Re: (Possible) Microsoft Dirty Trick (fwd)

[Christopher Pall <christopher.pall@wmich.edu>]

Well, my suspicions are that this person is not opening a .HTML file, they are opening a file of some other type. The warning message very well could
be well intentioned - 

"George J.P. Perry" wrote:
> 
> I don't have the software to test the following; the author, though,
> operated NirvanaNet's &totse bbs (which is to say that I think him a
> reliable sort of kook (as though you were to rely on me)). -g
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1998 09:44:23 -0800
> From: enigma <enigma@totse.com>
> Reply-To: pigdog-l@arlington.com
> To: pigdog-l@arlington.com,
>     "nnstuff@lists.best.com" <nnstuff@lists.best.com>
> Subject: [Pigdog] Microsoft Dirty Tricks
> 
> My office uses Microsoft Office 97 (SR 2) as a company standard. They also
> use Netscape Navigator 4.04 as a company standard. Yesterday I showed my
> boss how to create hyperlinks to internet/intranet pages from within a Word
> document because he wanted to capture some stats in a report and I
> mentioned that I had an internal web page that gave real-time stats. Now he
> can distribute a document with stats as of a given date, and people reading
> the report can also click on the link and get stats real-time.
> 
> Pretty cool, eh?
> 
> Here's the dirty trick: If Microsoft Internet Explorer is the default
> browser on the computer, everything works fine.
> 
> If Netscape Navigator is the default browser, you'll get a Microsoft Office
> warning on the screen that "Some files can contain viruses or otherwise be
> harmful to your computer. It is important to be certain that this file is
> from a trustworthy source. Would you like to open this file?" (This message
> does not appear when Microsoft Internet Explorer is your default browser.)
> 
> Then, if you click yes, it proceeds to load another instance of Navigator,
> and then sometimes Navigator crashes and sometimes it doesn't. If, however,
> you IMMEDIATELY EXIT MS WORD AFTER CLICKING ON YES (before Navigator is
> fully loaded), then Navigator will load with the page with no problems. It
> appears that some bit of software within Word is causing Navigator to crash
> and making it look like a problem with Navigator.
> 
> I'm not sure what happens if you have both Navigator and Internet Explorer
> loaded on the same machine. I used two different machines for these tests.
> 
> If anyone wants to try this out, create a Word document, type something in,
> highlight what you typed, and then click on the "Hyperlink" button (a small
> globe with two chain links on it). Type the URL you want to link to in the
> top box, and click OK. You have now created a link within your Word
> docuemnt. Click the link and it should start up your default browser and
> load the page.
> 
> enigma@totse.com      enigma@nirvananet.org      enigma@pigdog.org
> http://www.totse.com  http://www.nirvananet.org  http://www.pigdog.org