Caught cheating
Posted on March 05, 2003 @ 09:38 in General
My dad, who teaches in highschool, just caught some cheaters. The students had a two hour exam where they had to write an essay. The times being what they are, the students weren't busy scribbling on paper, but they each had their non-wired computer on which to type the essay. Finished essays were saved on a fresh floppy and handed in. Back at his desk with a stack of floppies, my dad noticed that a couple of the supposedly freshly created documents contained metadata from other computers. Among other things, the cheaters' documents showed that they had been created by author 'Johnson Family'. When looking at the Word file with Notepad, a whole history of previous autorecovery saves was visible. So, somehow the cheaters had managed to bring an already finished version of their essays into the classroom and handed them in as if they were freshly written.
Lucky for my dad that Microsoft has a habit of storing way too much, way too personal information in their files. Just right-click a Word document and select "properties" or select "properties" from the File menu in Word itself to see the basic metadata that's in the document. You can always check other people's documents if they use Versioning, which allows you to see previous versions of the document that are being saved with the last version. Or maybe they were using Track Changes, which also allows you to skip through the changes made to the document. Then, if you still want to see more, just open de Word document in a plain text editor, like Notepad. You'll see a lot of unreadable symbols and mumbojumbo, but there are patches of plain, readable text in there, which show a history of autorecovery saves and more interesting details.
Spooked already, about what you yourself may be sending out when you send someone a Word document? Microsoft itself offers an overview of how to Protect Personal Data in Your Microsoft Word Documents. One of the things they mention, that I would have never thought about myself, is that if you use macros, the macro-author's name will remain attached to that macro forever. Ugh. But really, even if you follow all the steps mentioned in the overview, I'd say nothing beats saving your document as plain, standard, ascii text.
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