but to continue to use Word. My clients sent me Word documents that I could
not open unless I used Word too. I sent Word documents back to them
because that's what they wanted. Who knows what evil may have lurked in
those Word documents?
feature of the program, but the Word doc file format. For a long time, the
only way to open a Word doc file was to use Word; without alternatives, busi-
nesses migrated to Word and the rest of the Office package and got stuck
there. As Word doc files proliferated (and as Microsoft wiped out the com-
petition in word processing programs), they hooked everyone they touched.
track and record changes you make to a document. A record of all changes
is silently embedded in the doc file every time you save it. It's easy as pie for
someone to recover this record and see all the revisions. Most Word document
files contain a revision log that is a listing of the last 10 edits of a document,
showing the names of the people who worked with the document and the
names of the files used for storing versions of the document.
could be embarrassing if discovered, and they are easy to discover. The British
government of Tony Blair learned this lesson the hard way. In February 2003,
10 Downing Street published an important dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence
organizations--the same dossier cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his
address to the United Nations later that month. It was published as a Word
document. A quick examination of hidden revision logs in the Word document
revealed that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarized from an
American Ph.D. student.
from an article in The Middle East Review of International Affairs titled "Iraq's
Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis" (September 2002), written
by the student. As a result, during the week of June 23, 2003, the British Parliament
held embarrassing hearings on the Blair dossier and other PR efforts by the UK
Government leading up to the Iraq war.
infrastructure." The Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. See www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2003/
msg00457.html.