shutdown -p now - Slashdot User

Submission + - ISO publishes final Open XML specification (iso.org)

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shutdown -p now

on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @03:15PM

shutdown -p now writes: "ISO/IEC 29500:2008, better known as Office Open XML, is now a published ISO International Standard. Major changes since last public drafts include splitting the standard into "strict conformance" and "transitional conformance" parts, with all the Microsoft Office compatibility hacks going into the latter, "for Office Open XML consumers and producers that comply to the transitional conformance category ... provide support for legacy Microsoft Office applications". The complete standard, including the transitional part, is still rather unwieldy at 7,228 pages; of those, the transitional elements take up only 1,475 pages.

In addition, the ISO press release explicitly references something called "Microsoft Office 2008" at least one time. Presumably, it would be a Microsoft Office release fully compliant with the newly released specification in its final form; however, there haven't been any announcements from Microsoft about a product named "Office 2008" yet."

Submission + - Exploits generated autpmatically from patches (lambda-the-ultimate.org)

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shutdown -p now

on Wednesday April 30, 2008 @04:53PM

shutdown -p now writes: "A group of researchers wrote a paper (PDF) on automatic generation of exploits from security patches. It works by performing flow analysis on the code that is changed by the code to find the boundary conditions that lead to vulnerability in an unpatched version. It's not just theory, either: they have successfully generated exploits for 5 known vulnerabilities in Microsoft products using their algorithm. The authors note that a successful attack using this method is particularly likely when vendor deliberately delays releasing security patches to the general public, to push them in a single bundle on a regular schedule — as is the case with Windows Update and its infamous Patch Tuesday."

Submission + - MS Office File Formats Made Open (microsoft.com) 1

Submitted by

shutdown -p now

on Saturday February 16, 2008 @07:30PM

shutdown -p now writes: "Microsoft has opened the specifications to the binary Microsoft Office file formats (.doc, .xls, and .ppt) under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Any conforming implementation is thus now free from the danger of patent infringement, but only insofar as it is conformant."

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