Once again, Microsoft is fixing a bug by declaring it a feature. That way, the marketing department doesn’t have to admit MS software isn’t perfect. [url=http://barelybad.com/fplicense.htm][b]See the second image on this page.[/b][/url]
This is [url=http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9016401&pageNumber=1][b]Microsoft’s current attempt to convince us that bugs are features[/b][/url]. This time around, bugs causing MS Word to crash when malformed documents are loaded are called a security feature. Most of us who deal with software security professionally call that a denial of service vulnerability, but to Microsoft public relations it’s a security feature.
Microsoft’s justification for this is that loading a malformed MS Word document runs the risk of executing malicious code. That’s obviously just a rationalization, however, for the complete lack of proper error handling. In an application like MS Word, handling such documents properly would not involve crashing the application. If this were really a security feature, the application would refuse to load the document, with an appropriate error message dialog. When an application crashes, that means the application source code is badly written. It probably needs refactoring — at minimum, it needs some error handling code added to one or more classes.
Feature? Don’t make me laugh. This is one of the (many) reasons I prefer open source software — you don’t tend to get this kind of marketing run-around when your software is broken. Someone just fixes it.
