2008/9/15 aharkness <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > My name is AlanHarkness, > > > > I have just downloaded your program, but before I opened it up to run it a > notice came up saying the Microsoft system could not identify the > authorship > of it so warning if I run it there may be a risk. Your office system sounds > great. I would like to try it. Just wonder why my system here is not > recognizing it. > > The OpenOffice software is not digitally signed so MIcrosoft can't authenticate it. If you were a conspiracy theorist you might say it wouldn't anyway as OpenOffice competes quite successfully with MS Office.
If you downloaded the software from www.openoffice.org then you're pretty much guaranteed it's genuine - unless some *very* clever hacker has managed to divert your web browser to his/her site *and* fool you into believing that site really is www.openoffice.org. Personally I think that's highly unlikely but I don't know how paranoid you are. You can check the downloaded file's *unencrypted* MD5 sum (many digital signatures are just MD5 sums encrypted with the author's private key). Instructions for doing this are available via the download page http://download.openoffice.org/index.html - click "md5sums" on the right hand side of this page. Of course if that is a hacker site then the hacker will have created his/her own md5sum to sink the hook deeper into your lip ;-) If you really can't bring yourself to trust the downloaded file you can often get OpenOffice on the CDs/DVDs that come "free" with computer magazines. Just make sure the magazine, and therefore the CD/DVD, is relevant to your Operating System. You can also pay a third party for a CD. There's a non-exhaustive list of suppliers linked to from the www.openoffice.org web page. Of course, all those suppliers could be parts of the same hacker's organisation ... If you do buy a copy, don't pay more than about 10 US dollars - just to cover the cost of making the CD plus P&P. Please note that we don't recommend or guarantee any of the suppliers on the list. -- Harold Fuchs London, England Please reply *only* to [email protected]
