Microsoft-Utility to remove hidden Information

[Kellanved]

Remember the Blair Iraq Dossier, where the .doc offered information about the creation of said document? Don't want that to happen to you?

Of course you could be careful or use .pdf, Ghostscript or some other non MS solution, but hey - here is the MS utility for it:

Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data
--snip
When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information you’ve designated as “hidden” or information that allows you to collaborate on writing and editing the document with others.

The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool that you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application.

You can run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on individual files from within your Office XP or Office 2003 application. Or, you can run Remove Hidden Data on multiple files at once from the command line. In either case, to run the tool you must have the application installed in which the document was created.
--snap
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=144e54ed-d43e-42ca-bc7b-5446d34e5360&displaylang=en

[dfong63]

1. better yet, DON'T USE MICROSOFT WORD

[sybylla]

2. And in a perfect world, we wouldn't

But in this very real world many of us have no choice.

I appreciate the tip. I'm quite shocked that MonkeySoft has made any such code available.

[Kellanved]

3. It suprised me as well

It's new (released 1/5/04) and I wouldn't be too suprised if the dossier thing had something to do with it.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Whine, whine, whine

<rant ferocity="high">

I can't understand how so many people can hate Microsoft and then decide to create an open-source version of Unix. The logical thing to have done would have been to clone MS-DOS and then Windows -- with the substantial improvements the anti-MSers claim they need.

Nope. It had to be Unix.

Microsoft now owns about 80% of the personal computing market. Whose fault is that? Is it Bill Gates', that evil monster who knows how to run a business, or is it that legion of 1980s computer entrepreneurs who spent all their free time outgassing about how visionary they were -- while Gates just kept to his business goals?

I agree that Gates is out of control and should be reined in. Once again, where is the political activity from the computer community? It seems like up until Theft 2K, 90% of the on-line political activism was based around guns.

GUNS!

Hell, I'm fairly pro-gun myself. But talk about "shooting yourself in the foot"! So we can't buy automatic rifles ... oh boo-hoo. I know -- let's reclaim our Liberty from the Forces of Government Oppreffion Moft Foul by focusing our efforts on GUNS!

Finally, if you save a MS Word document as an HTML file, you can find all the nasty metadata yourself, and delete it at your leisure. For all the bitching I've heard about this problem in the last FIVE YEARS, there have been exactly ZERO products (commercial or freeware) designed to remove it.

We get ROT-13. We get PGP. And steganography. We get a hundred different other ways to protect privacy. We get everything EXCEPT a reliable way to delete metadata in a DLL-like document format that's been published since version 2.0.

We got ourselves into this mess through sheer stupidity, yet we blame Bill Gates for running a competitive business. In that ideal world, Gates would have had to crawl naked across a field of broken glass for each percent of the market he won. In this world, all he had to do was wait until us geeks were busy with our latest wild-assed fantasy to simply ask for the sale. Ka-ching!

I used to hate Bill Gates. I'm still a critic, but I don't hate him any more. "Hi, I'm Bill Gates. Sorry, we don't carry 'The Polyamory Armory of Nanotechnology'. And sorry, we don't carry 'The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Shooting Range'. But would you like to purchase one site license or two? Thank you! Have a good day!"

It's time to replace the Penguin with the Ostrich.

--bkl

</rant>