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Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats
time961 writes "In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives."
If you read the knowledge base article, you'll see that the default allowed old-version goes back to before even Word 95. PowerPoint 95, but not 97, is blocked. It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
However, I really have to question whether the enhanced security is worth it, since those old versions didn't allow too much of embedded scripting anyway. Are we just worried about buffer overflows, because those are still a symptom of their parser, not the format itself.
The software nanny continues to keep us from hurting ourselves... gee, thanks. (Hmm, anyone smell a similar trend in government lately?)
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Wasn't "bakward compatibility" the whole crusade they were on last year? "We must preserve support for old formats, which is why we won't make IE standards compliant, and our spec has to back-support IndentsLikeWord95" and the rest?
Their sneaky brand of evil is saying two conflicting things and making us believe they work together.
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Funnily enough, the thing that finally, permanently, won me over to open document formats (I first used things like openoffice simply because they were free) was discovering I couldn't open my dissertation (written in word 5.1a for mac) on a standard install of office for windows. Yes, I know there's converters, and yes, I know current versions of word for mac can still open 5.1a documents, but I didn't have a mac at the time, and laboriously 'converting' the large numbers of transcripts, notes, papers, and all the other ephemera of writing a dissertation was a huge, timewasting PITA..
After that, the penny dropped. Using open document formats wasn't simply a way to save money, it was an actual necessity for anyone planning to have a career lasting more than 5 years where writing is a core part of your work.
This doesn't make sense to me. A file format doesn't have buffer overflow vulnerabilities, the program that opens it has them. A file format cannot execute a virus or a trojan, the program that opens it is the one that does it. I cannot believe that a file format can have inherent vulnerabilities that cannot be circumvented by the program that reads the file.
On the other hand, considering the ODF vs. OOXML format wars, it seems to me that Microsoft's objective with this is actually to press for the standardization of OOXML. How exactly I don't understand, since the whole point of standard document formats is to avoid this same problem that they've just created.
This is exactly why proprietary formats are bad, at least for documents that need to be kept for a long time for some reason, such as archival or historical documents. Even if open source office applications do similar things and depricate support for old formats, the older application versions might at least be available. Or third party developers could more easily create conversion programs. While open source programs do also exist to read these old proprietary documents today, we don't know if future proprietary document formats will be able to be supported. The open formats will be supportable.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In 25 years you will still able to use an open ISO standard or convert from one standard to another. Microsoft jsut proved to you they are unreliable for the goal you had (forward compatibility).
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...for demonstrating why we need ODF.
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He's right... their excuse is a joke. It can't be that hard--especially considering the huge profit margin on Office--to figure out a way of opening these file formats securely. It's not even executable data, for pete's sake! And if they *are* talking about macros or something, well then just disable the macro part until you figure out a way to sandbox it.
The richest tech company in the world is throwing its hands up in the air and saying that can't figure out how to make its most profitable (and presumably most actively developed) products render a human readable, non-executable data format safely--PLEASE. This is nothing more than a very clumsy (but brazen) attempt to make people upgrade. I'm surprised they have the balls to do it, what with their current OOXML circus.
Data obsolescence is a huge problem. MS doesn't give a damn, their business model is to sit between you and your data. (OOXML versus ODF.)
Apple also did something like this (or worse) when they EOL'd Classic in Leopard. Millions of files become inaccessible overnight because the applications to read them simply cannot be run. It's thoughtless and cynical and extremely destructive.
The summary is not alarmist. Data obsolescence happens every day. It's a fatal flaw in the proprietary software model that RMS correctly identified decades ago.
you had me at #!