My reaction.

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (KB949357).

Further information about this update can be found here.

Update: The Borg are watching.

It seems that feature parity between Word on Windows and on the Mac is nothing but empty spin. See here.

While naturally curious about the “new and improved” equation editor, Mac users who write technical material remain better served by LaTeX.

Update: Part of the disappointment, here, is that Microsoft is not utterly bereft of ideas about mathematical editing. See this very interesting report.

So that’s how it is now. I write within the pure, glowing universes of Scrivener and WriteRoom. I send articles to the Guardian as plain-text rather than .doc. I am confident that I will be able to open those articles and the chapters of my book again, if I want to, in 30 years’ time. And now a 1000-word review weighs 4K instead of 30K. I weep at all the innocent electrons I wastefully killed over the years, sending those massive, lumbering Word documents through the internet. I apologise for my particle profligacy. I have learned my lesson. Goodbye, cruel Word.

Over at An Antic Disposition, Rob Weir compares Micorsoft’s attempt to pass off OOXML as a standard to Diogenes the Cynic’s response to Plato’s definition of man.

Plato, teaching in the Akademia grove, defined Man as “a biped, without feathers.” This was answered by the original smart-ass, Diogenes of Sinope, aka Diogenes the Cynic, who showed up shortly after with a plucked chicken, saying, “Here is Plato’s Man.”

Was Diogenes the Cynic a Microsoft shill?

Nature has announced that it cannot accept OOXML documents:

We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs.

And so has Science:

Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.

Though, why anyone would be using Word for scientific document processing is beyond me. Indeed, the scientific community’s support for LaTeX during the ascendancy of word-processing—during the triumph of the Image over the Word—is heroic, and for this we are indebted to them. Even if a latter-day St Benedict of document processing has yet to arrive thus establishing editing with structural markup as the norm.

Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don’t even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

Hackers broke into a State Department office in East Asia last summer with a Word document. Ted Bridis of the AP reports:

Donald R. Reid, the senior security coordinator for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, also confirmed that a limited amount of U.S. government data was stolen by the hackers until tripwires severed all the State Department’s Internet connections throughout eastern Asia. The shut-off left U.S. government offices without Internet access in the tense weeks preceding missile tests by North Korea.

Good times over at Slashdot:

What magical office software do you use that is apparently 100% bug free?

Emacs

Funny because it’s true.

Patch Tuesday (when Microsoft releases security patches) has just rolled around and not too surprisingly zero-day vulnerabilities have surfaced. This time in Word 2007. Mati Ahorni of Offensive Security posted three bugs on a security mailing list. These were malformed Word documents. Two crashed the machine and one caused a buffer overflow in wwlib.dll that Ahorni claims could be exploitable, though notes that the code execution would be nontrivial. In and of itself, this is no big deal, given the size and complexity of the code base. Perhaps it is a little surprising since Word documents are now XML and an XML parser should be able to determine whether or not the document was valid OOXML without crashing, but I am no programmer and literally have no idea of the architecture of Word 2007.

What is surprising, is Microsoft’s reaction to the bug report. Apparently, Word taking down your machine is not a bug, it’s a feature! Computerworld cites a Microsoft spokesperson claiming:

In fact, the behavior observed in Microsoft Word 2007 in this instance is a by-design behavior that improves security and stability by exiting Microsoft Word when it has run out of options to try and reliably display a malformed Word document.

But it is not just Word that crashes, its your machine crashing, causing you to reboot. This is why some are describing this as a Denial of Service scenario, something that Microsoft has denied. Nor is this an isolated bit of spin by Microsoft marketing as is confirmed by David LeBlanc’s Web Log:

In Office 2007, and quite a few places in other Microsoft code, we’ve made use of my SafeInt class. SafeInt is designed to ensure that arithmetic is either mathematically correct, or an exception happens. You get to pick what sort of exception you like, and whether to catch it. By default, it throws C++ exceptions, but many of the users have chosen to take Win32 exceptions. … If you’re one of those people who like to find issues in our code, and you happen to see this exception, it means that we have caught you, no security bulletin with your name in lights, do not pass go. Obviously, if you have managed to find some other problem, and have managed to first tromp on an exception record, then that was the problem, and this was just the trigger.

Um, thanks.

For more discussion of this, see Frank Hayes post questioning Microsoft’s logic, and see Slashdot (natch).

Again, these are vulnerabilities, not exploits. (Unlike the vulnerability acknowledged by Microsoft that has been exploited in attacks and has yet to be fixed). And again, no big deal. What is a big deal is Microsoft’s apparent willingness to take down your machine and trumpet this as a security feature.

Some of the problems with storing data in proprietary binaries that motivated the development of ODF are familiar to readers of this blog:

• I want to own my data.
• I do not want access to my data controlled by a single commercial entity.
• I do not want to require that people go out and purchase a particular application in order to read my documents.
• I want my documents to be in a format that has long-term stability and understandability
• I want my documents to be in a format that lends itself to processing by a range of tools, both commercial and free.
• I want my documents to be a format that everyone can understand.
• I want to break out of the cycle of having to constantly upgrade my software every time my vendor decides to change formats on me.

Amen, brother, amen.

While I no longer word-process, if I did ODF would be the way to go. Almost every major word-processor now supports this open standard, and many that don’t are planning to implement it.

One of the advantages touted by Microsoft of their new XML standard is its compatibility with legacy binary formats. Rob shrewdly observes the irony of this:

So now, today, Microsoft is pushing their Office Open XML standard, “old wine in new wine skins”, not so much a new format as a new ploy. What should enrage every thoughtful person is that they are using compatibility with the legacy binary formats as the main selling point of the OOXML format. Think about it. Compatibility with the binary format that they withdrew from the public seven years ago when they cemented their monopoly, is now being touted as their unique advantage. Said differently, Microsoft is selling OOXML as the solution to an interoperability problem that they themselves created and carefully orchestrated.

…

So what prevents Microsoft from doing the same thing again?

Indeed.

Check out Rob’s post. And geeks who are writers (or at least, writers who are geeks abut the technology of writing) will enjoy An Antic Disposition’s informative and insightful discussion of document formats.

Although Word is a useful and practical tool for writing short and (very) simple documents, it becomes too complex or even unusable when one wants the word processor to do more complicated tasks. Moreover, many rather commonly needed features, like user-customised automated numbering or various automated indexes, cannot be created using Word at all. LaTeX does require more effort and time to learn to use even for simpler tasks, but once learned, difficult tasks can be accomplished rather easily and straightforwardly. Therefore, LaTeX is simpler, faster and better way to produce large or complex documents and the additional effort eventually pays off. Additionally, LaTeX is especially well suited for scientific and technical reports, even shorter ones. Writing only one diploma or master or doctor dissertation will pay off all your additional effort. And not to be forgotten—LaTeX is completely free of charge!

Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, and Marko very helpfully provides the following diagram which jibes well with my experience:

There are many reasons, but today I want to discuss the reason that actually moved me.

A Word document is a proprietary binary. Moreover, the proprietary format is subject to change over time thus allowing Word to add new features. It is possible to convert older forms of Word documents to newer forms, but the conversion is lossy and binary files are subject to corruption. Eventually, I reached the point where I was losing data. Thus, for example, I no longer have a copy of my dissertation (completed in 1995). Clearly, Word is not an archival format.

For me this was a disaster, particularly given the way that I work. I tend to publish approximately thirty percent of my written output. This is not (well, not merely) inefficiency. The remaining seventy percent gets recycled in lectures, talks, and sometimes in later research. This means that I need to have reliable access to all that I have written, and it needs to be in an editable form. Word couldn’t deliver, so I was forced to look elsewhere.

There are lots of reasons to give up Word. I will discuss some of these later. But the reason that actually moved me dictated the direction of an alternative—plain text.

The next post will discuss the virtues of plain text.