Slashdot reports that Microsoft has announced that support for older office file formats will be removed "for security reasons". Translation. Old Word documents and Excel spreadsheets will become unreadable by Office 2007. Any one who has old stuff that they care about has to convert it to the new formats or risk losing it forever.
Thanks Microsoft. "Security reasons". Right... It improves the financial security of Microsoft to force every one to buy Office 2007, at full list price no less.
The real sin here is Microsoft's practice of allowing executable Basic programs to live inside, come to life from, and do bad things from within Word and Excel documents. Any junior hacker can write a destructive Basic program and hide it in a .doc or .xls file. The "run a Basic program from a Office document" frill only helps spammers and other low life netscum. No real user of Office ever uses that capability.
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