Thor (Hammer of God) wrote: > "Leaking" a pdf with 'e:\nethome\joe_kitten_lover' doesn't remotely > "prove" anything. If I create a user called > MayIMommaDogFaceToTheBannanPatch and "leaked" a pdf, it doesn't mean > Steve Martin was culpable. This is a non-issue, no matter how much you > might want to create some fanciful "bonsai kitten" theory to get Joe in > trouble, dawg. Oddly, or not, that doyen of security sensibility, Microsoft, disagrees with you. A few years back, MS spent quite a bit of effort adding functionality to the next-SP-for-the-then-current (and next, in development) versions of Office to address exactly these kinds of privacy and information leakage through embedded metadata issues with its Office products. They also produced standalone tools for removing such metadata for users of older versions of Office (which no longer got SP support) and to allow mass "cleaning" of large collections of such files. Is it a big security exposure issue? That depends on your situation, the risks you're prepared to accept, etc, etc. Does disclosing this issue so more people are aware of it help or hurt? Regards, Nick FitzGerald
