Friday, February 13, 2004

How Critical Are Politically-Correct Fonts? We could argue endlessly about the moral propriety of Microsoft's recent release of a "critical update" that, according to published reports, removes characters resembling swastikas and a Star of David from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font of Office 2003. As one reader points out, however, there is a much more practical issue here. With IT managers having to deal with the seemingly endless stream of Microsoft updates fixing real security flaws, why would Redmond deem it critical that users remove a few symbols from a font? The reader writes: What I object to is classifying this as Critical. Will it cause the OS or an application to be unstable? Will the use of this symbol open a back door for a hacker, virus or worm? Not according to the knowledgebase article. If Microsoft had included this as a Windows or Office optional update, I would have no objection. In my opinion, their credibility relative to what is critical is now at ZERO! 2:08:19 PM    comment []