[plug] LaTeX -> Word converter?

[Christian]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 11:17:07AM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
 
> Write back and tell them that you are extermely reluctant to ship information
> around in a format that is:
> 
> * Well known for leaking legally sensitive and priviledged information such as
> past or tentative revisions, passwords, and other information not visible on a
> printout;

Getting off-topic a little here but this is, arguably, not a fault with
the application but rather with the operating system.  My understanding
of the problem is that Word pads out the buffers that it saves with
random data that it allocates from memory.  Since Windows 9x & Co. do
not zero out memory that has previously been allocated to another
program, whatever happened to be in memory previously (passwords,
cryptographic keys, your shopping list, ...) gets written into Word
files.  Of course, you could argue that Word should either zero/set
these buffers before using them or just use some *sane* way of padding
the buffer but, at the end of the day, it is the operating system's
responsibility to ensure that such leakage doesn't happen.

Regards,

Christian.