Microsoft Word snares Tony Blair

[amigamad]

An IT industry writer with some skills in computer forensics took a close look at the Government's infamous plagiarized Iraq dossier and found proof that it was heavily edited after it left the professional hands of the British Intelligence services, by 10 Downing Street.

Full item at the enquirer link here microsoft word snares tony blair

[Vincent]

Why am I not in the least bit surprised by this.

/me braces himself for the conspiracy theorists to start now :-D

[mikeymike]

I find it so irritating to think, that even with the most basic of knowledge of Word, and also of dealing with other people when sending file formats, is that all they needed to do was save as Word 6, RTF or something.

I would say 'save as HTML', but Word's 'Save as HTML' capabilities are worrying to say the least... I remember once where someone had a Word 2000 document that was a couple of hundred KB in size, saved it as HTML and ended up with a 2MB HTML file!  IIRC when the Word doc was saved as RTF it lost about 150KB in bloat :-)

Digressing even more, people might like to know that Word has a downloadable extra for Word that saves as 'compact HTML' which produces reasonably sane looking, and standards-compliant HTML.

[amigamad]

Im not a fan of blair myself but why did he not use something other than word .

[DaveP]

Im sorry but this is no proof at all, firstly heavily edited implies some knowledge of the markup changes that were made but all we have is proof that someone hit a space key and control S before passing it on.

This could easily be someone adding their name to a list of readers to keep a document trace of people whose hands it had been through or ticking off a list of approvers.

[mikeymike]

Also, not 100% sure on this, but AFAIK it depends on what each installation of Word has been told to personally identify documents that are edited by it.  I always put in something so generic or just two dashes into 'name' and 'company' type entries in PC software whenever I did bulk business installs.

I doubt Tony Blair's PC says 'registered to Tony Blair, Labour Government' :-)

[kubyx]

@mikeymike

Since when has Microsoft ever lived up to standards?  :-P :-D

[KennyR]

I can imagine that paperclip.

"Looks like you're typing up lying propaganda. Do you want help?"

[zudobug]

Vincent:
"/me braces himself for the conspiracy theorists to start now"

Where's the conspiracy? This looks more like a fact. And whats with Word secretly storing all this stuff anyway?

KennyR:
"Looks like you're typing up lying propaganda. Do you want help?"

LOL  :roflmao:

Nice one :-)

[amigamad]

There is a bit more imformation here more info :-)

[Rigger]

Oh yea, and as infamously secure as microsoft produces are there is no way these "investigative reporters" could have changed the files theirselves to fake the changes. I mean since most likely just only dishonest reporters work for the New York times, right?

[Vincent]

@zudobug

I am expecting people to come up with ideas as to what was deleted from the document.  You know, all the stuff Blair doesn't want us to know about ;-)

[XDelusion]

The government(s) love  conspiracy theories because they help drown out the Conspiracy Facts with an ever growing sea of non-sence and mis-information I.E. How Monica Sucked off Bill while America kills thousands yet again. Of course the only news topic we are familiar with there is not the Blood Shed that took place during his reign, but the blow job.

 Anyhow more to the subject. I find this really funny. Who ever did this is ok with me even if he is a M$ employee.

[Plaz]

I must be missing the point on this one. If I open a doc file, change a font and save, doesn't that put me on the list of edits? Details of the edits arn't known here are they? So other than a bit of embarasment knowing who's hands this passed through, where is the real harm? I bet Blair will use GeoWrite next time
 :-D

Plaz

[bhoggett]

Personally I have no doubt at all that the intelligence document was doctored for political reasons, but this is not proof of anything, one way or the other.