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Re: Need witnesses



If you ever send someone a Word .doc file, you might want to export it to ASCII first and then import it back to apply your formatting. Most likely RTF gets rid of most of the interesting stuff though.

Have a look at "The scary MSWord residue feature"

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.83.html#subj12.1

a more general problem is dirty buffers being saved to disk in any document format, or re-using disk blocks without zeroing them first.

I have observed that Windows NT will zero a disk block before allocating it to a file, but Windows 98 won't, so if someone created a binary document on a Windows 98 system, you're likely to get all kinds of goodies from documents they used to have on the disk and then deleted.

Best,

Mike


--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

     Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.



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