OpenOffice bug hits multiple operating systems

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Outlook? Good?

To each their own. Just what makes regularly losing e-mail and being a prime
target for e-mail virus writers, along with non-compliance to the IETF e-mail
standards, a good email client, I'll never know.

What nobody is noting is that no single evil TIFF can infect all of those systems.
The system calls are completely different from system to system, and my guess is
that the program will crash when reading the file on the wrong system. Also, the
failure completely depends on the allocator your system is using. The one I'm
using catches this sort of thing by putting in barriers between allocated chunks.
Of course, I'm also not using an Intel machine to run OO.o, so it is highly unlikely
that I'd be in any way affected, since few would bother to construct such TIFFs for
a Sparc (did they even mention Solaris?).

What this comes down to is this, people -- Never open any document, archive, or
program received from an unknown source without first checking it out with virus
scanners and such. This is not a 100% safety net, but it works nicely.

Word/Outlook/Excel have each had more major security holes fixed over the past
10 years. Anyone remember all the .doc file viruses? The "I love you" virus? I
won't bother to list them. What is true is that the bug was fixed before it was
made public. It is not as bad as this article makes it sound, because though it was
vulnerable on all of the listed systems, no single file could exploit all of them.

I suspect the bug was fixed almost immediately after the researcher pointed it out
to the OO.o folks, the patch was distributed, and the new version tested and made
available.

Office costs more than just the money. Office takes ownership of your
documents. If you want to use them in any other product, you're at Microsoft's
mercy as to whether they can be interpreted faithfully. In fact, just updating your
printer driver can cause Office to reformat your Word <ocument. Don't get me
wrong, I use Office on and off myself, but I am not deluded into thinking it's good.
I prefer LaTeX to Word; but, as I said, to each their own.

Posted by: Filker0_z   Posted on: 09/26/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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