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Few of OOXML's Flaws Have Been Addressed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the digging-under-the-hood dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "IBM's Rob Weir has done a study on how many flaws were addressed by the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting. So far, using a random sampling technique, he has yet to find a flaw that was addressed, making the upper bound a paltry 1.5%. Even so, he's found a number of new flaws, including a security vulnerability: OOXML stores passwords in database connection strings in plain text. At least there were no mistakes on five of the first twenty five random pages he reviewed."

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:huh? by Shados · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because people actually do work with Office Suites, and they are an integral part of the workflow and ecosystem of significant companies IT.

    For example, a spreadsheet is often the favored client for an OLAP system, and complex spreadsheets will get reused a lot, so connection strings may be part of the overall "application" that the document has become.

    People like me and (probably) you tend to use documents as just that: documents. But in the big boy's world, they're far more important than that.

  2. Re:Who said said OOXML is a "superb standard" ?? by pipatron · · Score: 3, Informative

    It was Miguel de Icaza, and he is paid money indirectly from Microsoft since he works for Novell.

    One of the reasons I stopped using GNOME, I don't want anything to do with the Mono project.

    --
    c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  3. Re:Um, this is a perfect example of "ad hominem".. by vtscott · · Score: 3, Informative
    No, this is a perfect example of an ad hominem attack... This particular type of ad hominem is an ad hominem circumstantial:

    Ad hominem circumstantial involves pointing out that someone is in circumstances such that he is disposed to take a particular position. Essentially, ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a person. The reason that this is fallacious in syllogistic logic is that pointing out that one's opponent is disposed to make a certain argument does not make the argument, from a logical point of view, any less credible; this overlaps with the genetic fallacy (an argument that a claim is incorrect due to its source).

    One example given by wikipedia is:

    Tobacco company representatives should not be believed when they say smoking doesn't seriously affect your health, because they're just defending their own multi-million-dollar financial interests.

    Just replace the relevant references with words like IBM, OOXML, etc. and it's basically the same.

  4. OOXML approved by NIST by seandiggity · · Score: 3, Informative

    Even though none of the substantial problems have been addressed, NIST has approved OOXML.

    --
    Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms