I am not sure if this was/still is an "exploit", but at least something that every one should be aware of.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It looks like you're trying to close Powerpoint. Would you like me to kill you now?
NOOOOO!!1
BANG! BANG! BANG!
It looks like you're dead. Would you like help in calling the mortician?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Flip Chart?, Chalk board?, Shadow Puppets?
Not to be mean, but Powerpoint is merely a tool purpose-designed for doing presentations. It is quite possible to write a good presentation in Poser-poi...er...Powerpoint, it just can't compensate for a bad presenter.
I like OpenOffice Impress as well BTW.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Now I'm scared and it's not even Halloween yet!
I think every presentation I've ever seen with flying graphics, pie charts, bullet points zooming in from the left, and all the other PowerPoint abuses a sales or marketing droid can think up in his voluminous spare time off the golf course, would definitely qualify as "PowerPoint Attacks".
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
I'm sure the I can speak for most of us when I say that we've already been experiencing power point attacks and they started right around the time our bosses took their first power point course and learned how to use^H^H^H abuse sound and animations.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
PowerPoint is the preferred communication tool of the Idiocracy.
If knowledge of this vulnerability falls into the wrong hands (Kim Jong-Il, Fascist Moozlams, Treacherous Liberals, or the French) it could destroy Corporate America!
Fortunately, it can't destroy the White House. They draw all their ideas on big sheets of paper with crayons.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
And this is, I think, the first PC virus to attach into Meat Space, as it were.
The way this works is that a compromised Powerpoint presentation is played to a room-full a victims. The speaker is first affected, speaking in a very monotone voice, rapidly clicking through the compromised slides of bullet-points and pie-charts. Within 10 minutes, all the victims are asleep.
I swear. I've seen this happen!! NO URBAN LEGEND! Check SNOPES!!!!!!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
OK, so everyone has alreay seen this...
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Your pitiful FlipChart-fu is no match for my mighty PowerPoint Attack!
Ceci n'est pas un post.
Microsoft Warns of PowerPoint Attack
We have these at work all the time. I call them "meetings"...
Microsoft has this annoying policy of putting some kind of general purpose execution engine in every Office product, from Word to PowerPoint to IE. Documents don't have to be Turing-complete, people. In fact, they're more useful if they're purely declarative - you can repurpose the content.
(Postscript is the classic bad example. The Postscript model is explicitly an interpreter. As a result, it's difficult to do anything with a Postscript document other than print it in the specified format. Text extraction is tough. Reliable format conversion is very tough. Reliable conversion to a different screen size, which ought to be easy, is terribly hard. Everybody moved away from Postscript, even Adobe. Microsoft should have learned from this.)
Is to buy a laser "pointer" from Wickedlasers.com and use it to try to burn a hole in anyone who attempts to present a powerpoint presentation to me. Note that this method can be defeated by painting your skin the same color as the laser, which is why it's important to have a couple of different colors on hand in case your presenter is a wiley one (I'm still working out what to do in the event of one wearing a mirrored fire suit...)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What do you expect, Power Point is EVIL