On Nov 29, 2007 5:16 PM, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6220719.html > fun yet brief article, explains about a huge increase in known flaws from > MS, > mostly in Excel, and then explains that it is due to the increased > profitability of finding flaws... > I just want to know if that profitability is legitimate or bound to > criminal activity. > > From what the article is saying, it sounds like it is criminal activity. My guess would be that a good part of the increase is due to the documentation for the "kind of XML" Office Open XML formats released when the specification for the formats was released as a standard by Ecma in December, 2006. (6,037 pages). The formats are largely a dump to XML of the in-memory binary representations of documents and the specs offer tons of clues about how the Office major apps' internals function. I know the earlier release of the schemas for the Officde 2003 XML formats aided our tech guys' efforts tremendously in successfully reverse engineering the native file format support APIs for Word and Excel.
And the Microsoft Knowledge Base is a treasure trove of known persistent bugs in Office. So lots of information to work with, with an incredible boost last December. Best regards, Marbux
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