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Microsoft Issues Zero-Day Attack Alert For Word
0xbl00d writes "Eweek.com is reporting a new Microsoft Word zero-day attack underway. Microsoft issued a security advisory to acknowledge the unpatched flaw, which affects Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac. The Microsoft Works 2004, 2005 and 2006 suites are also affected because they include Microsoft Word. Simply opening a word document will launch the exploit. There are no pre-patch workarounds or anti-virus signatures available. Microsoft suggests that users 'not open or save Word files,' even from trusted sources."
I don't use a word processor, I use LaTeX, which seems to have much better layout rules than any version of Word I have seen. The document I am working on is around 200 pages. Compiling it (including invoking gnuplot to draw a load of graphs, pulling in a few code files and syntax highlighting them, constructing an index and bibliography, and making sure all cross-references are correct) takes 7 seconds of wall time on my current laptop, and most of that is time spent waiting for I/O.
Oh, and much of the typesetting code used by LaTeX is written as interpreted macros that are run by the TeX runtime system. If it were all hard-coded, even in Java, it would be even faster.
Earlier this year, I saw a demo of a typesetting system written in Smalltalk (and running in the Squeak VM) that represented every character as an object, with simple rules (e.g. stay next to next character, jump to next line if you are over the margin, jump to the end of line if there is only whitespace between you and the end of line). It ran very fast; he dragged an image across a multi-page document, and the text re-flowed around it, and the entire thing was written in a couple of pages of Smalltalk.
If pagination is slow in Word, then I can only imagine it's because the developers need replacing.
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