Submitted by: Anonymous "SiaNews Exclusive Commentary
June 25, 2003
As many may know, Microsoft Office deposits secret, unique identification numbers in every document it creates. These numbers can be used to identify the author of any MS Office document by tracing his copy of the product to his home or office.
Now comes news that Microsoft plans even better things for our future. Soon you will not own your own files -- instead, your operating system will own them for you. Louis Suárez-Potts writes that "While the US Department of Justice is busy conceding the last war - the one in which Microsoft 'integrated' Internet Explorer in the operating system - Microsoft is moving its battalions ahead to win the coming war."
Little publicized privacy invasions and freedom restrictions have always been the order of the day for Microsoft customers. What do you expect from a company built on stock fraud? Ethical software?
It has been known for many years, for example, that "Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsoft's Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after you've erased them from your Deleted Items bin." For its own bizarre purposes, Microsoft insists on retaining files that you would rather delete.
It's not as if we don't already have enough to worry about in Windows. The infamous NSA key incident, or the humdrum commercial snooping defeated by tools like SpyBot Search and Destroy and SpyCop. Windows is so full of holes that it takes a platoon of software products just to protect it from, say, Homeland Security MIBs or corporate managers ready to keystroke-log you.
What to do? Well, even if you are not ready to switch from Windows to Linux, you can certainly migrate to the open-source, cost-free OpenOffice suite. No more secret behaviors, no more upgrade fees, and OpenOffice will read and write MS Office formats. Defenders of liberty everywhere should make the switch and stop supporting the Beast that lives in Redmond.
