It's the Microsoft security hole that will never die. Mac users have known for a good long while that something fishy's going on with Microsoft Office 98 and the way it saves its files; it seems that little fragments of unrelated information manage to burrow their way into the documents and lurk there, ready to be discovered by anyone who cares to open the file in a text editor. The upshot of this is that while you're writing that annual report on the steady decline in U.S. beet consumption for your boss, the file you send him might end up containing more than the facts and figures you put there on purpose-- it might also contain a list of "interesting" web sites you've visited lately, your personal credit card number, and snippets of that email message you sent to Anderson in Accounting about what a first-class numbskull your boss happens to be. Whoops.

Now, this issue came up ages ago, but the uproar is starting all over again now that it's been "rediscovered" following the recent flap over Microsoft's tagging of all Office files with an ID number that allows any document to be traced back to a specific computer. In the process of digging around through Office documents in search of the so-called GUID, several people noticed chunks of unrelated data swimming in the middle of their files, and the furor started anew. What we find particularly amusing is MacInTouch's page of sample data inclusion cases, which illustrates the potential privacy and security problem by examining public Word files posted at Microsoft's own web site. The names of people not listed in the documents' content itself are easily seen; perhaps it's a list of everyone who ever worked on the files? There are also lots of interesting full file path names readily available, prompting one reader to call Microsoft's web site "a break-in waiting to happen."

On the plus side, we've got to thank Microsoft for giving us all the basis of a great way to kill time. What could be more fun than delving through Microsoft Word documents to search for extranenous data? We don't use Office ourselves (and, frankly, we've never been more glad of that fact), but these days we find ourselves just a little bummed that we can't have fun typing up innocuous invoices and courtesy letters just to see what kind of nifty unsanctioned data gets captured in the files as we save them. Oh, well-- we can still download other people's public files and dig around for fun.