While reading this post, I noticed that the reader attached a Word document to illustrate a point.
As the conversation is fairly heated, it made me wonder whether this could be a security risk. Viruses are easily distributed via Word and Excel documents so should these doc formats be allowed as attachments to posts? Readers' machines can be configured in many different ways, with a multitude of installed software versions...
This is not the first forum post with a Word attachment, although the context and origin tends to be more reassuring. In this case, I decided not to open the document just in case.
What are your thoughts on this? Nowadays, it is trivial to save docs in PDF format to convey a message. Maybe some middle ground would be necessary for the working groups, etc.
As the conversation is fairly heated, it made me wonder whether this could be a security risk. Viruses are easily distributed via Word and Excel documents so should these doc formats be allowed as attachments to posts? Readers' machines can be configured in many different ways, with a multitude of installed software versions...
This is not the first forum post with a Word attachment, although the context and origin tends to be more reassuring. In this case, I decided not to open the document just in case.
What are your thoughts on this? Nowadays, it is trivial to save docs in PDF format to convey a message. Maybe some middle ground would be necessary for the working groups, etc.
