[PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 08:41:48PM -0500, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:

> 1) You have told your HR person what a bad idea it is to introduce a
> dependency on a proprietary file format, right?

Telling is useless. Are you in a sufficient position of power to make
them stop using it? I doubt it, because that person will be backed
both by your and her boss. Almost always.

It's never about merit, and not even money, but about predeployed
base and interoperability. In today's world, you minimize the surprise
on the opposite party's end if you stick with Redmondware. (Businessfolk
hate surprises, especially complicated, technical, boring surprises).

> 2) OpenOffice can read Excel spreadsheets, and I would assume it can
> save the changes back to them as well.

OpenOffice & Co usually supports a subset of Word and Excel formats.
If you want to randomly annoy your coworkers, use OpenOffice to process
the documents in MS Office formats before passing them on, without
telling what you're doing. Much hilarity will ensue.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]