Document security? It's a joke

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Oh, for crying out loud!

The only way to stop the document security leaks is to protect documents independent of file format.

Your own examples put the lie to this. Most of those documents were supposed to be released for general distribution. Press releases, even!

The fundamental problem is that there was more information in those documents than they were supposed to have in them, mostly because of an opaque (and low-quality) tool chain that is so ill-designed that it includes garbage data in documents, hiding that data [1] through opaque document formats -- and then even passing the data-that-shouldn't-be-there on.

Put your public data in something like HTML and it becomes pathetically easy to tell [2] whether there's something in it that shouldn't be there.

ZD has a bad habit of posting self-advertising pieces as "articles" but this is even worse than usual.

[1] Security through obscurity isn't. As demonstrated by the above examples.

[2] Use HTMLtidy, for instance.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 07/12/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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