Another Open and Honest Government?

Cabinet Minister Wrongfooted by Mega$loth® Weird^TM (In)security Feature

Mega$loth® Weird^TM strikes again. We knew it would happen and it just did!

According to a report in 'The Guardian' today (12/07/01), Cabinet Minister Stephen Byers was badly let down by his technologically ignorant/Mega$loth®-centric* Civil Servants, who emailed a Mega$loth® Weird^TM document, containing the text of a speech he gave to a conference of Even Newer Labour Councillors in Harrogate, to interested parties.

Apparently one of these, a clued-in 'person unknown', hacked the document and had a wee look at the document's 'undo buffer' (explanation here) where he discovered that a lot of good things had been taken out and a pile of bland 'poo' substituted - presumably by the bright young things at Even Newer Labour's 'Spin Central'.

Now we know that a lot of Even Newer Labour people have visited and even - dare we say it - enjoyed their visits here. But many of them seem to have lost sight of the fact that the arrogance that goes with power is not just confined to the Tories!

Update: 9th July 2003

Mega$loth® Weird^TM Bytes Tony Blair in the Butt

And it's happened yet again! According to a report in The Risks Digest, Richard M. Smith revealed data he had gleaned from the revision log contained within the controversial plagiarised dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (a Weird^TM document), which identified the civil servants who worked on it. There's more information at Richard M. Smith's site.

We warned you about Mega$loth® Weird^TM as far back as December 1997. It is not secure, and unless you know how to bypass the feature¶, it will save all your alterations, additions and deletions. It's even worse if you're in the habit of making one document out of another. A hacker can read both, or even more if you're in the habit of doing this!

Technical Note: This is a slight simplification of what happens - more details below

How to hack a Mega$loth® Weird^TM document (.doc) file

• Drag the file into an empty window of a suitable hacker's editor such as Textpad or Zap. Even Mega$loth®'s Nobloatpad will display this information if the file is small enough. However, Weirdpad will hide the information.
• Look for the main body text. You may find it's different from what the original document contains - the example file which you can download demonstrates this beautifully. Compare what Weird^TM displays with what your editor program displays.
• A bit beyond that you'll find fragments of text which are the bits that were added or amended since the document was created. Most of these will have a 'null' character between each letter. A hacker would remove all these and other characters, to reveal even more, including the path to the file on my computer.
• A careful analysis of these will reveal a lot of interesting facts, though the lines of 'xxxxx' show where we hacked the document before making it available to you! We don't give away our secrets as easily as that folks! Normally we'd clean it up completely before distributing it.

Happy Hacking!
If you're unsure about trying this, please visit this page.

What we're seeing here is how the dominance of one company (Mega$loth®) can seduce even the so-called experts in the Civil Service into believing that their products are perfect. Some serious questions need to be answered:

• How much nationally sensitive information has already leaked in this way?
• What is the hidden agenda?
• Whose is the hidden agenda?
• Why?

If anyone can throw some more light on these questions, please write to us at editor@phundria.org.

There's more truth in our little spoof slogan than you thought, isn't there!

* delete as applicable
¶ We're not going to tell you how to bypass this feature because that would stop all the fun, wouldn't it?

More from The Register
Earlier Mega$loth® stuff