For those of you who use Word 98, Microsoft has officially acknowledged the latest fun glitch to rise to the surface. You may have heard by now that Word 98 (and, apparently, Word 6 and some other non-Microsoft applications like PageMaker and Quark Xpress) has a nasty habit of inserting seemingly random chunks of data from your hard disk into saved document files; the data isn't visible in Word, but you can see it if you open the file in BBEdit or a data editor like HexEdit. The upshot of this is that the copy of the Petersen proposal you emailed down to the Marketing department might contain, say, some juicy passages from that "compromising" email message you received from Janice in Accounting. MacInTouch has a page dedicated to this security issue, which includes Microsoft's response to the problem.

Apparently the problem is simply that Word writes more data into the file than it probably should; it ignores the end-of-file marker and just writes everything contained in the last disk sector it encounters. Since the Mac OS doesn't actually erase data from the disk when you delete files (it just labels the space as "empty"), old data can easily be residing on the same disk sector as your Word file, and Word just snaps it all up together. The good news is, earlier reports of the bug which claimed it could capture data stored in other open applications (as opposed to on the hard disk) are false.

The bad news is, while Microsoft acknowledges the problem, they don't yet have a fix available; instead, they are "investigating remedies." They state that, until a fix is available, people concerned about the potential security problem have "the option of using a number of third party disk utilities." (We think that suggestion pretty much speaks for itself.) The best bet appears to be to save files that you may be giving to someone else onto a freshly-erased disk, so there's no private data lurking about that might be captured in the file. Or you could switch to a safer word processor (we've been digging through our Nisus Writer files and they all seem clean), but given Word's ubiquity, that's probably not an option for many people. Isn't choice grand?