RE: copyrights and email

["Mike Sofen" <miksof7@gte.net>]

Excuse me, but I work at Microsoft and I know for a fact that they do not, under any circumstance have Office software "send a GUID back to a database at Microsoft". 

 

ALL websites use some mechanism to uniquely identify all of their users, the GUID being the most common.  But Office isn't a website.  It has no direct connection to the internet.  And frankly, Microsoft could care less about what I have on my hard drive, as long as I have Windows and Office on it.  Do you really think they have a staff of 10,000 analysts poring over the documents on Joe Long's hard drive?  We barely have enough bodies to get the REAL work done.

 

Mike Sofen   Professional Propeller Head  :-)

Redmond, WA

-----Original Message-----
From: Salim Nice [mailto:snice@premhealth.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 1999 12:25 PM
To: ridecamp@endurance.net
Cc: lbm@ici.net; Tivers@aol.com
Subject: RC: copyrights and email

The point you make in your opening sentence of  argument 5 is incorrect.  The person responsible for creating the Melissa virus was TRACED by Microsoft.  Microsoft was recently discovered to have inserted programming code into the Microsoft Office suite of programs that sends a "globally unique identifier" directly to a database at Microsoft.  Every time an Office document was created information about the action and user was transmitted unknowingly.  This is more an issue for users with constant Internet connections as opposed to dial-up users.  The Melissa virus only affected Microsoft Exchange users who also ran Microsoft Word.  Apparently, it is quite possible to trace the exact sources of an -mail, spreadsheet, Word document, virus...