Blackmoor Vituperative

Apparently there is a big hullaballoo in Europe over Microsoft wanting to add “Save as PDF…” as an option in the next version of Microsoft Office, with threats of lawsuits being tossed back and forth between Adobe and Microsoft.

To me, this is a big “so what?” Switch to OpenOffice (which has been able to “Save as PDF…” for years). Case closed.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have spotted what they believe is the first virus for OpenOffice, the open-source rival to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite.

The virus, dubbed Stardust, is capable of infecting OpenOffice and StarOffice, which is sold by Sun Microsystems, a Kaspersky Lab researcher wrote on the Russian company’s Viruslist Web site on Tuesday.

“Stardust is a macro virus written for StarOffice, the first one I’ve seen,” the researcher wrote. “Macro viruses usually infect MS Office applications.”

The pest is written in Star Basic. It downloads an image file with adult content from the Internet and opens that file in a new document, according to Kaspersky’s posting.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)

So someone wrote a StarBasic macro that can download an image and display it in a new document.

Excuse me if this is an obvious question, but why, exactly, is this considered a virus? I suppose it could, theoretically, be a trojan, if you created a bunch of OpenOffice documents and gave them misleading names. But hell, you can do that with a text document. “Oh, no, that X-Men 3 script I downloaded is actually Catcher In The Rye! Gasp!”

It’s a macro that downloads an image. It is not a virus. It does not download a virus.

Does the macro execute a virus? Does it do any damage to the system? Install anything? Is it capable of infecting other documents or systems? Until it does at least one of these things, this is a total non-issue.

Not a virus, and not news.

I do like the way the article ends, though:

So far, Stardust is a proof-of-concept virus, which means that it was created to demonstrate that an OpenOffice virus is possible. The virus has not been sent out in the wild and is not actually attacking people’s systems.

The story is different for Microsoft Office applications: A yet-to-be-patched security hole in Word has been exploited in at least one recent cyberattack.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)

Just because Microsoft refuses to support ODF (Open Document Format) never meant that someone wouldn’t write a plug-in to enable Microsoft Office users to read and write ODF documents. Well, it’s happened.

In an interview with Groklaw‘s Pamela Jones, the OpenDocument Foundation Inc.‘s co-founder and president, Gary Edwards, said the Foundation will be presenting Massachusetts with an Office plug-in that will allow Office users to open, render, and save to ODF files, while also allowing translation of documents between Microsoft’s binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF.

In the interview, Edwards said that the Foundation has “completed testing on an ODF Plugin for all versions of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plugin renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office.”

Edwards hopes that this plugin, which also supports accessibility add-ons, will end any further debate about whether ODF is suitable for government use. Microsoft has continued to take pot-shots at ODF as being unsuitable for business or government users.

(from Linux-Watch, Coming soon: ODF for MS Office)

Frankly, I’d be just as happy if MS Office simply died, but I guess this is good for people who work in institutions which stupidly refuse to switch to OpenOffice.

I added a couple of new software entries to Useful Links:

I want a freeware utility to… and Open Source Freeware.