Re: [Fsfe-uk] Trying to pull a fast one in the Office

[Robert J Munro]

Seth Johnson wrote:

> Paul Mobbs wrote:
>  
>
> > The new version of Office includes a new feature called 'information rights
> > management', designed to fix this.
> >    
>
>
> This is supremely perverse.  Nobody has any rights to information.  Period. 
> You just get exclusive rights to original expression.

"Information Rights Management" (in the sense above) has nothing to do 
with free speech or philosophy. It's just a silly name for a combination 
of features added to Microsoft offfice programs that provide encryption, 
DRM, and the ability to see and clean out all the junk that office 
documents tend to accumulate.

I'm sure the DRM, at the very least, will be cracked soon enough. The 
ability to clean out the junk is a hack. They really should stop it 
saving the junk in the first place.

It occurs to me that the facility to display a document, but not allow 
copy and paste without a password cannot be achieved except by keeping 
the source code secret. This would seem to clash with Microsoft's 
"Shared Source" program.

Robert Munro

Ps. If you use Microsoft Word, and have a large document that's been 
edited a lot, try the following sequence:
* Select all (Ctrl-A)
* Copy (Ctrl-C)
* New Document (Ctrl-N)
* Paste (Ctrl-V)
* Save as a new name (Ctrl-S)

Then compare the sizes of the newly saved document with the document you 
started with...